Park Begins Mountain Goat Management Plan
(from Olympic Park Associates website)
After a 20-year hiatus, Olympic National Park has begun work on a Mountain Goat Management Plan/EIS. When complete, the plan will determine the fate of exotic goats throughout the park. Park planners are accepting comments on the scope of the plan until September 19, 2014. You can share your thoughts on the park’s planning website.
Mountain goats are not native to the Olympics; they were introduced by hunting interests in the 1920s before the park was created. With the absence of natural predators and in the mild coastal climate of the Olympics, their numbers soared. By the 1980s the population reached more than 1,100 animals. Destructive impacts by goats on sensitive alpine and subalpine environments from feeding, trampling and wallowing became both visible and profound.
A live-capture and translocation program, begun in the 1980s, reduced the population significantly. A 1990s planning effort, which proposed to remove remaining goats by aerial shooting, was placed on hold. More recently, with goat numbers and impacts once again increasing, and the tragic death of Bob Boardman by goat attack in 2010, park managers have once more focused on this serious problem.
The current planning effort will consider a range of alternatives including: no-action, live-capture and translocation, lethal removal, increased nuisance control, and combinations of the above. OPA and a number of conservation organizations supported the park’s proposed action of lethal removal of remaining goats during the earlier planning process. We remain committed to finding a workable solution through the current plan that will result in removal all non-native goats from the park. A draft plan is due next summer and a final plan in 2016.
Let’s help preserve the Olympics’ stunning alpine habitats for the native plants and animals that have made it their home for millennia. Please log on to the planning website and express your concerns to park planners. Urge them to develop a workable scientific approach that will remove non-native goats from the national park.
Remember, the deadline for initial comments is September 19. To review OPA’s 1995 detailed analysis of non-native mountain goats in the Olympics, click here.