Monday, January 31, 2011

Hiking with cows

Although we live in a very urban area, we are pretty lucky to have a lot of regional parks close by. This weekend we headed to a new (to us) park, Chabot Regional Park, which is in the hills just south of where we live. It was overcast and sprinkling rain so it wasn't surprising we didn't run into many people on the path. A few hikers and mountain bikers here and there, but but mostly just us. 

That is until we rounded the corner and stumbled upon this mama and her calf just off the path! 

I wasn't sure what to do, as I haven't run into a lot of cows in my life. For some reason my mind jumped to mama bear with their cubs (what? i know) so I walked out of the way to not disrupt or taunt the mama. Don't mind us...we'll snap your picture and keep walking. 


That's when we realized there wasn't just one but TWO calves! Clearly this mama has more to worry about than us walking by. Funny side note: when this second calf stopped nursing to look at us, it had milk ALL OVER its face...unfortunately we didn't capture that!

As we continued on our way we ran into the rest of the herd, cow-pies and all. 

There had to be at least 20 of them! Apparently I've been in Oakland a little too long because I was so excited to have run into all these cows. That is until we were walking through the herd and two were wrestling (I guess), which startled the rest of the crew. I didn't think they'd stampede us, but I was honestly a little nervous. That's when we stopped taking pictures and move along. We also refrained from mentioning that we were headed to In&Out Burger after the hike!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

great pics, lady! what a fun hike! SO glad mama cows are not the agricultural equivalant of mama bears. yikes! i think that's the colorado girl in you coming out ;)