They’re goal oriented, mission driven and their excrement is an excellent organic fertilizer.

With a resume like that – and floppy-eared, fuzzy good looks to boot – it’s no wonder the Friends of the Wyman Park Dell is bringing back its Goats on the Slope event on Friday October 14.

Managed by Calvert County-based Prosperity Acres, the goat team is due to arrive in the morning and be installed about noon, across from the Baltimore Museum of Art on Art Museum Drive.

“They will stick around for as long as there is foliage to eat,” according to the Friends group’s web page.

[Goats arrive on the scene in 2020. Video by Louis Krauss]

Fundraising for the project has exceeded expectations. The Goats on the Slope 2022 gofundme page had a goal of $3,750 and has raised $4,908 so far.

Unassuming Ungulates

As was the case two years ago, the aim is to clear away dense vegetation on the hillside in an environmentally friendly way.

Thanks to their willingness to eat almost anything, goats can be an effective tool to combat gnarly vines, invasive species and noxious plants like poison ivy and poison oak.

“Goats can graze in hard-to-reach places that machines usually miss, such as slopes, wetlands and rough terrain areas,” notes the Chesapeake Bay Trust (CBT) that funded a “goatscaping” project in Edgewater a few years ago.

“Additional benefits of goat browsing,” CBT’s Cindy Edson wrote, “include the natural fertilizer source of their excrement and their ability to till the soil with their hooves, which break down clumps and large mounds of soil for a better surface to plant new trees.”

The other reason Wyman Park Dell’s boosters revived this project:

They know the unassuming ungulates will  draw visitors to this cherished urban green space.

PREVIOUS BREW GOAT COVERAGE:

• Ed, the Filbert Street Garden’s goat, was “kid”napped last night (5/19/20)

• Amid public outrage, Ed’s captors anonymously bring him back (5/20/20)

• Hungry and eager, weed-eating goats are deployed in Wyman Park Dell (10/15/20)