Natural friends

We may have reverted to cold temperatures and frosts in the morning, but there is no denying that the wildlife has emerged for the year.

Just this weekend the boys found this garter snake and made a temporary shelter for it while they ‘visited’, and my youngest caught frogs in one of our streams. The winter-dried grasses are alive with tiny spiders and insects. Birds swoop and call overhead, the continuous waves of Canada geese now followed by the odd seagull, birds of prey, mourning doves and cedar waxwings.

I love having children who are comfortable finding and handling a snake, who will thrust their hands into the muck and murk at the edges of the stream in the hopes of finding a frog or a crayfish. This is what childhood should be.