Teton Goats Rebound After Hunts, Gunning

Leaving aside the fact that virtually no so-called “invasive species” has ever been permanently eradicated, why would Teton Park managers want to remove a rare native animal, the Mountain Goat (Oreamnos americanus) - the only genus and species of its kind in the world  - which has been moving around North America's mountains for  1-million years?  The reason is that, because the Mountain Goat withstands domestic sheep diseases better than bighorn sheep,  it is more numerous. And so, to ‘protect’ bighorn from ‘competition’ we must kill Mountain Goats. 

Has anyone considered that these animals, which coevolved over millions of years, are complimentary - not competitive? The belief that sick species are made healthy by killing out the healthy species alongside which they have lived since time immemorial shows the ecological illiteracy, lack of holistic thinking, and hostility to biodiversity, that permeates invasive species ‘biology’.

NOTE: this article was originally published to JHNewsandGuide.com on September 18, 2024. It was written by Billy Arnold.

Toby Smith was just starting to climb the East Ridge of Disappointment Peak in mid-July when he noticed something move: a white mountain goat clambering toward his friend 5 feet below.

“Honestly, he looked a little aggressive,” the 28-year-old said. “I felt fear because my belayer was in his firing zone, and I didn’t know what would happen if my belayer got charged while I was climbing.”

Smith’s belayer — this reporter — was similarly concerned. The billy goat (no relation to the reporter) was making eye contact and pawing the ground. Overhead, Smith climbed quickly and built an anchor. But as he did that the goat moved on, sauntering downslope until it disappeared into a pile of boulders and trees.

“It’s conflicting because you know in theory they’re not supposed to be there,” Smith said Tuesday, reflecting on the experience. “But they do look majestic, and it feels like it’s such an inhospitable place. It’s cool to see a creature that’s much more comfortable hopping around in those areas than I will ever be.”

This summer, more nonnative mountain goats have been spotted across the Tetons, two years after Grand Teton National Park ended its aggressive efforts to remove the alpine-dwelling ungulates to protect native bighorn sheep.

At the time, park officials said some goats might have survived the removal operations.

The past two summers have confirmed as much. In addition to the Disappointment Peak billy, climbers and hikers say they’ve spotted a nanny — a female goat — and some kids on Teewinot, as well as a solo animal in Garnet Canyon. The park has confirmed 12 sightings this summer, up from seven sightings during the summer of 2022 and seven in the summer of 2023, officials said.

“We probably haven’t removed all the goats in the park, and what we’re seeing is the remaining individuals building the population back up,” park wildlife biologist Sarah Dewey said Monday. “We don’t have any specific actions planned at this time, but it’s very likely that we will need to take action at some point.”

Dewey did not say what, exactly, that would look like. But she said that any action the park takes will comply with the 2019 Mountain Goat Management Plan, attached to the online version of this article at JHNewsAndGuide.com. Broadly, that plan gives the park three options for removing goats: killing them from helicopters, requiring staff or hunters deputized as “qualified volunteers” to dispatch them from the ground, or capturing and translocating them to zoos or areas where they are considered a native species.

“We’ve always recognized that it was going to be an ongoing process,” Dewey said of goat management. “We’re always trying to keep the mountain goats to a point where impacts to bighorn sheep are minimal.”

Other biologists aren’t surprised to see goats bounce back in the Tetons.

“We knew between us and the park, we never were going to remove every single mountain goat from the Tetons,” said Aly Courtemanch, wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and member of the Teton Bighorn Sheep Working Group. “You just can’t get them all.”

Mountain goats first were documented in the Teton Range in 1977, a few years after the Idaho Department of Fish and Game introduced them to the Snake River Range to expand hunting opportunities.

The goats moved north, entered the Tetons’ rocky Alpine peaks and set up shop. But doing so threatened the range’s herd of bighorn sheep, the smallest and most isolated native herd in Wyoming. Development in the Jackson Hole valley already had cut the animals off from their historical migration routes, and over the past 50 or so years, skiers and goats have competed with the sheep for choice winter range.

Goats, in particular, are known for being feisty. Research has shown that in Rocky Mountain Alpine environments where mountain goats and bighorn sheep compete for resources, goats displace sheep — as much as 95% of the time. Their aggressive behavior is part of the reason for their relative dominance.

Between 2019 and 2022, park officials and their counterparts at Wyoming Game and Fish blitzed the Tetons’ mountain goats, hoping to remove them from the range and give bighorns a leg up. In 2019, Game and Fish expanded hunting outside the park. In 2020 the park started using helicopter gunners to kill goats within its boundaries, though outcry from state game officials and, later, the Interior secretary led them to stop. In the fall of 2020 and 2021 officials deputized hunters to kill goats.

Then, in the winter of 2022, park officials used helicopter gunners, taking out the last 60 or so goats they could find.

Now, two and a half years later, Dewey and Carson Butler, another sheep-focused wildlife biologist in the park, estimate there are at least a dozen goats dwelling in the Tetons’ Alpine regions. There could be more.

“That’s a bare minimum,” Butler said.

The park has not seen any mountain goats on trail cameras. Instead, Dewey and Butler primarily are monitoring the population via reports from climbers and hikers. Butler follows up and interviews spotters to confirm they saw a goat and roughly determine its age and sex. With photos and videos, that’s easier.

But most of the reports come from highly trafficked areas, such as Teewinot, Garnet Canyon and Cascade Canyon.

“We don’t have a lot of visitors going into the middle of the range,” Butler said, referring to Leigh Canyon, Moran Canyon and Snowshoe Canyon. “We know there used to be a fair number of goats in there before.”

Butler and Dewey suspect there are goats in those remote canyons now.

Their best guess for a range-wide goat population is about 24 animals, double what they’ve confirmed. Still, that’s well below the last count of mountain goats before removals began in 2019: 88 animals.

Dewey said the park doesn’t have a numerical threshold for when it might start removing goats again.

“Obviously, it’s more challenging to remove goats when the population is really small,” she said. “But that’s the best time to do it, too. You’re keeping the numbers low so they don’t impact the sheep.”

For the time being, the park biologists and Courtemanch believe all the goats in the Tetons are those that survived the helicopter gunning. They don’t think goats are migrating up from the Snake River Range.

Courtemanch said hunters haven’t reported any goats on the west slope of the Tetons for three years.

In 2019, when Game and Fish first bumped up the number of tags it issued around the Tetons to 48, the strategy was intended to kill goats outside the park, and buffer against north-to-south migration. Citing decreasing hunter success and a lack of sightings outside Teton park, the state cut tags to four in 2023.

This year the department eliminated the hunt altogether. There have been no reports of goats from backcountry users or hunters, and biologists haven’t seen any in aerial surveys for bighorn sheep.

There still is a risk of goats making the trek north into the park, Courtemanch said. But if any are detected, the department can authorize a hunt the following year — or send game wardens out to kill them.

This year Game and Fish didn’t want to disappoint hunters.

“We didn’t want to keep selling licenses to hunters knowing that there were no mountain goats in that area,” Courtemanch said.

Dewey said the park is OK with that strategy.

“Given that there haven’t been reports of goats outside the park, I think we’re comfortable with what Game and Fish has decided to do,” she said.