Life on the Rocks: A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat

Chapter Seven: Conservation: Local Challenges

Beyond the hazards of severe weather and gravity— environmental constraints by which the animal has been shaped through the diligent fine-tuning of natural selection—North America’s mountain goat faces a host of new challenges. All of these are human-caused. Beginning in the 1970s, concerns that many goat populations were dwindling spawned investigations of the species’ ecology from Alaska to Montana. For the first time in 1976, agency scientists and student researchers gathered in Kalispell, Montana, to share their knowledge and concerns about the animal at the First International Mountain Goat Symposium. This began a tradition of convening a biennial meeting (the Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council Symposium) to share research findings and report on the status of the mountain goat across its continental distribution. Thereafter, science began to play a greater role in the species’ management. It became clear that goats introduced to previously unoccupied habitats often underwent a boom and bust growth cycle, initially growing rapidly followed by population decline. To shortcircuit anticipated declines, managers have sanctioned annual harvests of 7 to 10 percent by hunters to hold goat densities below range carrying capacity—an admittedly fuzzy metric. To Out of nowhere. A two-year-old nanny in the Palisades Wilderness Area of Idaho. (Photo by author) CHAPTER SEVEN Conservation: Local Challenges DOI: 10.5876_9781607322924.c007 Like the nutrients of the plants they recycle, periodic wildfires have always been part of the mountain goat’s ecology, making way for new plant growth in over-mature forests of the Rocky Mountains. On the contrary, tree canopies are essential for intercepting snow that permits goats to survive in Pacific coastal forests from Alaska to Washington. (Photo by author) 128 C O N S E R V A T I O N : L O C A L C H A L L E N G E S provide new herds for recreational hunting was of course the original purpose most transplants were conceived. The question lingers: would this boom and bust cycle occur uniformly for all newly established or reestablished populations? Apparently not, because some introductions have failed. Ten hunting districts in Montana, for example, closed to goat hunting between 1994 and 2008 due to declining goat populations. Seven of those districts had introduced populations. Where winters are more severe, or where habitat is limited or conducive to predation by wolves and grizzly bears, hunting may be unwarranted or may need to be far more conservative. As if a different species, most native populations can withstand far less hunter removal than newly established herds. Across the species’ range, hunting is regulated by issuing limited numbers of permits on a lottery basis, except in remote areas of Alaska, British Columbia, and Northwest Territories where hunting pressure is slight or unrestricted hunting accommodates First Nations’ rights. Permit numbers and allocations are based on population trend data, which ideally would be collected annually. But gathering population data is constrained by budgets and logistics. So over the past decade managers have prescribed increasingly conservative harvests, largely as an upshot of past misjudgments that produced overharvests of goats. The Montana wildlands where I lived among goats offers just one of many examples. The nineteen canyons of the northern Bitterroot Range comprise Hunting District 240. Following excessive harvest and decline of the population during the twentieth century, hunting in 240 was closed from 1948 to 1954. After hunting reopened in 1955, Montana issued seventy-five or more permits each year during the 1960s and 1970s producing annual harvests averaging thirty-seven animals—more than 10 percent of the district’s estimated population of 300 goats. My observations during the mid-1970s suggested that losses from natural causes doubled that annual mortality rate. Even if every adult female had produced and successfully raised a kid each year, that would not have offset total annual losses. In response to plummeting goat numbers and productivity, in 2011 only twelve permits were offered for Hunting District 240 and only two permits in 2012. Over the past thirty years, wildlife officials have pared back hunting of native populations in most provinces and states. In the Bob Marshal and Great Bear Wilderness Areas, two other Montana strongholds of native goats, populations have shrunk by an estimated 85 percent in recent years and hunting has all but ended. The number of permits to hunt goats in Idaho’s Pahsimeroi Mountains, where biologist Lonn Kuck documented how excessive harvests had...