(CN) – Ninety-eight mountain goats are starting over in the peaks of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state, after the government flew them there from the Olympic Peninsula, in an effort to eradicate the animals from an area where humans introduced them.
Seventeen died during the effort.
Though the two mountain ranges are a mere 70 miles apart, Mount Olympus is geographically isolated from the Cascades and the area’s separate evolutionary track did not include wild goats until they were introduced by a hunting group in the 1920s.
The Northern Cascade Mountains, meanwhile have always been home to goats, and their population there is struggling to recover from overhunting. An interagency effort ended its first of the first of three planned two-week relocation periods.
The government removed 115 goats out of an estimated 725 on the peninsula, according to a joint statement Wednesday from the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Of those removed, 98 made it safely to release sites atop the Northern Cascades.
Six mountain goat kids were captured without their mothers, and were placed instead in a sanctuary at Northwest Trek Wildlife Park. Six adults died during capture, two died during transport and three were euthanized “because they were unfit for translocation,” according to the statement.
The northwestern corner of the United States, the Olympic Peninsula is isolated on three sides from the rest of Washington state. The bays and inlets of the Salish Sea enclose the peninsula on the north and east, while the western peaks of Mount Olympus plummet down toward the Pacific Ocean. To the south lie low-elevation forests – a no-go zone for alpine species that might otherwise travel between the two mountain ranges.
Thousands of years of isolation have created a unique alpine habitat with plants and animals that live nowhere else. At least 33 rare plants that grow nowhere else live in the alpine meadows of Olympic National Park, where goats forage in the summer, according to the environmental impact statement prepared by the National Park Service for the mountain goat removal project. Four of those are heavily grazed by goats, including Cotton’s milkvetch, which is globally imperiled, and the adorably named featherleaf kittentails, which is designated as threatened by the state.
But mountain goats were not part of that evolution. Common in the Cascades until overhunting severely depressed their numbers, 12 goats were introduced on Mount Olympus by hunters who traded them with hunting groups in Alaska and Canada for several locally abundant Rocky Mountain Elk. The population grew to nearly 1,000 in the 1980s, when the government last tried to cull its numbers.
At that time, the goats’ behavior had caused vast disturbance in the areas they colonized. Not only do goats trample and gobble up rare alpine plants, they also wallow in the dirt to cool off, causing bald spots in the delicate meadows that let invasive plants get a foothold.
The government moved some of them to the Cascades then, and shot others. It reduced the population to “between zero and two” goats, and those that remained again proliferated. Today, wildlife biologists estimate that there are upwards of 725 mountain goats in Olympic Park and the surrounding area.
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