Harvesting grapes saddles you with responsibilities to make wine, put away your tools and clean up the vineyard.  But in the midst of endless work there are surprises both pleasant and problematic.  On the pleasant side, finding old bird nests is one of my favorites.  It is a good reminder that not all birds are after your grapes and that some can even be helpful.  Moreover, it shows that the vineyard is a healthy habitat for a number of creatures that you might not even know about till they have already raised their young and left.

While birds are generally well-loved and, as can be seen in the pages of the North Columbia Monthly, are often identified and photographed, I will only name a few and move on. The picture is probably of a robin’s nest. They can be noisy and when large flocks pass through in the fall, they can devastate a grape crop in less than a day.  So, I have bird nets and neighbors sometimes use recorded distress calls.  I know when robins are hatching young because they tend to leave blue eggshells on a pathway.  Chickadees, woodpeckers, nuthatches and many other birds frequent the vineyard.  My favorites are bohemian waxwings and piliated woodpeckers.

But we also have cats.  So, I discourage bluebirds and any bird that I really like because the vineyard can be a dangerous place for them.  Before I go any further with this, I want to lay down a principle about the health of any biome. “The greater the diversity of species available in any habitat, the greater is its health.”  Before you shrug your shoulders with a physical “whatever”, I want to elaborate on some not-commonly-accepted ramifications of this maxim starting with gophers.

“Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 species are all endemic to North and Central America. They are commonly known for their extensive tunneling activities and their ability to destroy farms and gardens.” (Wikipedia) Even in this first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gophers are thrown into the category of pests and varmints.  Agreed, they are hell on garlic, potatoes, carrots… and many other garden crops.  I admit to trapping them with good old fashion lethal gopher traps when they get close to those crops. We also have a self-seeding plant in the garden known as Gopher Purge, (Euphorbia lathyrism), which does discourage them.  But getting back to our principle about diversity, gophers have some good qualities and a place in enhancing the ecosystem.  Bear with me.

Most of my vineyard is not a garden.  I don’t own a tractor. The top six inches of the soil is the most active part of the ecosystem. Turning it over, incorporating organic matter that breaks down and rots is the source of a lot of natural nutrition in the soil, especially when you are adding amendments like leaves, manure and biochar or cover crops like clover and vetch.  Gophers enhance that process.  I have seen them wipe out young vines and other plants.  Where there are a lot of gophers, I suggest cutting the bottom out of the plastic pots that most plant starts come in to protect the upper 8 inches of roots from gophers. Walking the rows there is no visible damage to the older vines where gophers are present. 

Gophers like plants with juice. They can’t visit the local watering hole.  Moist, loose soil is their favorite. Their mounds encourage ruderal plant species, plant species that are the first to colonize disturbed lands.  Native climax species eventually return but many forbes and flowers fall into the ruderal niche. It looks to me like gophers like to eat quack grass.  You have to like that.  They are called “pocket gophers” because their cheeks serve as pockets to use in transporting and hoarding food. When that food rots deep underground, it provides plant nutrients far below the surface where you would normally fertilize.

We’ve looked at gophers from both sides now, and you have to admit that they can get out of hand. Enter the gopher snake, (Pituophis catenifer deserticola). So, in some people’s minds we have just gone from bad to worse.  Bear with me.  They do look a lot like rattle snakes.  Gopher Snakes even imitate rattle snakes when defending themselves by coiling up, flattening their heads to look like rattle snake heads and even striking out but it’s a head butt and not a bite.  They are not poisonous. They eat voles, mice and other pests besides gophers including other snakes.  Bottom line, they are also great to have around. The last one I saw was inside my 50-year-old pickup truck and leaving quickly in a hole through the floorboard.  They can climb to eat birds and their eggs. Mostly, you won’t see them if they are underground eating or digesting gophers.

 Also underground and mostly unseen, are yellowjackets, another creature that is probably on your I-hate-these-things list. Not so fast. Yes, they are nasty and relentless when disturbed. (I try to put a small flag by any underground nest I find so as to avoid it from then on.) Only fertilized queens survive the winter.  They take a couple of months to ramp up production and can build colonies of 5000 workers.  Early on they eat a lot of insects to feed protein to their young larvae. That is their biggest benefit. Their hives are made of wood pulp. The hives do not survive the winter in our climate and are digested by fungi when they rot. Not only is more fungus underground good for the soil, the hives can contain the yeast that will emerge again on new fruit, a benefit for my wines that are fermented with natural yeast.

You may not be warming up to this idea that diversity is healthy given these three examples. I haven’t even gotten to skunks, squirrels, racoons and several kinds of insects. But for each one of these I can cite examples of how they enhance the biome.  More about that later.  It works for plants as well as animals. Weeds tell us about our soil. We will do well to understand them before we attack.  

On a warm Sunday morning as I was travelling south along Lake Roosevelt on Hwy 25 the Watch Duty app on my phone kept sounding off as new wildfires popped up along the way.  Nine of them would be active by the end of the day.  The Wicked Drive fire grew to 700 acres. Three on the Colville Reservation are still active and not contained.  A lot of us have wildfires on our minds these days.

I kept looking at the areas around me. All were dry. In open fields the grass was tall and blond. Even when it is green, firefighters call it “grassoline”.  In the forests the brush had been removed in places but mostly it was thick providing “ladder fuels” that would send a fire into the crowns where it would spread embers in the wind.

I was heading to Reardan, Washington to visit Craig Madsen, owner of Healing Hooves, a goat herding business (healinghooves.com).  Craig has a degree in range management. He started shepherding goats 20 years ago.  Today the business has grown to a point where he has spun off a partner who works the west side of Washington.  The demand still outweighs the supply.

Having owned goats in the past I have opinions. The best thing about goats is that they will eat almost any plant.  The worst thing about goats is that they will eat almost any plant.  I remember pulling into a wayside park in Australia and discovering that it contained a large population of feral goats.  We stepped out of the car and immediately a long thorn went through my wife’s sandals and almost into her foot.  A look at the vegetation revealed that virtually every plant, whether low or high, had thorns.  That was the nature of the standoff between the goats and the vegetation.  Both still seemed to survive.

When I got to the area along the railroad tracks passing through Readon where Craig was tending his goats, I could see how that played out in Eastern Washington.  There were green stems from Russian Thistle (AKA Tumbleweed) and Rush Skeletonweed, plants that most animals won’t eat, and a lot of goat manure in the dirt where the goats had already grazed.  The goats themselves, all 100 of them, were working their way through some green Quackgrass behind an electric fence on the far side of the tracks.  They had about another day to finish off that section before being moved to the next job.

I asked Craig about how he would move them.  He has a double-decker semi-trailer that he moves with a diesel truck.  Seeing it load would have been fun.  Actually, the goats themselves are fun to watch.  The favorite game of young goats is King of the Hill, in most cases a rock will do as a hill.  One will get on top and others will try to knock it off.  Eventually they wear out. They tend to all lie down together at night and some rest together during the day.  Places where they bed down become very barren.

I wondered about predators. Cougars are sometimes an issue.  Coyotes and wolves don’t tend to get through the electric fences.  Craig has dogs that he embeds in the herd to keep the cougars at bay.  Dogs also are good at keeping people and other dogs on their side of the fence.  The goats themselves can be pretty curious and friendly.   Craig grazes a mixture of Boer Goats and Kiko Goats.  Both are meat varieties.  The Boer goats were developed for meat in South Africa where they grazed on an area called the Thorn veldt.  You can guess how that got its name.  They live up to 20 years and can weigh up to 350 lbs.  So, it is a good thing that they are basically friendly.

The Kiko goats are a cross between domestic goats and native goats from New Zealand.  They are also very hardy and pest resistant.  They are also very productive, tending to give birth to twins.  The whole herd is used to urban sounds, so they don’t spook at sirens or airplanes.  A lot of the grazing jobs are in towns where there are steep slopes, soft ground or obstacles under the brush that would be dangerous for humans and machinery.

Along the way in developing this business, Craig became interested in and took a course on regenerative agriculture from Nicole Masters. Grazing goats is close to the breakthrough that Allan Savory made years ago that led to “mob grazing”.  Savory was in charge of restoring grasslands in Zimbabwe.  At first, he thought that elephants were overgrazing and he had thousands of them killed.  It made the grasslands worse.  Looking deeper into the life-cycles of grasses he realized that they needed some disturbance to reseed and thrive.  Herds of animals would pass through an area, usually concentrated to protect themselves from predators. They would eat the grass, rough up the ground and leave manure and urine. Then the herds would move on and not return for up to a year.  Grasses have deep roots. They could rebound from this treatment and outgrow weeds, forbes and competing brush.  This turns out to be good for the herd, good for the soil and good for the forage. 

Savory developed Holistic Management expanding on these ideas and Masters learned from and added to that knowledge base.  Madsen learned from them both.  So grazing goats to reduce fuel loads and eliminate weeds is essentially mob grazing.  It not only reduces fire danger, but it produces meat and leaves better soil behind. 

As usual, timing is important.  When those Spring rains produce tall grass.  That is when land managers should line up a herd of goats to graze down the fuel load.  On a day like the one I when visited Readon, there is not much greenery left to eat.  By Fall, Madsen needs to bring the herd home and feed them through the winter, culling some for food and profit.  Both breeds are okay in the cold as long as they have some shelter.

Herding goats is not going to eliminate the immense amount of fire danger that surrounds us.  But the devastating fires in Cheney and Elk suburban areas last year alerted the mayor of Reardan to look for ways to improve the town’s safety.  Lots of other folks are beginning to think the same way.  The business is growing and is good for the earth, the economy and our peace of mind. So maybe its time for more people to get their goats.