Winning Back the West, Goat by Hungry Goat

In the early 1990s, Leslie Barclay bought a 3,100-acre ranch a half-hour south of Santa Fe, N.M. She was from back East, and, like many newcomers to the West with some money and energy, she was romantic about the region and the land. She understood that the ranch wasn’t in great shape, but she thought it had potential. She had the same dream that brought millions of us to the West over the last 150 years.

Before long, however, she felt defeated by the almost five square miles of desert she’d taken on. She said she came to understand that her land was just another beaten-up piece of Western landscape, of which there are several hundred thousand square miles.

The presenting symptom, as the doctors say, was the thousands of tamarisk, an exotic Asian tree, on her land, each of which sucked 200 to 300 gallons of water a day out of the ground.

Like vampires at a feast, these trees line Galisteo Creek running through the ranch. They also encircle five large, dry, man-made lakes on the ranch.

A bizarre sight on her land is a diving board that sits above one of the lake beds. Barclay was shocked when she ran into a relatively young woman who remembered diving off that board 30 years ago. Those lakes once held water and fish. Only three decades ago, this piece of the West was wet and alive.

Going back further, beaver trappers described Galisteo Creek as a narrow and shaded trout stream. Today, the “creek” is as wide as an interstate. On the spring day I saw it, it held only a trickle of water and no trout.

To bring it back to life, the New Mexico fish and game agency offered to bulldoze the tamarisk. Clearing the land would allow rain and melting snow to soak into the ground, and the grasses would grow. Then the water table would rise, the lakes would fill and Galisteo Creek would flow once again.

Even after that, though, the tamarisk probably would sprout again, filling the ecological niche that was still empty, waiting for these weedy trees.

Barclay also didn’t think she’d feel good about seeing bulldozers root out the tamarisk. She wanted another solution.

She found what she was looking for last winter at a seminar in Pueblo, Colo., when she heard former Wyoming cattle rancher Lani Lamming talk about her 2,000 goats.

Lamming said her herds loved chewing the limbs of tamarisk and ripping off their bark. Their narrow, triangular, tough mouths will even devastate a cholla cactus, and they chew weed seeds so thoroughly that the seeds become fertilizer rather than a source of new plants.

So this spring, Lamming and 604 cashmere goats appeared at Barclay’s ranch. Lamming says that if the goats return to the ranch for a few weeks at a time over the next three to five years, the tamarisk will weaken and die. As the tamarisk retreat, grasses and willows and cottonwoods alongside the river and lakes will gradually come back.

Lamming, thanks to her ranching background, makes handling the goats look easy. She knows how to put up the temporary fences to contain the goats until they’ve trashed the tamarisk. She knows how to train her border collies. And she knows how to deploy her burro to protect the goats against their main enemy--other people’s dogs.

It takes patience. It takes skill. And it costs 30 cents to $1 per day per goat.

So this is not a quick fix. But why should it be? We have spent 150 years, give or take, destroying the West’s middle elevations--the land above desert and below alpine characterized by sagebrush and pinon pine and juniper trees and ponderosa pine. This was once the West’s working landscape.

We’ve reduced that landscape to a condition where it’s good mainly for ranchettes for ex-urbanites who think desert with small trees and broad washes is “pristine.”

But here and there, as on Leslie Barclay’s ranch, the Old West and the New West come together to try to restore the land to health. It’s a gallant effort.