I took my grandson for a wander through Rattray Marsh in Mississauga. I go there often, whenever I need a dose of nature, but I enjoyed seeing it through a ten-year-old's eyes. We'd gone about fifty feet in when we encountered four deer, three adults and a speckled fawn. At first they were difficult to distinguish in the tall grass, and then they moved out into the open and you wondered how that fox-red could have possibly hidden in the greenery. They seemed completely oblivious to us, other than one who stopped and blinked at us for a minute before walking calmly on. I imagined him around the dinner table that night, telling his family "Guess what I saw today? Two humans!"
The diversity of birds was great fun, including particularly loud red-winged blackbirds, mallards, and a couple of swans (possibly with cygnets -- I couldn't tell at that distance, with my eyesight). We saw a very large bird swoop past and weren't sure if it was a hawk or an eagle. We met another hiker who was examining a teeny tiny frog, the size of my fingernail. We met a lot of people walking their dogs. We saw squirrels and chipmunks. Water skeeters in the river. My grandson thought it would be very grand to live in one of the houses overlooking the marsh, so you could see "all the green."
On the shore, we skipped rocks a couple of times and watched two paddleboarders go by, looking stately. We stopped to play on the swings and spinny chair (i.e. the sick chair) at the playground. We admired the view of Toronto and I secretly gloated that I no longer have to commute there, ever again. We practised walking on the boardwalk as quietly as we could, which was surprisingly impossible. We hiked up through the pines on a path softened by fallen needles.
We came home saturated with sun and rehearsed for his dad all the animals we had seen. We agreed we should go again, and this time go further on the western path up the hill.
A very satisfactory day.
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