Menlo Park has found an environmentally sensitive -- and inexpensive -- way to clean up fire-hazardous brush in a small open space that lies amid the homes and gardens of Sharon Heights. They're using goats.

A herd of 451 pygmy goats trucked in from a ranch in Davis has been grazing at Sharon Hills Park in Menlo Park since Wednesday, chewing down the shrubs and wild grasses that pose an annual fire threat to the neighboring homes. Instead of the noise and dust of workers and equipment, the goats are going about their business placidly, the quiet punctuated only by the occasional bleat.

The goats also have proven a popular attraction, drawing a crowd of onlookers as large as 200.
The park is a tiny 5-acre wedge of open space in Sharon Heights, above Alameda de las Pulgas at the end of Valparaiso Avenue. It's surrounded by homes, and that means the city perennially must clear out overgrown weeds and brush to prevent a small wildfire from turning into a neighborhood-destroying conflagration.
The park is on a steep hillside, so the city has had to send heavy equipment -- tractors and bulldozers -- to the site to aid crews using weed whackers. The racket and pollution of the cleanup -- as well as fleeing gophers and gopher snakes that migrate to nearby yards -- have been an annual nuisance to residents in the neighborhood.

GOING TO THE GOATS: This year, Dan Freitas, director of maintenance for the city, decided to try a more natural method of stripping away the weeds. He contacted Brea and Robert McGrew, co-owners of Ecosystem Concepts Inc., who have a herd of 1,800 goats available for brush removal.

The goats are penned in by a temporary electrical fence and watched over by two Peruvian herdsmen and two dogs. The goats are moved along the acreage until they've done their work. They can even tailor the munching so that the weeds are left at certain heights, depending on the risk of erosion, McGrew said.
``It's not just a matter of turning a bunch of goats loose out there and having at it,'' he said.
McGrew was standing atop the hill overlooking Sharon Hills Park. Below him, goats were arrayed against the suburban backdrop of western Menlo Park. Some were basking in the sun, some were snoozing in the shade. Most were eating. And eating -- chewing on wild oats, stripping bark off trees and craning for leaves off shrubs.

GOATS ARE CHEAPER THAN PEOPLE: It's costing the city $12,000 for the goats, which should be finished with their work this week. Using workers and equipment usually costs about $17,000, Freitas said, excluding lost time when members of the city crew get poison oak. So far, Freitas said, the goats appear to be working out just fine. `

`They're pretty aggressive when it comes to eating,'' Freitas said. Not just eating. The herd numbered 450 when it left Davis for Menlo Park. En route, one of the goat gave birth to a female kid. McGrew and his crew have named the baby Sharon.