Goats at Berkeley LabGoats gone wild!We utilize goats at the lab in order to keep our grasses short and reduce fire hazards. In this video the goats are being herded (wait for dog at end) to the tree laden hill just below our Blackberry Gate.Video: David Stein, Berkeley Lab employeeGoats: Goats R Us Company
Posted by Berkeley Lab on Friday, June 12, 2015
June 16, 2015
The goats of Berkeley.
Berkeley Lab says: "We utilize goats at the lab in order to keep our grasses short and reduce fire hazards. In this video the goats are being herded (wait for dog at end) to the tree laden hill just below our Blackberry Gate." Note: The "Lab" in Berkeley Lab does not refer to the dog.
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25 comments:
Now I'll have "The Sisters of Mercy" running through my head all day.
I'm blind. I don't see a dog! I see a guy trying not to fall down the hill.
Oh ok. I watch again and saw the dog. My dog would love to do that.
Guy holding stop sign.
Do the goats of Berkeley read?
:-))
If you want to control grass with sheep or goats, you have to have a lot of them and keep them hungry. Otherwise they eat all of the nice tasty grass and let the ugly weeds grow wild. Look like quite a herd a Berkeley.
That Berkeley Lab, that's those evil bomb guys from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Wow, that quadropedic global warming (QGW) gas, aka carbon dioxide, emission could really heat up the earth causing draught in California for next hundred years.
lemondog said...
Guy holding stop sign.
Do the goats of Berkeley read?
Yes, their lemmings are granted degrees every May.
The Drill SGT,
I think the evil bomb guys are still mostly at Lawrence Livermore. LBL is more pure research.
I see a Phd in Shepherding coming. That may become the only degree from Berkeley worth having.
Somebody has to know how to separate the sheep from the goats.
I used to go to LBNL from time to time to use the synchrotron. There's a lot of wildlife up there and the bus drivers at the lab swear there's a cougar.
Very lovely view of the Bay and the city from up there--when it's clear. I quickly learned that I could 100% assure clear days by neglecting to bring my camera with me.
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...
The Drill SGT,
I think the evil bomb guys are still mostly at Lawrence Livermore. LBL is more pure research.
I know. I'm (or was) a local and a UC (double grad) but not from Cal.
But though they try to hide it, both are part of DOE.
traditionalguy said...
Physics and most chemistry is still un-PC at Cal.
The hillside above the Berkeley Labs goes all the way up to Grizzly Peak and on into Tilden Regional Park. Fire on that hillside is a real danger. Maybe 20 years or so back there was a tremendous fire in the Oakland Hills just two or three miles to the south (but along the same mountain range) that destroyed hundreds of homes. So it makes sense to use those four legged "lawn mowers" to keep the weeds down. To paraphrase Smokey The Bear, "Only a herd of goats can prevent a forest fire."
And yes there are mountain lions in the Berkeley Hills. About 4 years ago one of them came down out of the hills and strolled along Shattuck Avenue (aka the "Gourmet Gulch" for its restaurants) at 2 a.m. The Berkeley Police Department managed to corral the mountain lion somehow before it snacked on some tasty homeless hobo.
Next stop for the goats is the back door of the cafeteria.
I live fairly close to this area and our community has been using goats to trim back weeds and grasses for years now. The company is Goats R Us. Near my house, there's a fenced creek and a trail. The creek is protected watershed that leads to a reservoir. They use the goats to clean up that area. It's always fun to see them after they've done their jobs and are penned up waiting to be loaded back into the truck. People bring their children by to look at the goats. My dog found the goats fascinating. They did not feel the same way.
Old hat; you can rent goats through Amazon now.
Goats are especially useful for poison oak. Nothing else will eat it, and taking it out manually is very messy business. Not sure whether they eat blackberry, though. If so, I'd like half a dozen to clean out our backyard. Stuff positively grows like bamboo.
Skeptical Voter, the Oakland Hills fire was in '91, about two years to the day after that other disaster, the Loma Prieta quake. I was there. It wasn't actually very near LBL, and ran far south on the Oakland side. About the closest it got was the Claremont Hotel, or rather the hillside behind it -- the firefighters were very anxious that the Claremont not go up, and so one of my professors, living in a rented house on the hillside behind it, had his house saved by virtue of the eucalyptus standing near it, on which the firefighters concentrated much of their hosepower. Another professor, a little further south, spent the night hosing down his roof. His house survived, but others on the same street did not.
Other houses were lost, of course, many of them. Three belonged to friends of mine.
Running in Strawberry Canyon, just east of the lab, we always kept an eye out for big cat predators. The larger wilderness in that area is extensive, running up past the water district land by Briones, Tilden Park, and all the way down west of the I-680 corridor to Sunol. Of course, that was back in 19#*&&$W [signal breaking up!] so things may be different now.
The real fire problem is all the eucalyptus infesting the hills. They are non-native, invasive, and in a fire they are absolutely lethal.
I lived in the Berkeley hills a few years ago, and often walked up to Berkeley Lab. A nice lady in the neighborhood would collect the goat droppings (which looked a bit like Kalamata olives) with which she'd fertilize her roses.
This is an excellent idea as long as it doesn't create the chance for rain-induced landslides. The goats maybe need to be moved around more frequently.
Fleet USA, in order to have rain-induced landslides, we'd need rain. Also, most landslides up there are deeper-seated than that - vegetation won't make much difference.
There are two dogs, one under the truck.
I work there. The goats do a great job, and they're only there for a couple of days a year. The areas they're trimming would be extremely hard to clear any other way.
There's a lot of wildlife in the area. You see deer several days a week, and turkeys pretty much daily.
I lived in San Francisco during the Berkeley Hills Fire. My girlfriend and I sat at the top of McLaren Park (across the 101 from Candlestick) and could see the flames clearly. A thick column of smoke blew south from the fire and rained soot and ash down all over the City.
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