Real story behind goat population

The Herald’s recent article on sophisticated monitoring of mountain goats showed that exercise to be interesting and informative, but in no way related to the decline in goat populations.

Along with other lifetime observers of mountain goats, I’ve seen four combined causes of the decline – habitat loss, legal hunting and its attendant illegal kills, predation and disease. Age and accidents are constants.

From the early 1920s to the late 1940s, goat populations held quite steady, but then all those problems seemed to hit them at once.

John Biggs, head of the Washington state Game Department, and with no knowledge of mountain goats, made them subject to hunting by permit. Almost simultaneous logging in the goats’ lower areas followed by that in higher elevations took away their places of winter shelter and food. Easy access by logging roads spelled big trouble.

In little more than a decade, goat numbers on various local mountains dropped significantly.

Meetings hosted in Everett and Arlington by sportsmen’s groups asking for a moratorium on legal hunting and its associated poaching fell on deaf ears. Finally, a meeting in Bellingham forced the Game Department to admit it had no one who knew anything about goats. There, a young game protector was named to study them – in of all places, Olympic National Park!

A ray of hope shone when protector L. Wadkins took on the survey of goats in addition to his assigned duties. He soon became the department’s most knowledgeable employee, but he couldn’t change the department’s attitude. The Game Department’s attempt to modify its errors by transplanting goats from Olympic National Park to depleted local areas was a failure. Most of those animals that didn’t die from the stress of capture and transport were released in spots convenient to transport but totally unsuited to goats; e.g., a logged area on the northeast side of Mount Higgins.

KEITH MARKWELL

Marysville

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