Article by Allen Best
Wildlife – September 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
If tradition is served on the first weekend after Labor Day, 200 to 250 people will draw round their tents and RVs in a large meadow at the base of Mount Shavano. There they will play cribbage and croquet, toss tall tales and horseshoes, chow down on catered food and toast their glasses to the shaggy white mountain goats on high.
Every summer since 1966 such gatherings of goat enthusiasts, called a wadi, have been held at the base of Shavano. The organization is a local chapter, called a verd, of the International Order of Rocky Mountain Goats. To get in, you must be sponsored by an existing member, of which there are 1,400.
At a wadi, new members are called kids, and they are required to run errands for their elders, who are, naturally, called “old goats.”
But beyond the golf tournament, the silent auction, and everything else that makes this sound suspiciously similar to the gathering of your favorite non-profit organization, there is a point to these old goats. They admire — no, let’s make that stronger — they revere their namesake animal, the mountain goat. And it was here, near where the wadi is held each year, that in May 1948, eight mountain goats, with coal black eyes and long hair as white as the fading snow on the Angel of Shavano, wobbled their way onto the rocks after a 30-hour ride from Choteau, Montana. It was their first introduction into Colorado.
“RE-introduced,” Arch Andrews, correcting me, when I ask him about the wadi. As president of the Rocky Mountain Goats Foundation, Andrews is sensitive to how the goats are described, lest anybody misunderstand. “It’s a magnificent high country native species,” he explains — laying his already-deep voice hard into “native” — “that gets shafted from just about every other quarter.”
Andrews and some of the other old goats are feeling put upon these days.
After several years in which mountain goats basked in the light of native status, as decreed by the Colorado Wildlife Commission in 1993, there’s a new report out. Written by two professors associated with Colorado State University, this report concludes that no evidence exists that goats are native to Colorado. They believe the previous report, the one that caused Colorado wildlife commissioners to declare the goat native, took some Bob Beamon-style long jumps from facts to conclusions. Some individuals, even within the Colorado Division of Wildlife, would rather the state reverse itself, declaring the goat a non-native, thereby being pre-empted by other species, particularly bighorn sheep.
Goats do exist in Colorado, most notably in the above-treeline slopes of Shavano and neighboring mountains as well as on Mt. Evans, the Gore Range, and other sites. What difference does it make whether these goats are native?
In answering such questions, even in the realm of wildlife management, it’s useful to follow the money trail. The original research, which provoked the designation of native, was paid for by the Rocky Mountain Goats Foundation.
The new study, which finds that goats haven’t existed here for at least 200 years, was paid for by the National Park Service. Goats from the Mt. Evans herd have wandered north into Rocky Mountain National Park periodically, and Park Service biologists fret that the goats will spread disease among bighorn sheep and also compete for food. The concern is not one of prissiness. A presidential order, issued by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, directs management for native species.
Most of the rest of Colorado that is or could be favored by mountain goats is administered by the U.S. Forest Service. By memorandum of understanding, the state manages the wildlife and the feds manage the habitat.
If the goat persists as native, herds could spread and more hunting licenses could be issued. As is, there’s a four-year wait to pay a high price to hunt the animals. Even so, hunters only get one chance in a lifetime. If the state decides the goat isn’t native, wildlife authorities are unlikely to introduce goats into areas previously vacated by bighorn sheep, such as areas around Mt. of the Holy Cross.
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That’s what is at stake, now and in the future. But the future is premised by the past, which is why researchers have been studying reports and journals written in the nineteenth century by people who knew or at least purported to know Colorado wildlife.
It doesn’t help that people called the same animal different names. Worse yet, they used the name of other animals. For example, Lewis and Clark and their assistants called the Rocky Mountain goat a “mountain sheep,” a name also used when referring to bighorn sheep.
Goats have black horns, and sheep white horns, among other differences.
Compounding the confusion, Lewis and Clark originally called pronghorn antelope “goats” or “buck goats.” Others of the frontier likewise invented the taxonomy of wildlife as they went along. Further complicating the scenery was the introduction into Colorado of Angora goats.
The closest thing to hard evidence of mountain goats in Colorado is fossilized remains of an ancestor to the modern mountain goat which existed 350,000 years ago. More recently, fossilized remains that date to the last ice age of 30,000 or more years ago have been found in caves in Wyoming, near Laramie and Douglas. Farther north, in Montana and Idaho, mountain goats still abound, perhaps because of colder weather.
But what about Colorado? That was the focus of a study completed in 1993 by M. LaNette Irby, a graduate student at the University of Northern Colorado, and Alex Chappell, a Colorado Division of Wildlife employee then stationed in Summit County. In their report, they note mention of “goats” here and there among expedition reports, including that by Stephen Long in 1820.
Apparently, from his description, he was referring to a pronghorn antelope.
But in a book published in 1822, Baron Georges Cuvier described both bighorn sheep and mountain goats accurately, and had a drawing that was said to be modeled upon an animal killed in what is now Southern Colorado.
Another testament is drawn from the expedition of Lieutenant John W. Gunnison, which left the Arkansas River Valley to cross the San Luis Valley and then Gunnison Basin in 1853. Records of provisions include both bighorn rams and white goats. A letter from that survey speaks specifically of shooting some goats “on top of the mountains.”
There were more reports as Colorado was settled after the gold rush of 1859. But Irby and Chappell hypothesize that the goats were eventually wiped out, as so many other species were, by market hunters.
To stall the depletion of wildlife, the Colorado Legislature in 1887 banned the killing of bison, mountain sheep, and “ibex or Rocky Mountain goat” for a number of years. Ibex and Rocky Mountain goats were interchangeable terms, much like “bison and “buffalo.”
[Mountain goats in roofless Mt. Evans summit house]
Defenders of the goat as a Colorado native then go on to recite the writings of Theodore Roosevelt in two books. “They are found here and there on the highest and most inaccessible mountain peaks down even to Arizona and New Mexico…” he wrote. He went on to describe the experience of his guide, who had killed five white goats, the first near Cañon City, when he supposedly didn’t know what he had shot, and the others in the Northern Rockies, where the goats were in abundance.
Finally, there was the collection of Edwin Carter, who had immigrated in 1859 to Colorado, staking a placer claim in Leadville, but later turning to natural history and taxidermy. Eventually, he set up a museum in Breckenridge. A photograph from the time shows a stuffed Rocky Mountain goat standing in Carter’s museum of “Colorado faun.”
To this evidence, Arch Andrews, in an appendix given to the Colorado Wildlife Commission in 1893, further cites various books testifying to existence of mountain goats, and even a Denver Times report of 1900, that bemoaning the passing of the white mountain goats “almost as completely as the brown bison of the plains.”
But this mound of evidence was, in other eyes, inconclusive, maybe worse.
One of Colorado’s leading mammalogists, Dr. David Armstrong, reviewed the report and found it wanting. “What might have been an orderly and independent search for truth becomes instead a one-sided debate, a sort of special pleading,” he wrote in 1994. “Certainly the study is insufficiently objective to be used as a basis for either policy-making or scientific management,” he concluded.
A report completed in 2000 by John E. Gross, then a professor at Colorado State University, and Bruce A. Wunder, who remains a biology professor there, picked up where the first report left off — or perhaps in the eyes of goat defenders, tried to nit-pick. Goats may well have been native to Colorado, but the evidence so far was not credible.
Where the first reports had found books putting goats in Colorado, Wunder and Gross found books that did not. For example, the first book specifically listing all the mammals of Colorado was E.R. Warren’s Mammals of Colorado, published in 1910. It made no mention of goats. At that time, he had been studying Colorado wildlife for 28 years.
Instructive, perhaps, is the absence of mountain goat reports by A.D. Wilson and Franklin Rhoda, two of the chief topographers in the Hayden Surveys of 1873 to 1877. Although they mention grizzly bears and bighorn sheep in their climbs of the state’s highest peaks, they never mention goats.
Surveyors in the northern Rockies noted goats.
What about collections? None from Martha Maxwell, a self-trained naturalist and taxidermist who began collecting in 1868. As for the goats in Carter’s museum in Breckenridge, a letter found in the Archives of the Denver Museum of Natural History clearly points to an origin near Salmon City, Idaho, by Ben. S. Revett, better remembered today as the father of gold dredging at Breckenridge.
The Gunnison Expedition? Retracing the travel itinerary, Wunder found that the “white goats” that had been on a “high mountain” were probably pronghorn antelope shot somewhere along the lower Arkansas River. “Our supposition is that the broken hills of western Kansas and eastern Colorado could certainly have seemed to be mountains to troopers from the East, thus the statement that the “goats” were shot “on top of the mountain.”
As for Teddy Roosevelt, he was passing along hearsay. He also had a tendency to confuse animals. Visiting the Glenwood Springs area in 1901, he reported killing five “lynx cats,” repeating a solecism of the day. The animals, his guides confided later, were actually bobcats.
In their conclusion, Wunder and Gross argue that the “lack of evidence is compelling. … If goats had been in Colorado before 1948, we contend that unequivocal records of this would exist.”
But once again, who cares? What difference does it make whether the animals are native? After all, for most of Colorado’s first century of statehood, what mattered most to those who ordered the wildlife was the utility of the species. In this manner pheasants were introduced to the state’s prairie, while brook, rainbow, and brown trout were released into the mountain’s streams and lakes. The bird was considered fun to hunt, and the three non-native trout proved more prolific than the native greenback and cutthroat, which they have gradually been replacing. More recently, moose have been introduced deep into Colorado by state wildlife officials, beginning in 1978, despite the best evidence that moose only roved in Colorado occasionally.
Certainly, there was no debate when the goats from Montana were released near Mt. Shavano, described at the time by the Denver Post as “the wildest animals on the North American continent,” a tribute to their instinctive above-treeline clambering. Subsequent transplants that continued into 1971 brought another 43 goats into the San Juans, the Gore Range, and Mt. Evans — populations that have thrived and now spread to other parts of Colorado, wandering even onto the slopes around Rocky Mountain National Park.
At Rocky Mountain National Park, wildlife biologists have used computer modeling techniques to calculate the effect of mountain goats on terrain now the exclusive province of bighorn sheep, which are indisputably native to the park. Goats could cause a decline of 12 to 44 percent in bighorn sheep populations, or even a 47 percent decline if diseases are introduced. Other species, from elk to pikas, could also be affected.
Ken Czarnowski, of the National Park Service, says the policy is to “keep out exotic animals. If we do sight them, we will capture them and remove them, which we have done in the past.”
The Forest Service has a more flexible policy regarding introduced species.
The key is that they “have to be desired,” explains Peter McDonald, a wildlife biologist at the agency’s regional office in Golden. “that can be a pretty personal thing,” he notes. On the other hand, the Forest Service has been instructed to manage the forest for “long-term ecological integrity.” That’s easier said than done. “We’re in a constant mode of trying to understand how we manage for long-term sustainability.”
For example, the agency battles non-native plants such as Canadian thistle and yellow toadflax, which are crowding out other plants. But when it comes to mountain goats, wildlife biologists are not quite sure of the long-term implications. At any rate, says McDonald, it may be a moot point now. The goats seem to be well-established in Colorado.
Still, the agency’s biologists are keeping a wary eye. “We’re as much concerned by what we don’t know as what we do,” says Joan Friedlander, a public information officer. “There are a lot of examples where non-native animals appear to be harmoniously living in the environment, but it’s an assumption we need to test continuously in light of what we’re learning,” she says.
So, for now, the old goats and the kids at the wadi near Shavano can revel as much as they did 35 years ago when Salida writer Steve Frazee described the scene for the Denver Post. “Wadi, incidentally, is the name for a normally dry water course in northern Africa or in the Sinai. While the Old Goats use the name to designate their annual meeting, they have raised the humidity slightly to improve working conditions during their gatherings.”
Allen Best has edited several mountain newspapers and tries to find time to hike among the goats.
