Goats do not like to get their feet wet. They don’t like dirty water. They don’t like their barn messy. Considering that, you would think they would do a better job of being neat and clean, wouldn’t you? But no. They drop nanny berries into their water bucket, spill their grain in the dirt, and climb all over the clean hay. When it rains they huddle in their little barn and look down their Roman noses at the terrible wetness out there and refuse to come out. If you drag them out for milking they pussy foot around, dancing on their tip toes (er,hooves, I know) in an attempt to keep their dainty feet dry. It is pretty comical to watch.

We had Nubian milk goats, the kind with the long, floppy ears. They are seriously cute, especially when they are kids. They can be a real pain when it comes to keeping them out of things, though. Like the garden. Or the fruit trees. Or the house.

Kasha was the flightiest, quick-stepping, udder swinging, raindrop dodging goat we had. She bleated like a stuck pig whenever she didn’t get her way. She could sail over the woven wire fence around the garden, do a little twist in mid air, and bleat like a screaming banshee at the same time. Lolipop was more sedate and a whole lot bigger and came from a commercial dairy.

She could knock over a grown man if she wanted to, which luckily, she never did. Lolipop once defended the herd from a Newfoundland/ Great Pyrenees, by rearing up and timing her powerful head-butt to coincide exactly with the arrival of the dogs head at the fence. The huge black dog was boring down on her at full speed. Knocked the dog senseless. It was impressive, plus it gave us time to get a rope on him before he tried again. She must have weighed over a hundred pounds and when she reared up she was as tall as I am. The poor dog didn’t know any better. Cherokee lived his first two years chained up in a yard in D.C. and had never seen a goat before. A friend of ours had found him in a “good home wanted” ad in the latest issue of “The Mother Earth News”. For some reason he thought bringing him out to our place was a good idea. The next day Cherokee broke his rope and tried to get the neighbors milk calf that was grazing on their lawn. They almost shot him for a bear. We had to ask him to leave and train him somewhere else. He eventually turned into a good dog.

The spring of 1975 was super wet in Northwest Central West Virginia. Seriously. They called it that on the radio. Ritchie County had at least a little rain every day for a month that June. The creek came up, it went down, it came up again. It overflowed the banks. Mud was everywhere. We could not work the garden and plant. There was a rice paddy right by it. The barnyard was a mucky mess and the goats were very unhappy about it. The chickens looked scraggly in soggy feathers. The water got so high that even inside the barn was getting soggy. We were digging ditches with the mattock all over the place, trying to drain the water away. The goats were huddled in the barn peering out as we worked.

Standing there in my mud boots, scraping away at a ditch, I thought I heard a bathtub draining. You know the sound. Kind of a sucking, swirling glug, glug sound. It was loud and somewhere close by. Except here was no bathtub, not even in the house. Plus, we were standing in the middle of the barnyard.

“Where in the world is that sound coming from? Can you see anything?”

We finally looked down and found a swirling water tornado-lookin-thingy about 10 feet out from the barn wall in a low spot.
“Wow. Check this out. A Crawdad has drilled us our own barnyard drain hole. How handy is that? Little West Virginia ground lobsters helping us out.”

There was a small hill of tiny, round, mud balls mounded up and water was pouring over the top into a hole about an inch or two across. The water was pouring through pretty fast, just like going down a drain.

Crawdads are the same thing as Crayfish and some people eat them, mostly further down South though. They move backwards when they swim and forwards on land, eating insects. We had come across some huge ones on our place that measured about eight inches long when we were digging the well hole. Didn’t know they could be so useful though.

Wendy lee, writing at edgewisewoods.com

Want More Crawdad info? www.nps.gov/laro/learn/…/Crayfish-facts.docx