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In New York City Parks, Goats Save the Day

Brooklyn Bridge Park is an oasis of calm in New York City, providing stunning waterside views and some much-needed greenery. To further isolate the park’s Pier 3 Greenway Terrace, the developers constructed a 45-foot sound-attenuating hill behind it, blocking the noise of the city and traffic on the other side.

The problem is that weeds have begun attacking the hill. These cannot be controlled with pesticides, thanks to the park’s sensible “organic-only” regulations, and sending city workers onto the treacherous slopes to pull the weeds has been deemed unworkable. Thus Rebecca McMackin, the park’s Director of Horticulture, has struck upon a better solution: Rescue goats.

Four Nubian goats—Eyebrows, Hector, Horatio and Minnie—were rescues from a petting zoo that was shut down, and are now contentedly fenced onto the hill during the daytime. The creatures have no problem navigating the slope, and spend their day going up and down the hill, seeking out weeds and consuming them. “They don’t eat the grasses as much they eat the weeds, they literally have a preference,” McMackin told Gothamist. “This is a goat paradise. They’re thrilled.”

The goats will be allowed to freely roam the berm each day, and at night will be housed in a covered shed on the property, where they’ll have access to food and water. Brooklyn Bridge Park plans to keep them for two months before reassessing if they are a sustainable answer to the weed problem. If all goes according to plan, the goats will move in permanently.

…Cute as they may be, however, the park is going to great lengths to keep them away from people. “In order for this project to work, they can’t be disturbed by the public,” McMackin stressed. “We need the public to not pester them and especially not to feed them. If they’re being given food, they won’t be hungry enough to eat the weeds, and if they don’t do their job the project will be a failure.”

The Prospect Park Alliance has also used goats to rid their site of weeds, explaining that the animals are a superior choice to machinery. As The Daily News reports,

“It’s feasible to go in with people, but that part of the park is incredibly steep,” [said Alliance spokeswoman Grace McCreight], adding that the area in question is too heavily wooded and precipitous for machinery. “Sending a person up those slopes would be a very strenuous climb…. It is more cost-efficient to do this kind of work with goats than with humans.”

Incidentally, New York City’s nickname of Gotham was borrowed from a town in Nottinghamshire, England. In Old English, “Got-” = “goat,” and “-ham” = “home,” loosely translated as “goat homestead.”