Did you know Mimico means “resting place of the wild pigeon”? Long before condos lined the lake, Mimico was named for the vast flocks of passenger pigeons that once filled the skies over Toronto, so many that their migration darkened the horizon and sounded like thunder.
For centuries, Indigenous peoples hunted the birds sustainably, but overhunting and deforestation in the 19th century drove the species to extinction. The last known passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in 1914 — a loss that helped spark modern conservation efforts.