Biologists try to solve mountain goat mystery

DARRINGTON – Goats reign in the highest reaches of the North Cascades.

Quick-footed and as elusive as ghosts, they scramble unchallenged along sheer granite cliffs 6,000 feet above sea level. Their versatile hoofs – soft in the middle and hard on the edges – give them superb traction, allowing them to easily slip from sight in a vertical environment. Fluffy white double coats blanket their muscular frames.

In their universe of clouds, meadows and rocky outcrops, the mountain goats seem to be living in an idyllic setting with few predators to threaten them.

Most of the land they live on is protected, and so remote that only hardy backcountry hikers ever see them. And lush mountain meadows suggest that food is abundant, at least in the summertime.

But all is not well in the goat kingdom.

With the state focused on saving salmon, goshawks and spotted owls, the dwindling mountain goat’s plight has gone largely unnoticed for decades.

“On first examination, you’d assume goats ought to be doing fine,” said David Wallin, a professor of environmental sciences at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

However, the state’s native goat population has plummeted anywhere from 75 percent to 90 percent since 1945, estimates show.

And with so little research available on the mysterious animals, no one is really sure how many are left, said Cliff Rice, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife research scientist.

The best guess is that there are 3,000 to 4,000 goats in the state, down from an estimated 9,000 in 1960, a drop of more than 67 percent.

Rice doesn’t know how many goats remain in the Darrington area, but said the Snohomish County group makes up one of the state’s most struggling populations.

There are small herds of a dozen or fewer goats on Whitehorse, Three Fingers and White Chuck mountains, and at Round Lake near Glacier Peak.

The declining numbers would seem to indicate that being squirreled away in some of the most remote country in the Pacific Northwest has been no guarantee of the goat’s survival.

Four years ago, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe, which views the goat as a sacred part of its cultural heritage, pushed to get state wildlife biologists to find out what was happening to the vanishing species. Now state biologists are in the second year of a four-year study to map out where the goats go in the summer and, more mysteriously, in the winter.

The Fish and Wildlife Department is spending $150,000 a year to collar and track goats up and down the Cascades. So far, 40 animals have been outfitted with collars that use Global Positioning System technology to track where they go and what they do.

Helping the goat herds recover is crucial to the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe, which has contributed $250,000 in grant money to help pay for the goat monitoring study.

“They used to be so abundant you could go outside your back door and see them,” said Norma Joseph, a member of the tribe’s cultural committee.

Tribal members once gathered wool from goats they hunted in the mountains around Darrington, Joseph said. But in her lifetime, she has seen only small tufts of goat wool.

“We used to make elaborate blankets and clothing that we would trade with other tribes,” she said. “That’s a resource that’s gone to me.”

Rice said it’s clear there are a lot fewer goats in the mountains around Darrington than even 40 years ago. “We know we’re losing ground,” he said.

The GPS technology allows researchers to map a goat’s location every three minutes, Rice said. The mapping will allow for the first comprehensive analysis of where the goats go “when we can’t see them, which is most of the time,” Rice said.

Biologists who once relied on anecdotal information of goat sightings will now have hard data to use in puzzling out what’s causing the animal’s decline, he said.

Such information will help land managers better regulate hunting, recreation and logging, all of which could be harming the goats, said Phyllis Reed, a biologist with the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

“We are certainly looking at what impact human activity has had,” she said.

Hunting of goats – which has been greatly scaled back – is widely thought to be the main reason goat populations are down, Reed, Rice and Wallin said.

Goat hunting was reduced to just 20 permits a year in the state in the mid-1990s, and those goats can only be taken from populations that are thriving, Rice said.

He said biologists assumed that goats would rebound from hunting like deer, which produce more offspring when overhunted.

Goats, as it turns out, don’t bounce back as quickly. But their populations do recover, which means they may rebound now that hunting is mostly banned throughout the Cascades, including in Snohomish County, biologists said.

“We could be past the crisis point,” Rice said.

Because of past hunting, goats remain wary of people, which means hikers and rock climbers could be keeping goats away from their prime feeding areas, Reed said.

Snowmobile use in the winter may also keep goats from the best feeding areas and from shelter, she said.

Other possible threats include logging, which opens up goat habitat to more people and eliminates some of the ground cover that goats need for winter forage, Wallin said. However, there’s also evidence that goats forage in clear-cuts during the summer.

The researchers agreed that collecting hard data on the goats’ whereabouts will help them figure out how to save them.

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