If I’m not allowed to reveal the precise location, it’s not because it’s classified military information (though it is) but because people have been known to trespass to lay eyes on those grey and yellow feathers. Following a blaze in 2012, caused by a lightning strike, these scrublands have regrown into prime warbler real estate.

In turn, Kirtland’s warblers need young jack pines to nest beneath, and they’re fussy about finding trees five to twenty feet tall. It’s so rock hard, it may as well be fossilized-which explains why the jack pine needs the intense heat of a forest fire to release its seeds. And once the team locates a nest, they’ll also impose a 200-metre buffer to prevent personnel from walking in the area.Ĭybulski makes a point of handing me a pine cone.

The warblers’ breeding grounds here are off limits for training exercises, he explains. A biologist in the base’s environmental office, Cybulski is tasked with looking after local wildlife, including federally listed species at risk and the fragile ecosystems that support them. Once numbering fewer than 200 pairs worldwide, Kirtland’s warblers return each spring from the Bahamas to Garrison Petawawa, this busy military training ground in the Ottawa Valley. “At one point, this was the only place in Canada you could find them.” As he speaks, machine guns crackle in the background, a blunt reminder that we’re not walking through a nature sanctuary or a national park but an army base. “Kirtland’s warblers have backed themselves into a bit of an evolutionary corner,” Matt Cybulski tells me. This scruffy forest is home to one of the rarest songbirds in North America, and we’ve come to see where it nests. The sun has just come out, and behind me, I can hear the footsteps of two wildlife researchers crunching over the undergrowth. I ’m walking through a stand of jack pines.

Military tank section illustration