Olympic Goats Take Final Flight to their New Cascade Home
by Hannah Weinberger—hannah.weinberger@crosscut.com
August 7, 2020
The final effort of a two-year program to relocate mountain goats from Olympic National Park to the North Cascades almost didn’t happen.
“It was a little dicey getting all the protocols approved with all the [pandemic] modifications,” says Dr. Patti Happe, wildlife branch chief at Olympic National Park. When the project kicked off its fourth and final two-week relocation process on July 27, Happe says she breathed a sigh of relief.
Today, the team is reaching its goal of relocating about 50% of the Olympics’ mountain goats — a win-win for the Olympics and the North Cascades, two ecosystems suffering from a respective excess and lack of mountain goats.
The nimble alpine ungulates aren’t native to the Olympics, but they’ve flourished there since hunters introduced them in the 1920s, before the formation of the park, to the detriment of native species. Through decades of damaging endemic plants, they’ve also become increasingly aggressive toward humans, going so far as to kill a man in 2010. Goats need salt, and the Olympics lack natural salt deposits, leaving goats to stalk humans for their urine.
To Move A Goat
For wildlife professionals, the relocation project is the experience of a lifetime.
“I'm pretty relieved that it's the last year,” says wildlife technician Annie Doss, also known as 'Goat Handler Number One.' “Just imagine getting swooped up by a helicopter and sedated and put into a crate and then waking up in a different place — it’s pretty hard on the animals. But I really like being part of the process because I know that I’m doing my best to make it as OK as possible for the goats.”
The process is surreal even in nonpandemic years. A contracted helicopter capture crew called “muggers” flies over remote goat habitat, tranquilizing goats from the air, Doss says.
Catching a goat is “pretty darn difficult,” Happe says, but the capture crews are good at judging whether an animal is safe to catch.
They’ve only experienced one minor injury, when someone got horned by a goat last year while trying to get it into a bag.
Biologists like Happe receive the goats at helicopter landing sites, where veterinarians and wildlife technicians like Doss can take the bagged goats’ vitals and give extra sedative injections in close quarters. “The whole process is pretty crazy,” Doss says. “They just fly in with these bags of goats and drop them in a truck! It’s happening all very fast and close to you. And then you jump in the back of this truck and grab a goat — most of the time they have sedation drugs but sometimes not, and then they’re just jumping around a bit. But they’re hobbled and have horn guards and a mask on so it’s pretty safe.”
The crews put a radio collar on the goats for monitoring and wrangle them into transport crates in a refrigerated truck. For 400- to 500-pound male billies, wrangling a single goat requires a team of five or six people . . . .
The entire transport crew is made up of more than 100 volunteers. Once they truck the goats to the North Cascades, another helicopter crew steps in to carry and deposit the goats at remote release sites high in the mountains. This year’s 12 release sites were in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie and Okanogan-Wenatchee national forests. Staff members select sites based on things like existing goat population; important habitat features like steep alpine terrain with plenty of escape routes and easy access for helicopters and trucks . . . .
Even when conditions are ideal, risks remain for the mountain goats. The National Park Service evaluates capture statistics to improve the goats’ chances of survival, and they adjust practices as they learn (like switching to larger transport crates after two billies died in too-small crates during the first relocation session). The team waited to catch more until a partner organization in California drove up crates meant for larger bighorn rams; volunteers with Fish and Wildlife’s Master Hunter group then built 10 more large crates. “We haven’t lost any billies on the trip over since,” Happe says ....
“Hopefully, the goats will be gone, or 90%, by the end of 2022,” Happe says. “You don’t want to revisit this issue 20 years from now if the population rebounds again.
Visit crosscut.com/donate to support nonprofit, freely distributed, local journalism.
NOTE: This is an excerpt from the online magazine Crosscut.com. We thank them for allowing The Lighthouse Peddler to republish this wonderful article. The relocation process began in 2018.
