Survey assesses elusive Olympic Mountain goats

By Jim Downing
Seattle Times staff reporter

OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK The National Parks Service's new survey is an assessment of Washington's goat population.

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OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK — It was the 1920s when a few pairs of snow-white mountain goats were brought to the Olympic Peninsula for the pleasure of hunters.

By the 1980s — with a population of more than 1,100 — the billies, nannies and their sprightly kids were so abundant that backpackers in the Olympic Mountains reported them nibbling on their leather boots at night.

A new census to be released this week by the National Park Service shows their numbers appear to have stabilized at about 300. Most of the herds have moved deep into the park's craggy, remote interior, and are seen only rarely by backpackers.

The shift away from the fringes of the park may be rooted in the Park Service's controversial actions in the late 1980s. The non-native goats had caused so much damage to fragile alpine vegetation that as many animals as possible were trapped and relocated out of state.

Margaret Mitchell, who runs the Elwha Ranch Bed and Breakfast near the park's northern boundary, remembers when guests could look out her dining-room window and watch goats cavort. "People were always so thrilled to see them. And the kids were such cute little guys — looked like they had suction cups on their feet."

The Park Service's newest helicopter survey is part of a more thorough assessment of Washington's entire goat population. Biologists are finding that while the Olympic's population seems to have stabilized since about 1990, many of the Cascade Mountain herds actually are crashing, their numbers dropping by more than 80 percent in some locations since the 1970s.

The smaller numbers may be due to hunting, cougar predation, diseases caught from pack animals and disturbance from rock climbers, backpackers, snowmobilers and loggers.

For more information: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Science News: wdfw.wa.gov/science/

Another new hypothesis suggests that air pollution from greater Seattle is reducing the amount of selenium, a micro-nutrient necessary for muscle development and a goat's immune system.

Nitrogen oxides from car exhaust may fall with the rain and act as a sort of fertilizer in the areas where the goats feed, says Doug McMurtry, environmental director for the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe. When the plants hit a growth spurt, they may not take up as much selenium from the soil as they would otherwise. "It's a small change, but the goats already have a low-selenium diet, so it might be enough to hurt the population over the long run."

Until recently, goats in Washington's Cascades were a mystery, seldom counted and poorly understood. Estimates of the historic population range from 4,500 to 10,000; current counts put the population at less than 3,000.

"In the past, the goat wasn't a concern for the state agencies because it wasn't a real big game species, its habitat didn't seem to be threatened, and it was so inaccessible that it was difficult to learn much about it," says Doug Houston, a retired Olympic National Park wildlife biologist.

Now, several studies are under way to improve understanding of the mountain goat.

David Wallin, a Western Washington University professor, and Clifford Rice, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife research biologist, are coordinating an interagency study of goat behavior and habitat preferences in the Cascades. Last summer, they fitted GPS collars on 30 goats to track them throughout the year.

"We're hoping that this will help fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of goat habitat and behavior," Wallin says. "For instance, we'd like to know where goats go in the winter."

"We're hoping that we'll learn more about what kinds of habitat goats need to survive over the winter, and that should help us to improve habitat conservation and relocation programs."

The goat-tracking study is evidence of a broad commitment to preserving the mountain goat — collaborators include the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, three national forests, three national parks, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Upper Skagit and Sauk-Suiattle tribes.

"We used to manage goats like deer," says Jim Rieck, game staff biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. "But now we know you can't do that. Goats aren't as productive, and their family relationships are very delicate."

Goats tend to live in groups of three to eight led by a dominant nanny; older billy goats often live alone except during the fall mating season.

"The presence of that dominant nanny is very important," says Rieck. "If something happens to her, the whole band is really thrown off. Deer aren't like that — they're much more independent."

The mountain goat's natural range stretches from Washington and Idaho to Alaska's coastal mountains. Within Washington, goats still are found along the length of the Cascades, from Mount Adams to Mount Baker. In prehistoric times, the natural barriers of Puget Sound and predator-rich lowlands are thought to have kept the goats out of the Olympics.

The park's decision to try to remove the goats in the 1980s was a hard one, says Cat Hawkins-Hoffman, chief of the park's Natural Resources Division. "Goats are a huge challenge — not only the terrain and the difficulty of actually getting your hands on them, but also the human sentiments involved.

"If this was a Norway rat we were talking about, of course the discussion would be different."

At first, the relocation program went relatively smoothly — goats living in helicopter-accessible environments such as alpine meadows were lured with salt licks, then shot with tranquilizer darts and removed in nets.

But then Park Service wranglers went after the holdout goats that had sought refuge on the cliff faces.

"You'd hear stories of guys landing the helicopter on one skid on a razor-edge ridge with the throttle on and then rappelling down to try to net a goat perched on a tiny ledge" says Bill Baccus, who has worked in the park since the mid-'80s.

"The risk to the people and the goats just became too great," Houston says. "So we stopped."

For the past 15 years, the park has maintained a sort of truce with the goats.

"It's in a holding pattern right now. There's no active management now aside from these surveys," says Patti Happe, a wildlife biologist at the Olympic National Park who directed this year's census. Happe had to get a $30,000 grant to fund the count.

Happe says the goat population appears to be stable and, if anything, the Olympic goats are slowly re-expanding their range.

In the 1980s, during the Park Service's commando operation in the Olympics, the goat population in some locations in the Cascades started to decline sharply. Until then, the Department of Fish and Wildlife issued more than 800 goat-hunting permits per year. Now, there's an annual lottery for 21 permits.

At first, the change went unnoticed by nearly everyone except some members of tribes that have a traditional relationship with the goat, and a U.S. Forest Service employee named Art Ryals, who had been recording his mountain-goat observations in a personal diary since 1946.

"Art sparked our interest in the problem throughout the Cascades," says Lawrence Joseph, 64, a member of the mountain-goat clan within the Sauk-Suiattle, and the tribe's natural-resources director.

"We claim ourselves to be brothers to the mountain goat," Joseph says. "It was one of our primary foods, and when there were plenty of goats that roamed the hills, we would gather wool as it would shed and get stuck on the brush, and the women would knit it into sweaters and hats and socks. We used the hoofs and horns for other tools to help us survive."

Joseph is hopeful that science can reveal what's hurting the Cascades goats. But until the studies are in, he has a plan that might suit wildlife managers on both sides of Puget Sound.

"Those goats in the Olympics came from the Cascades, right? Maybe they ought to let us go over there and hunt," Joseph says, chuckling. "We've got to follow our animal, don't we?"

Jim Downing: 206-464-2164 or jdowning@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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