Slender tendrils of grass thread their way between the trampled thatch of dead grey matter formed from generations of oxidizing plants, left standing until we arrived. The electric green cotyledons of wild radish speckled the cool fall ground. The sinking sun gave shining edges to the clouds, moving swiftly through a sky like a dusky blue plum, the bloom smudged by darker shades of cloud like fingermarks. The glow of the golden hour suffused the pasture, the sheep, and us, tinting the white fleeces and turning the Caspar Community Center, glimpsed across the field, slightly pink.
Nearby, Matt snoozed on the ground, his hat slouched over his face and a bag of Cookie’s wool under his head. Cookie, the black Icelandic ewe, curled on the ground next to him, chewing her cud. Matt’s slow circular scratching on her neck mirrored the lazy circular motions of her jaw.
The rest of the flock was resting too, lying in perfect little circles with their hooves tucked up under their chubby bodies. Chego, a leonine Livestock Guardian Dog with a mane like a white lion and a heart like warm butter, ever watchful, regarded us from outside the small shearing pen. His eyes were steady and his heavy head was resting on his mitten paws. He wasn’t allowed in the small pen with us for the simple reason that it’s difficult to shear a sheep with a 100lb dog in your lap. The goats were not invited for the same reason, with the added charge of eating my hair when I bend over and don’t have free hands to defend it.
My friend Amalia, who came to snuggle sheep, bag fleece, and take pictures, was also on the ground with arms full of sheep. Her face mask, printed with flowers, had been nibbled several times in the course of the day.
We had all sunk into flock time.
Flock Time is a difficult concept to explain, but an easy feeling to identify when you’re in it. The moment you become part of a flock of animals that think of themselves primarily as a collective can happen almost unconsciously, when you find yourself moving with them rather than reacting to them. Ruminants spend most of their time in thoughtful communal work, either eating grass, herbs, and shrubs, or chewing them to culture bacteria which they digest for protein. Becoming part of their group on their terms has a deeply soporific effect on most people, as evidenced by Matt.
Matt began Holy Goats, Fire Prevention Angels, as a response to the devastating fires of 2017, and over the years we have begun to collaborate, finally combining the sheep and goats into one large mixed flock and tackling grazing projects. We work on all kinds of terrain, including literal concrete mill floors, with solar powered portable fences.
In the past few days I had been rushing ahead of the rain and feeling stressed about the impossibility of getting the shearing done before it fell, necessitating taking time off to let the sheep fully dry out, which risks the wool felting on their bodies and lowers its quality. Stress is the wrong energy with which to approach the process. When you rush,you often end up taking twice the time to accomplish half as much. The flock moves by consensus, and when you bring in discordant energy, it comes back out. Sheep might bolt away from you chaotically, reading your tense body language as a response to a threat they can’t see. Sheep don’t know the difference between cortisol produced due to modern stresses and cortisol in your blood because you see a threat they don’t yet see. They will trust you if you say there’s cause to worry, and if your body language says you are stressed, they will match you, and handling them will be more difficult as a result.
Sheep shearing is an ancient craft and skill. People have been living closely with sheep for at least 10,000 years. In the ancient past, seasonally shed wool was collected from brambles and stones where sheep scratched their itchy coats, leaving fiber behind. Wool was shaved off with razor sharp knapped stone blades, snipped with hand shears, and, in recent times, buzzed with modern electric handpieces. Sheep have been divested of their wool while tied at the ankles, slung over the lap of the shearer, held by one person in a hug while being sheared by another, clipped in a headstall, tied up in a collar or halter. The most modern and common method—the New Zealand Method—is a very fast mode of shearing in which the sheep is sat on their butt with their legs off the ground and smoothly sheared in long sweeps, called blows. This method allows one shearer to handle many sheep quickly, but it’s loud and can be abrupt.
I use traditional hand shears. My cousin Anyawu, who is my partner in all things sheep, gave me my pair. It has padded grips, and is made of one piece of springy mild steel bent and forged into large sharp scissors. These simple tools are what I was using that afternoon to gently relieve the flock of the season’s growth of wool.
Under the bruised sky cut through by beams of sun, I sheared sheep with zero restraints of any kind, as they stood freely on their feet in an open, if small, field. The sheep came up, interested in what I was doing, and I waited until they calmed and breathed in sync with me, scratching the napes of their necks and the bases of their tails, and watching them stretch into it and half lid their eyes, an expression of dreamy, soporific contemplation.
Faun and Carlotta came to be sheared, with Carlotta, the older ewe, going first while Faun watched curiously. Faun had never been sheared standing free before, but only in a halter on a shearing stand. The moment she chose to trust me, and stand chewing her cud while I slid the sharp shears around the base of her neck, her fleece falling in silky locks around her like a curtain, is a moment that I will be storing against all future hard times. I am canning it and tucking it on a high shelf in the chambers of my heart.
When a sheep is totally free to move if they want, they will naturally move away from pressure, which means I have to be intimately aware of the angle that the blade moves against their skin, and how I move around them and lean over them, and which parts are ticklish and can make them startle forward, like the backs of their legs. To do it successfully you have to be both exquisitely observant and relaxed.
As I sheared Faun, Carlotta sniffing each falling lock of wool and Amalia taking pictures, the family whose land we were on drifted in and out with their extended family. Their adorable kids petted the goats and explored the bags of loose wool. Outside the small shearing pen the goats were systematically tearing down Himalayan blackberry, ivy, and broom from a series of old fence lines and outbuildings. The rooftops of the old buildings, having been mostly held up by the canes, were gently descending to earth. Crowded shoulder to shoulder, the goats forced new pathways into the jungle.
Shearing sheep in Caspar—on that very spot—is a sight that would have been normal not too long ago. But the sight those little kids saw that day, of a totally free animal standing calmly, intermittently wagging their tail as they are sheared, would be pretty unusual in most modern contexts. I can’t know what shearing in deep time looked like, but the way the sheep and I move together, the fact that we’re even capable of this, feels like picking up something our ancestors laid down for us to find.
The recent past of Caspar is one of intense industrial extraction; rapid, total, and brutal. The land we are grazing disgorges occasional evidence, usually in the form of rusted metal shrapnel. Its mark is all over the landscape. The boom of logging extraction scorched the landscape. The very topsoil was scraped off the pastures around the Community Center to build logging decks. This massive impact was followed by neglect when the resources to exploit ran out.
In the woods behind my cabin there is a train trestle, grown over by salal. It lies amidst a hush of crowded Doug fir saplings that grew up in the sudden glut of light created by logging at the turn of the century, which have mostly since died of crowding and disease. Though it is increasingly hard to tell, it was once a place of noise and intense activity. It is being buried in duff and dripping with usnea lichen, but the land remembers the impact of the boom days and reflects the harm that was done, though education is now required to understand what we see.
When we did our soil sampling for Fortunate Farm’s Carbon Farm Plan, the data revealed this land’s ancient past. The soil shows carbon layers put down by seasonal burning of meadows by the Pomo, which increased the clover they cultivated, and caused blooms of wildflowers. Elk browsed in the creeks and through the wet perennial meadows, slowing and spreading the frothy tannic exudates of the forest above which washed down in the winter rains.
It was our Carbon Farm Plan that first got me seriously interested in grazing as a tool for landscape regeneration. I have seen firsthand how it can transform the land for the better. On our farm we have seen fields that used to be choked with gorse and velvet grass restored by elderberry, thimble berry, native grasses from blue wild rye to Pacific Reed Grass. Potentilla and wild celery swarm over what had been only gorse duff. New nettle patches are establishing themselves.
All these species co-evolved with large grazers. Most recently the grazers were larger populations of deer and elk, but these plants also grew with the Pleistocene megafauna that used to roam this land. Pursued by wolves, grizzlies, and other Pleistocene predators like cheetahs and lions, as well as, of course, humans. The grazers knocked down old dead foliage and thinned emerging forests, creating lush and vibrant open landscapes with widely spaced large trees teeming with food and basketry plants and home to many other creatures.
The first few times I grazed the flock through the recovering stands of elderberry and willow and thimbleberry, I almost couldn’t watch. They beat up the plants and it felt like I was undoing all the progress we’d made transitioning gorse fields to native plant communities. They stomped and broke foliage and seemed destructive in the short amount of time they were in the field. Shockingly quickly after moving on, however, the plants were coming back thicker and stronger than before. There is an intense stimulating power in short, intense intervals of grazing followed by long rest periods. Intense browsing followed by rest is what has made the places on the earth that have the greatest carrying capacity for large mammals, and the place our species evolved in Africa, and the kinds of environments we most enjoy living in today.
Most land in California is either under impacted or over impacted. A bare yard with a couple of bored goats in it is over-impacted; the land does not have a chance to rest or recover, and no other species are allowed to use it, so its carbon sequestration potential is limited. The manure of the animals isn’t cycled well, and all of the other potential of the land is sacrificed. The other extreme is neglect, including very well-meaning neglect, that allows years and years of flammable thatch to build up on land.
In the first year our neighbors to the east bought their farm, when we grazed our flock through the field my pant legs were swarming with ticks. It was disgusting and scary, and I coated the vulnerable parts of the flock with organic cedar oil as a repellant and seriously doubted if I would ever enjoy spending time there in the grey tussocks between the towering gorse plants and dead pine trees. No grazing other than the occasional single or trio of deer had happened there within anyone’s memory.
That same field contains no large stands of gorse now and can be freely walked without encountering the ticks that breed in the dry dead grass. When the plants die back in the fall, they release their nutrients as greenhouse gases, shading and crowding out the growth beneath. That kind of choked grassland might be most of what we see, but it is not “normal” any more than leaving layers and layers of dead skin on your face would be. Grazing, in which a dense herd moves across the field thoroughly and then moves on, has the same effect as a good face wash. The land is cleaned, nourished, and the dry brittle material gives way to vibrant new life.
Sheep were once a large part of life in Caspar. A relative of the family whose land we now live on shares fond memories of the surrounding families all herding their flocks down the highway to the community center for communal shearing days. It was the kids’ job, herself included, to stomp the wool down into giant canvas bags to be shipped to a mill. The same relative shared memories of Pomo ceremonies held on some of that same land when she was a child. Contemporary Pomo people are still active in Caspar, advocating for the preservation of the redwood trees that contain their sacred sites and protesting the cycle of clearing the largest trees, leading to flammable brush recruitment in the newly available light.
Fuel build-up has become a deadly danger in all of our communities. One of the first laws passed by the newly-formed State of California banned “Indian Burning.” Cultural burning, along with migrating herds of ungulates, kept brittle fuel loads from building to dangerous levels. The suppression of healthy fire and removal of large herds has created a dangerous landscape. We at Fortunate Farm found ourselves pressed into emergency service in 2017 as a fire shelter when local services were overwhelmed by neighbors fleeing nearby Redwood and Potter Valleys. It seared my psyche watching families pouring onto the farm all night, the panels of some of their vehicles melted, with sleepy, confused kids in their pajamas. It was an experience I will never forget, and one I hope never to repeat.
In 2019 on Fortunate Farm, a PG&E line caught fire when it became entangled in a tree branch in a field the flock was in at the time. The branch burned all the way through and dropped, flaming, onto the ground, in late summer. The previously waist-high dry grass had already been trampled into a ground cover, so the burning branch smoldered and did not burn up into the ladder fuels along the creek, leading into the Jackson State Demonstration Forest. This might have happened had the flock not grazed there. We were awakened early in the morning by fire trucks and had to herd a group of large irritable rams in between firefighters, but thankfully this event was memorable, not disastrous.
I have come to feel deep love for sheep and goats, but their history in California is a troubled and tragic one. In Sheemi Ke Janu, by Victoria Dickler Kaplan, oral histories collected in the book describe the time when sheep farmers invaded this land as “White Rabbits Come.” It was a time of great suffering and resource extraction. Sheep, described by the Pomo as monstrous rabbits, were overpopulated by extractive shepherds who killed Native people and native carnivores with impunity, harmed waterways, disrupted lifeways, and wreaked havoc on this landscape. The Mendocino Reservation, surrounding what is now the town of Fort Bragg, was under frequent attack from ranchers who invaded the clover fields the Pomo had cultivated with their stock, as described in The Destruction of the Indian in Mendocino County 1856-1860, by Gary E Garrett.
Perceived threats to livestock were one of the most common excuses given by white men to justify murder of Native people. The record of their statements are recorded in books like Murder State by Brendan C Lindsay and An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley. It is a chilling reminder to see verbatim arguments made by some community members in favor of killing native carnivores like coyotes, lions and bears in the present day. The refusal to share the land, part of the mindset of colonization, has not disappeared. But it also does not have to be perpetuated. We have never shot, trapped, or poisoned a carnivore, and very rarely have conflicts, despite sharing territory with them intimately. The rare times that we see a carnivore, other than on a game camera, is when something has already gone very wrong. Only starving, half grown mountain lion cubs whose mother was shot by a neighbor have ever made a direct attempt on our sheep within an electric mesh fence, and it was unsuccessful. Solar electric fences, solar motion lights, and a big dog have always worked for us. We even shared a pasture with a three-legged bear hit by a car on the highway by the farm. Local game cameras showed he was getting around well enough to feed himself and heal without any loss of livestock or interference from us. The first night of our first contract together with Matt’s goats and my sheep, a large mountain lion crossed our path near their night enclosure of simple electric mesh. I took it as a blessing, and we didn’t lose a single animal to the curious cat.
My grandfather used to talk about the extreme destruction of the landscape he witnessed in Mendocino County during the Great Depression. His mother used to send him out with the family shotgun as a small boy to shoot songbirds she would boil for broth, straining out the bones. He told me that I could not imagine how bare the landscape was from so many hungry people on it, with little or no relief for the humans or protections for the wildlife. The native predators of this land were nearly exterminated for their fur and for the zero tolerance desperate people had for any perceived threat to their livestock. Carnivores, who tend to take longer to procreate than herbivores and spend more time raising their young, take a long time to recover.
The near complete destruction of native carnivores in this county happened within my grandfather’s memory, a story he passed to me directly. I have heard many locals expressing fear and dismay about the increase they perceive in the populations of coyotes, lions, and black bears, one writer even describing them as an “invasion.” Recovery is not invasion. A persecuted native population returning to their home territory is not an invasion. It is our task to learn to live respectfully alongside each other, which is not only possible, but wildly rewarding. I love native carnivores. My heart leaps every time I see them on game cameras or press my fingertips into their tracks. They belong here, and I love sharing the fields with them. As mobile grazers, we pass quickly through the fields, leaving them for wildlife the majority of the year.
Sheep, like the people who raise them, can be in or out of balance with a landscape, and, like us, can harm or heal. We contain abundant capacities: we have no single immutable nature. But the history of our coast post-colonization has been mostly one of harm. It’s important to reckon with that and face it honestly in order to properly place ourselves in historical context and think clearly about what is ours to do now. Less than 5% of the original, fire-resistant redwood forests are left. Less than 1% of original perennial grasslands, with their accompanying species, are left. Managed flocks can help reverse, or worsen, both of those statistics. It depends on how they are managed. In the portion of the Lighting Complex Fire I witnessed in Yolo County in 2020, tree mortality was shockingly higher in ungrazed pastures. To function optimally, grasslands require grazers..
As much as sheep and goats and cows are part of my cultural context, my goal is not a return to an agrarian idyll that never really existed in this hardscrabble logging town, but something more complex. Their natural herd behavior can help keep us safe from fires, reduce ticks, reduce invasive species, and help propagate native plants. I also hope domesticated animals can act as a proxy for native ungulates, and perhaps help pave the way for the return of those who have not gone into extinction. What would a herd of elk in downtown Caspar look like? How would we all have to adjust? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to find out.
What is clear to me is that we live in a highly impacted environment, whose native residents have mostly been disrupted or exterminated. In order to welcome biodiversity return, we must begin to cycle carbon and stimulate plant growth, without using poisons that will have long term negative consequences, as has been done in Caspar for decades—at great cost to environmental health and little reduction to the gorse. I know of no better way to do that than the sharp hooves and eager mouths and enzyme rich manure of ruminants. On our own farm we have seen how grazing can reduce invasive plants, prevent fire, and stimulate the return of browsing adapted native plants. We now have a rare red coastal lily population growing where only gorse and velvet grass were before. In addition to their practical benefits, when we enter Flock Time, they share their peace with us. Their long daily meditations contain an invitation to collaboration with everyone who witnesses them.
As I kneel in the trampled thatch of the previous years, thin threads of new growth already reaching for the light, locks of wool falling around me, Faun’s warm body with springy shorn curls leaning against me, rumbling faintly as she chews and slowly blinks, her belly metabolizing solar energy into a form that can be swallowed by the earth instead of oxidizing back into the air, I feel oriented, purposeful, and peaceful. Matt and I are lucky to offer grazing as a service to neighbors, with our motley, friendly flock tended for their services, not bred for their meat. We are a small part of what is needed to ensure the return of biodiversity and a safe and pleasant community to live in. We are lucky to have grant writers and weed pullers, native plant gardeners and community breakfast servers. This is a vibrant place with a complicated past and a hopeful future, and I am excited to follow a flock of grazing animals across it, as one of the stewards of your community flock.
