A working farm and a raptor house inside the suburbs of Troy

Troy is office towers, big-box shopping, and the kind of traffic that comes with one of the largest suburbs in the state. So it’s a small surprise that two miles of trail through meadow, marsh, and old forest sit right inside it, off Coolidge Highway, on a hundred acres that never got paved. This is the Lloyd A. Stage Nature Center, and walking it you can lose the city for an hour at a time.

The trails do real work — they thread a wetland, cross a stretch of woods, and run a strip of the Rouge River, the kind of mixed ground that draws frogs, turtles, deer, and a long roster of birds. There’s an interpretive building with a children’s nature area and exhibits, the sort of place a school bus unloads on a weekday morning, but it’s open and free for anyone who just wants to wander the loops.

The piece that sticks with kids is the Raptor House. The center keeps a small group of hawks and owls that can’t survive in the wild — birds with a permanent injury or a wing that won’t carry them anymore — and gives them a home where visitors can stand a few feet from a great horned owl and watch it watch them back. It’s the closest most people will ever get to a working bird of prey.

Next door, the city keeps Troy Farm on the same parcel, a nod to what all this land was before the subdivisions: farm country. Together the nature center and the farm hold a square of southeast Michigan more or less the way it looked a century ago — a marsh full of red-winged blackbirds, a meadow going to seed, and a barn owl blinking in the shade — boxed in on every side by one of the busiest suburbs in the state.