Camelscaping: Rent camels, fight off invasive species

January 21, 2010 · Posted by in Environment 

Ah, yes, the high plains camel. Majestic, really, with his untroubled stare and his precarious and stupefying perch atop Delicate Arch; the original inspiration for the mountain biker’s friend, the Camelbak, the high plains camel himself is quite a cyclist.

 

Camel

HEY, GUYS! | flickr user tarksiala

OK, so camels seem pretty out of place here. But that’s the idea:

If you’ve been playing in the outdoors in parts of Colorado — or just about anywhere in the Southwest — you might have seen this little fellow known as Tamarisk.

 

Tamarisk

A species of Tamarix at home in Israel (Wikimedia Commons image)

Well, it’s not actually from around here either and it causes all kinds of trouble. So one Colorado woman has a wacky strategy for fighting it off: she thinks you might do well to rent her camels, which have acquired a taste for the scrubby little invader. People in California have been cutting back dry fauna with goats for some time now, so why not try a camel up here? From Lisa Song of High Country News we get this:

The invasive tamarisk is notoriously hard to kill. First introduced from Eurasia to the U.S. in the 1800s, it spread relentlessly across the West, choking up rivers and out-competing native plants (for a history of the tamarisk, see Paul Larmer’s 1998 article “Tackling Tamarisk”). Tamarisk has survived chainsaws, fire and chemical herbicides. In 2001, scientists released the foreign Diorabda beetle to control the plant's spread. Since then, the leaf-eating beetles have attacked thousands of acres of tamarisk (see Michelle Nijhuis' 2007 story Beetle Warfare).

Repp (the rancher with the camels) estimates that 10 camels could destroy half an acre of tamarisk in 2 days. That’s small-scale compared to tamarisk beetles, which can spread over a hundred miles in two years. So for full riparian restoration, stick with the beetle. But if you want to clear the odd tamarisk patch off your pasture, it might be easier to rent a camel.

(Read the rest of their post for a fun description of what our camel-reliant future might look like.)

In addition to screwing up the salt content of the soil around it (by increasing it) and therefore making it tougher for native plants to grow, Discover Moab points out that Tamarisk’s negative effects include:

  • narrowing and channelizing streams and rivers;
  • displacing native vegetation such as cottonwoods, willows, and adjacent dryland plant communities;
  • providing poor habitat for livestock, wild animals, and birds: the foliage and flowers of tamarisk provide little food value for native wildlife species that depend on nutrient-rich native plant resources;
  • increasing wildfire hazards;
  • limiting human and animal use of the waterways

Chemicals? Machines? Beetles? Camels?

Maybe I don’t know which is the best choice to fight some Tamarisk back, but I do know which one is the funniest.

(Related fun fact: I believe I coined both the terms “goatscaping” and “goatsploitation.”)

UPDATE: the much-smarter-than-me Laura Snider has pointed out that camels used to live in Boulder County!

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One Response to “Camelscaping: Rent camels, fight off invasive species”

  1. Goatscaping back in Boulder | BigGreenBoulder Boulder, CO : BigGreenBoulder on July 29th, 2010 7:05 am

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