For the next couple of weeks, nearly 800 goats will be grazing the grounds of Nose Hill Park.

Though the animals can sometimes be unpredictable, their task in the park is far from random.

The City of Calgary has partnered with Bahh’d Plant Management to tackle germination, fertilization and fire prevention in Nose Hill Park. Over the next three weeks, goats from the organization will be moving, eating and pooping throughout the park.

Jeanette Hall, owner and operator of Bahh’d Plant Management, said that her use of goats came after artificial options just weren’t doing the trick.

“My background is in environmental technology and I started doing a lot of land reclamation,” she said.

“When I was seeing that we weren’t seeing results with herbicide application or other mechanical methods, I realized we needed to fix what’s in the soil, and so that’s what really got this all started in terms of weed control.”

Among its many benefits, grazing can also reduce an area’s fire fuel load, Hall said. For grass specifically, once it’s grazed, it actually grows back healthier.

“Once it’s grazed, it actually goes into a stress and reproduction response. When that happens, it puts down deeper roots. That helps sequester carbon, which is what we need in the climate crisis,” Hall said.

“It also helps strengthen the plants. It makes them more drought and flood-resistant.”

Andrew Phelps, a parks ecologist with the City of Calgary, said that with programs like this, goals go beyond vegetation removal.

“There’s cycling of nutrients that happens when the goats are on the landscape, so they go through an area, they digest the vegetation and then they release that vegetation as droppings, which fertilizes the landscape and is a cycling of nutrients,” he said.

“When the goats are moving across the landscape, they’re also tilling up that soil with their hooves, which breaks up the soil, loosens it up and makes it easier for seeds to germinate.”

The city monitors the results of programs like this in both a short-term and long-term lens, Phelps said. 

“In terms of the short-term, we’re really looking at what those goats can do during their two or three weeks that they’re here. Biomass removal is what we want to see, and it does a great job of that,” he said, adding that they remove 40 to 50 per cent of the biomass in the pasture area that they’re in.

“In terms of the long term, we really want to see enhancements in overall ecological health, and those take 10 or more years to really see. We’re collecting some ecological health parameters to monitor that.”

Generally, wildlife-led initiatives like this are more effective than manmade changes, according to Phelps.

Planned re-introduciton of grazers

Ideally, as happened for thousands of years, grazing would be a constant, naturally occurring part of the ecosystem, according to Phelps.

“(Previously) Bison would have moved in seasonally, and there would have been really intensive pressure in some areas, and then they would have moved off,” he said.

“There would also have been white-tailed deer here, for example, that were grazing all throughout the growing season.”

Phelps said that in today’s Nose Hill Park, there are still white-tailed deer, but the populations aren’t high enough to have a large-scale impact. 

“We’re bringing in goats as analogs versus other grazers,” he said.

Goats being the herbivore of choice for a job like this is no accident. Hall said that thanks to their hardy stomachs, which have special enzymes, goats can eat weeds that sheep or cattle won’t.

On top of staff and personnel, including Hall, being with the animals around the clock and camping in the park, there are also electric fences which keep goats in and humans and predators out.

“We also have herding dogs and livestock guardian dogs that protect them and perimeter fencing around 14th Street as well,” Phelps said.

Even when they aren’t in Nose Hill Park, the goats are doing something similar somewhere else, Hall said.

“They’re actually specially trained for this. This herd’s been together almost 30 years, and what makes our herds so reliable is that we know they’re going to eat the targeted plants because they’ve had so much exposure to so many weeds,” she said.

“You could go into a lot of goat pastures and still find weeds there, if they haven’t been trained or introduced to eating those, they just won’t.”