Olympic National Park Needs Your Help to Remove Non-native Mountain Goats

Dear OFCO Members and Supporters –

Please consider attending a meeting below and also commenting to support Olympic Park Associates (OPA) in their efforts to protect the Olympic National Park. They have worked on this issue for many years and have worked to achieve a compromise solution. Thank you for your help!

Support is needed for the draft plan to remove goats from Olympic National Park and Forest. Public meetings are scheduled for mid-August and comments accepted through September 26.

After decades of study and experiment, Olympic National Park has decided to take action to remove non-native mountain goats and restore degraded alpine habitats in the Olympics.

The Park’s preferred alternative (Alternative D) in its draft Mountain Goat Management Plan proposes to live-capture and relocate goats to native habitats in Washington’s North Cascades where goat populations are in steep decline. Following that, remaining non-native goats will be removed by aerial and ground-based shooting by park staff and trained volunteers.

OPA supports this sound and far-reaching approach to resolve this long-standing threat to the Park’s ecological integrity and public safety. We recommend the goal of the final plan be to eliminate all non-native goats from the Olympics.

The plan, developed by the National Park Service in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service and the Washington State Dept. of Fish and Wildlife with significant public participation, is a thoughtful and sensitive compromise approach. It will eliminate exotic goats from the Olympics, protect irreplaceable alpine plant and animal communities, and help restore struggling native mountain goat populations in the North Cascades.

We urge you to contact park planners and express your support for Alternative D: live capture and relocation followed by lethal removal.

If you can, please plan to attend one of these public informational meetings scheduled for mid-August:

Olympia: Mon. 8/14, 5–7 PM Olympic National Forest Supervisor’s Office 1835 Black Lake Blvd. SW	Everett: Wed. 8/16, 5–7 PM Everett Public Library Auditorium 2702 Hoyt Avenue
Port Angeles: Tues. 8/15, 6–8 PM Olympic National Park Visitor Center 3002 Mount Angeles Road	Seattle: Thurs. 8/17, 5–7 PM Seattle Public Library (Douglass-Truth Branch) 2300 Yesler Way

It is essential that this problematic threat to irreplaceable park resources, as well as visitor safety, finally be resolved.

To comment on the plan:

Go here and click on “Comment Now.” Support the park’s preferred alternative (Alternative D) and urge park planners to aim for complete removal of non-native goats from the Olympics, not merely a reduction in number.

For more information on the long-standing problem of non-native mountain goats in the Olympics, go to this Olympic Park Associates web page and follow the links for background.

To review the Park’s Goat Management Plan DEIS, click here.

Thank you for defending Olympic National Park’s wilderness and ecological integrity.