Mendocino County’s smallest fire crew is 43 sheep

Fire season’s cutest fuel crew is working Caspar right now: 43 sheep the size of golden retrievers, eating the brush around the community center and growing next year’s wool while they do it. Black is the most common color; some run brown, gray or white. Some sport plain canvas coats to keep stickers out of the fleece — because the fleece is the other half of the paycheck.

They are Ouessant sheep, a rare breed off a windswept island near Brittany, and the name lands close enough to “croissant” that their shepherd, Marie Hoff, calls her crossbreds exactly that. Hoff runs Capella Grazing Project and its wool arm, Full Circle Wool, moving her flock from job to job to eat down fire fuel and selling what grows on their backs to the people who spin it. Fibershed, the Northern California fiber-systems nonprofit, lists hers as the largest Ouessant flock in the West.