Invasive Mtn Goats in GTNP have to go

In the end what we will have is a struggling bighorn herd on the Tetons that has not to this point contracted anything from the goats that migrated there. There is a good chance one day the sheep won't be there at all. The Whiskey Mountain herd near Dubois is slowly dying off and no mountain goats even exist there.

Not enough evidence here to convince me sheep and goats would bump noses and the sheep will die. What a shame...
 
You covered the current mountain goat issues incredibly well, theat, thank you! From funding, to disease, to lack of knowledge, reduction in habitat, native herds vs non native transplants, and goats vs wild sheep. Lot of complicating factors to deal with here.

One example of of difficulties in finding suitable transplant sites that involved wild sheep in Montana was the Lewis and Clark Cavern proposal. One of the larger landowners in the area objected and that put an end to that idea. Don't recall if he had public land grazing permits or just private deeded acres in that particular instance.

No matter what, our wildlife officials have a lot of obstacles in their way when it comes to managing wild sheep and mountain goats.

Thanks for what you do to help theat!
 
I have been told by a pretty respected bio that the goats are the dominant animal and will crowd out sheep and push them off of their food. Goats have a wider range of food options than sheep. For example, when sheep get pushed off their grassy ledge into a conifer patch, they struggle to find food.

This conversation was not about the Tetons. It was just about sheep/goats in general.
 
MTGomer said:
I have been told by a pretty respected bio that the goats are the dominant animal and will crowd out sheep and push them off of their food. Goats have a wider range of food options than sheep. For example, when sheep get pushed off their grassy ledge into a conifer patch, they struggle to find food.

This conversation was not about the Tetons. It was just about sheep/goats in general.
Click to expand...

Then how do goats and sheep in Montana that were both native and have lived there for oh, a couple thousand years minimum, both do so well (Rocky Mountain Front/Scapegoat/Bob Marshall, Sapphire range, Bitterroots)?

How is it that goats and sheep live in the same country in Canada and Alaska?

I think there's been some tremendous pressure put on biologists to favor bighorns over goats and it is reflected in funding, and what biologists "think".

If you want to really dive into the biology of goats ask the "respected bio's" in Montana how come they've lost a vast majority of the native goat herds in Montana. Fair question would also be to ask them why they've over-hunted those native populations in spite of over whelming science regarding how hunting impacts native goat populations.

Montana should have scooped up those teton goats and supplemented the native goat herds they've wiped out over the last 40 years...
 
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MTGomer said:
I have been told by a pretty respected bio that the goats are the dominant animal and will crowd out sheep and push them off of their food. Goats have a wider range of food options than sheep. For example, when sheep get pushed off their grassy ledge into a conifer patch, they struggle to find food.

This conversation was not about the Tetons. It was just about sheep/goats in general.
Click to expand...
This rings very true which is why I am in question of why they would want to try and establish a Bighorn sheep herd in such a small island mountain range like the Bridgers.
 
Here is a good article that sums up much the transplanting bighorn sheep issues we face. Mountain goats face similar issues.

missoulian.com

On the bighorns of a dilemma: Montana wild sheep plan draws fire

Repeatedly stifled in efforts to transplant bighorn sheep in new locations in Montana over the past few years, the state’s wildlife commission chairman said it may be time to rethink
missoulian.com missoulian.com
 
BuzzH said:
Then how do goats and sheep in Montana that were both native and have lived there for oh, a couple thousand years minimum, both do so well (Rocky Mountain Front/Scapegoat/Bob Marshall, Sapphire range, Bitterroots)?

How is it that goats and sheep live in the same country in Canada and Alaska?

I think there's been some tremendous pressure put on biologists to favor bighorns over goats and it is reflected in funding, and what biologists "think".
Click to expand...
I don’t think it’s a stretch for one species to be dominant over the other yet still live in the same range.
elk and bison are dominant over mule deer for example. That is probably a bad example, because mule deer eat a lot of things that elk aren’t that interested in.
Would whether sheep/goat overlap is an issue or not depend on habitat and winter range size/quality?
If sheep have 10s of thousands of acres of low elevation winter range, I imagine they’d be less impacted by sharing habitat than sheep that winter on the same 20 acre piece of high elevation wind blown plateau all winter, every winter.
I don’t know if this is the situation in the Tetons, like I said that conversation wasn’t about the Tetons. I know nothing about where the Teton sheep winter.

Either way, I’m not supportive of killing goats with helicopters until we can do the same to domestic sheep and feral horses.
 
Here are links to articles on WGF calling for the cancellation of the aerial gunning:

Game and Fish Commission Passes Resolution on Grand Teton Mountain Goat Removal | Wyoming Game & Fish Department

The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission condemned the National Park Service’s planned use of aerial gunning to remove mountain goats in Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) at their Jan. 15 meeting.
wgfd.wyo.gov

Interestingly, an article from the Idaho State Journal on the same subject:

www.idahostatejournal.com

PETA, others urge park to rethink using helicopter gunners to kill goats

The planned mountain goat killing operation in Grand Teton National Park literally never got off the ground because of poor weather.
www.idahostatejournal.com www.idahostatejournal.com
 
i dont know the number of goats there but why isnt there talk of moving them like we did in wa 70 plus goats
 
I wish they would just kill all the goats and get it over with. We remove non-native species all the time to benefit native species. The only reason a handful of hunters have risen such a stink over the operation is because they want a goat to pin it on their wall. We should remove every threat to those bighorns, however small, I don't care if they have to kill every mtn goat or back country skier to do it.
 
MTTW said:
We should remove every threat to those bighorns,...
Click to expand...
I think that it's more a problem with the Park Service and their "keep it natural" attitude than it is an actual problem of goats and sheep competing for food.
In the late '70s until the mid '90s I would make several trips into Yellowstone NP each winter to see and photograph the bighorn sheep on their winter ranges on McMinn (sp?) Bench just south of Gardiner, MT and on the slopes just west of the confluence of Pebble Creek and the Lamar River in Yellowstone NP.

Thirty or so years ago the sheep on McMinn Bench were just about wiped out from an epidemic of "pink eye" that they contracted from the domestic sheep on the CUT ranch just northwest of Gardiner. The Park Service refused help from a sportsmen's group that volunteered to help trap and medicate the diseased bighorn sheep. The Park said it was a "natural" disease and that it should naturally run its course. The Park's solution was to put signs up along the road that read "No Admittance, Bighorn Sheep Management Area".

When the Park was preparing to introduce wolves into Yellowstone, one of the Park biologists said that wolves would not be a threat to the Bighorn sheep as "the sheep inhabited the steep, rocky cliffs where the wolves couldn't go". Total BS! I have pictures of a friend and myself sitting on the flat ground of the McMinn Bench sheep wintering area and a ewe walked up to me and sniffed my hand, and a ram walked up to within a few feet of me. Those sheep are extremely easy prey from wolves there.

Its also been many years since I've seen a sheep in the Pebble Creek area of Yellowstone NP. For the past 10 or so years the Park has posted this area as "No Admittance, Wolf Denning area.

For over 40 years and as recently as last summer I have enjoyed viewing mountain goats on Baronet Peak in Yellowstone NP, west of Cooke City. These goats are in the rocky cliffs where the wolves won't go, and I've never seen a Bighorn sheep near there. However this is another mountain goat herd that the Park Service has proposed to kill because the goats there "are not native, they moved in from the Beartooth Mountains in Montana", just north of there.

Like others have posted, there are plenty of mountain ranges in Montana that support healthy populations of both bighorn sheep and mountain goats.

I have hunted Bighorn sheep in at least 5 of the Montana Unlimited Bighorn sheep units (some are no longer Unlimited), and I shot a Mountain goat in one of those units. While hunting sheep, I have seen Mountain goats in several of the units, and one time I saw goats and sheep within several hundred yards of each other. Other than on the winter range, there is no shortage of food for either the Bighorn sheep or the Mountain goats. I have never seen Bighorn sheep and Mountain goats of the same winter range.
 
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