A crated (and sedated) mountain goat waits for release.
Olympic Peninsula mountain goats dropped off in North Cascades
The mountains of the Methow Valley got a furry, white infusion when 14 mountain goats from Olympic National Park were delivered to their new home near Tower Mountain last week.
The goats were transported in refrigerated trucks (to keep them cool) and were delivered to a staging area along Highway 20 near Rainy Pass. There, volunteers and employees with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) harnessed their crates to a helicopter and flew the goats the final mile or two to Tower Mountain, at an elevation of roughly 8,500 feet.
The goats were given sedatives for the journey, and nannies and kids were kept together and helicoptered in pairs to their new home. One large billy goat, weighing more than 300 pounds, was transported by himself.
“It’s stressful for them, there’s no getting around that, so we do everything we can to make that as least stressed as possible,” said Rich Harris, a biologist with the WDFW who was overseeing the relocation effort.
The National Park Service has wanted to get rid of the mountain goats in Olympic National Park for decades. The goats were introduced there in the 1920s and now number more than 700. They destroy fragile alpine habitat and harass hikers in search of salt and enzymes from human sweat and urine. A hiker was killed by a goat in Olympic National Park in 2010.
Mountain goats are native to the North Cascades, though the population has been declining in recent decades. The last survey of goats in the Methow Valley found just 45 animals. Ruth Milner has been studying mountain goats in the North Cascades with WDFW since the 1990s. She said relocating goats from the Olympic Peninsula is a win-win.
“It’s kind of the perfect storm of their [Olympic National Park’s] need to remove goats and our need to have goats returning to the Cascades,” Milner said.
Years of planning
This is not the first time Olympic National Park has attempted to get rid of its mountain goats. In the 1980s several hundred goats were relocated across the West, with limited success.
“It got to the point where they got the ones that were easy to get and then logistically it was getting difficult and dangerous for the people doing the trapping so they discontinued,” said David Wallin, a professor at Western Washington University who has been studying mountain goats for years.
This year’s relocation effort is the result of several years of planning and collaboration between the National Park Service, the National Forest Service and WDFW. As of this week, more than 75 goats have been captured in Olympic National Park and delivered to four different sites in the North Cascades, including the site near Tower Mountain. Three more goat capture and relocation events are planned for 2018 and 2019 and then the remaining mountain goats in Olympic National Park will be killed.
Wallin said the translocation effort won’t solve the problem of declining mountain goat populations in the North Cascades, “but we figure we can move 300-400 goats over and that’s a 10-percent bump in the population and our hope is that will help jump start the recovery here.”
The relocated mountain goats were fitted with radio collars and tagged so that their movements can be monitored in the coming years as they spread out and explore their new habitat.
