They’re Baaaaack … the Goats of Riverside Park

This week the goats returned to Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  Charlie, Chico, Cowgirl, and Mallomar launched their summer’s groundskeeping job with a “ribbon chewing” ceremony to open the park’s new compost site, to which the four will be contributing over the next two months.

Riverside Park Conservancy president Merritt Birnbaum packed a lot information into his Goatham Festival spiel: “They are going to be spending the next several months here at this site helping to clear out a lot of really undesirable invasive plants like poison ivy and multiflora rose and poison berry and things that are really not part of a healthy forest ecosystem and have come here through other means of bird droppings and other ways that invasive plants get into our parks and then continue to take over the system and choke out all of the good native plants.”

The four caprine groundskeepers will be chewing through the invasive plants and other flora on a two-acre plot not far from Grant’s Tomb. When the job’s done they’ll return to their farm in Rhinebeck.

Photo credit: Riverside Park Conservancy