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󰁃󰁨󰁡󰁐󰁴󰁥󰁲 󰀱
Goats, Rats, and Clara’s Kids
n July 4, 1976, while most olks in the United States were celebrat-ing the 200th anniversary o the ounding o the nation, my wie and I were driving 400 miles across Utah, rom Logan in the north-east to St. George in the southwest, so we could build a ence. From July through September, Sue and I constructed two miles o ence to orm six pastures on Cactus Flat, a mesa twenty-eight miles northwest o St. George and roughly two miles rom the small town o Gunlock. It was no vacation. I was a graduate student, and the paddocks would be the scene o a research study that would span the next five years o my lie.The cities and towns—Ogden, Salt Lake, Provo, Nephi, Fillmore, and Cedar City—we traveled through on our way to St. George were small back then. Outside o the settled areas, we traversed long rolling stretches o arid land clothed in gray-green sagebrush and dark green juniper. As we drove over mountains and across great valleys, I tried to imagine how the landscape in the Gunlock area would look. I knew a shrub called blackbrush would be common, because my research would involve goats grazing black-brush. I’d seen samples o blackbrush mounted on herbarium sheets, but I wasn’t sure what the shrub would look like in the landscape. I began to get a sense o that as we descended rom Cedar City (5,846 eet) to St. George (2,860 eet), and the landscape changed dramatically rom anything I’d ever seen. The Pine Valley Mountain Range dominated the horizon to the west, with just barely visible canyonlands to the east (Zion National Park) and the south (Grand Canyon). The black lava–strewn landscapes were attired with a diverse mix o shrubs including banana yucca, bitterbrush, broom snakeweed, creosote bush, threadlea (old man) sagebrush, indigo bush, desert peach, and Mormon tea. It was a strange, harsh-looking land, utterly different rom the Rocky Mountains where I
 
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grew up. The vista was at once oreboding and enticing. I wondered where this adventure would lead us. In retrospect, I really didn’t have a clue. We lived in a trailer in what was then the small town o St. George, and our routine was the same six days each week or twelve weeks. At 5 a.m. each morning, we began our hour-long drive to the study site on Cactus Flat. At 6 p.m. each evening, we began our hour-long trip back to St. George. In the hours between, we dug holes—our-oot-deep holes or corner posts, which we ashioned rom juniper trees. Because goats can go anywhere a rat can go, we used our-oot net wire encing held erect by the steel line posts that we pounded at sixteen-oot intervals into the rock-hard caliche soil, all the time baking in the unrelenting rays o the desert sun, which typi-cally elevated air temperatures to as much as 110°F. Nor did temperatures moderate much at night, as asphalt and concrete that baked during the day radiated heat into the trailer at night. Building the ence on Cactus Flat and living in St. George can best be described as “hell on Earth.We used the pastures on Cactus Flat to evaluate the effectiveness o goats as mobile pruning machines to rejuvenate landscapes dominated by blackbrush. Our goal was to evaluate the effectiveness o goats browsing at different densities (fifeen goats per pasture in 2.5-acre, 5-acre, and 10-acre pastures) to improve the quality o oraging land in the uture or both wildlie and cattle that spend the winter in those landscapes. In practice, this would then be done on unenced land. And, indeed, many people, nowa-days reerred to as ecological doctors, are using shepherding with goats and sheep to rejuvenate landscapes. At the time we did the research, ew people were contemplating using livestock or such purposes. We built the ence so we could manage the goats’ oraging behavior during winter and observe the results. When old twigs are removed by pruning (grazing) during winter, blackbrush produces a flush o new twigs the ollowing spring. The new growth is much higher in energy, protein, and minerals than are the old twigs. So, we reasoned, goat browsing during winter would stimulate growth o nutritious young twigs, which provide better orage or mule deer, bighorn sheep, and cattle that spend their winters oraging on blackbrush.Blackbrush is a small shrub, eighteen to thirty-six inches in height depend-ing on where it grows, that dominates the transition zone between cold desert to the north and hot desert to the south, orming a narrow band across south-ern Utah and northern Arizona. Blackbrush, a member o the rose amily and the only species in the monotypic genus
Coleogyne
, was named or its gray
 
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bark, which turns jet black when it gets wet during rain- or snow-storms. The gray branches are ornamented with small evergreen leaves. Blackbrush orms vast pure stands across the desert floor and on scrubby slopes, giving the landscape a uniorm dark gray color. On Cactus Flat, blackbrush shares its home with juniper trees, whose gray bark and dark green leaves brighten an otherwise blackbrush gray backdrop with a savannah o juniper green trees. Blackbrush and juniper provide orage and construction materials or desert woodrats, mammals that have long tails, large ears, and large black eyes. Woodrats live in houses they build rom branches, twigs, sticks, and other debris. The huge, beaver-dam–shaped structures may be up to our eet across. They are usually constructed in a tree or on the ground at the base o a tree or rocky ledge. On Cactus Flat, woodrats use small twigs and leaves rom blackbrush and juniper to ashion large mounds at the bases o juniper trees, with juniper bark as “siding” on the outside. They build tunnels to various rooms inside their houses, which provide shelter rom extremes o desert temperatures in summer and winter and protection rom predators. Primarily nocturnal and vegetarian, woodrats survive on a diet o cactus, yucca pods, bark, berries, pinyon nuts, seeds, and green vegeta-tion. Woodrat houses, the new growth o blackbrush, and the goats would become my teachers as my research study commenced.From July through September o 1976, while we were building the ence, Sue and I observed that a juniper tree in one o the pastures had been struck by lightning the previous summer. The blackbrush shrubs around the tree had produced prodigious amounts o new growth, and we were eager to see how vigorously the goats would consume those nutritious new twigs. During the winter o 1977, we had leased ninety Angora goats rom the Navajo Nation, and we put fifeen goats in each o the six pastures we’d built. Nearly as soon as the study began, we watched the goats engage in two peculiar behaviors. The first occurred early in January, just a week afer we’d moved the goats to their new homes on Cactus Flats. Near dusk one evening, while the goats were actively oraging, we slowly herded them to the spot where the blackbrush shrubs encircled the old, dead juniper. We ully expected them to chow down on the nutritious new twigs. But to our amazement, only one goat sampled the new twigs, taking one small bite. The goats simply stood there, silently gazing at us. Afer a while, they walked away rom the dead juniper and began once again to orage enthusiastically on older twigs on other blackbrush shrubs in their pasture. I was shocked. I wondered what the goats were thinking as they
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