[slideshow]

Yesterday was a beautiful fall day here in Nashville.  I’m dog-sitting my brother’s dog, Stella.  My son and I took Stella to Shelby Bottoms Greenway to the north entrance at Forrest Green Dr.  The sun was shining brightly and it was crisply cool.  The greenway is nestled among 800+ acres in the Cumberland River bottoms.  There are several miles of blacktop trails but we wanted to break in my son’s new hiking boots because he has a Boy Scouts backpacking trip in a couple of weeks so we went onto the unpaved trails.  Within a couple of hundred yards we noticed movement back in the brush just in time to see a whitetail deer and her fawn hop off.  It was a very cool up close view of a deer.  Stella was on high alert at that point for any other wildlife.  In a few more minutes, we heard some animal sounds in the thick underbrush.  Thinking it was a deer, I crept into the honeysuckle thicket step at a time, very quietly.  My son was on my heels.  Straining my ears and my eyes, I eventually noticed the slight movement of a flicker of an ear.  The closer I looked, I could tell that it was not a deer but a COW!  I let out a loud, “Moooooooooo”.  Immediately the cow mooed back and began walking towards us in the thicket.  We backed out and then started on down the trail.  The cow was lowing and following us down the trail.  It had to weigh over a thousand pounds and my son was a tiny bit nervous.  As we walked down the trail with the cow in tow, we noticed a herd of cows in the honeysuckle thicket up ahead.  The cow following us must have gotten separated from his herd.  When the cow smelled or sensed his buddies were nearby he started into the bushes but then the herd sensed him and they crashed out of the thicket and got in between us and Stella.  She freaked out and took off running pell mell into the thicket and it took us several minutes to get it all straightened out and not get stampeded.  In the melee, Stella ran into something that cut up her face.  It didn’t look too bad–probably just a deep scratch.  As we made it further down the trail, we noticed some huge Alpha oak trees.  Seriously they must have been 200-300 years old.  I’ve included some photos of the tree along with pix of the cows.  The acorns on this tree were gigantic too.  We stood there for a few moments in silence as we looked the tree up and down and it was raining acorns every few seconds.  It must be a great tree for all the deer that live in the park.

We continued on our hike and saw a few other people with dogs and some trail runners.  The fall colors were nice and you can feel winter coming on too.  The turning of the seasons is always a mixed bag.  With the fall you get the turning in the interior landscape that corresponds to the external dying of the year.  It is always a good time to contemplate where you are currently and where you want to go.  About the time these thoughts were marinading in my mind, we heard the melancholic sound of a flock of geese sound off and looked up to see a V of geese winging by in the sky.

It was a nice day to hike. Just because you don’t have time to drive several hours to reach a national park, don’t despair because our little city park at Shelby Bottoms is a great resource.  We had a quality wildlife experience without really even trying.  It is features like Shelby Bottoms that make selling real estate in Nashville worthwhile.  Many cities don’t have resources like Shelby Bottoms.  We got home at nearly lunch time and our robust morning gave man, boy and beast a hearty appetite.