RUNNING OUT OF MOUNTAINTOP
As big as a black bear, scaling steep cliff faces on teeny-tiny hooves, mountain goats are usually unseen specks on distant mountainsides, but climate change coupled with human encroachment on their territory has parks officials concerned a human-goat showdown is inevitable.
words: Andrew Findlay Mountain goats are the ultimate masters of the vertical world. These shaggy, white-coated animals are skilled climbers that can balance on a spot no bigger than a loonie. An adult mountain goat can weigh between 80 and 100 kilograms—as much as a black bear—and their gymnastic ability to scale a mountainside can be breathtaking. But when push comes to shove, these alpine ungulates can be as lethal as they are beautiful. Last September, at the start of the Labour Day long weekend, a couple of hikers in Yoho National Park discovered a dead grizzly near the Burgess Pass trail. They wisely retreated to the parking lot, not knowing whether there was another bear lurking in the area—adult male grizzlies have been known to attack and kill younger males in territorial displays of aggression. Once back in cell range, the hikers notified Parks Canada. A team was immediately dispatched to investigate the scene. It was a busy holiday weekend in the mountains, and a carcass on the side of a trail could be a dangerous attractant for other wildlife. Wardens slung the dead bear to a parks compound near Field. Over the next few days, with the help of University of Calgary researchers, Parks Canada conducted a forensic necropsy to determine the cause of death. The results were surprising, says David Laskin, a Parks Canada environmental scientist based in Banff—puncture wounds on the bear’s neck and armpits led to the ruling of death by mountain goat horn.
Mountain goats in the Lewis Range, Glacier National Park, MT.
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STEVEN GNAM
It was a first for Laskin, and a rare example of just how deadly mountain goats can be if backed into a corner. Knowing the predatory behavior of grizzlies and the defensive strategies of goats enabled Laskin and his fellow scientists to recreate what went down on Burgess Pass that day last fall. Bears attack prey from behind by locking onto an animal’s head and shoulders. “The goat’s reaction would have been to thrust its head back with its very sharp horns,” Laskin explains. In the case of the grizzly-goat encounter in Yoho, the bear took numerous hits from the horns, one that punctured its lung and another that went through its lower jaw before piercing its brain. The details are gruesome, but that’s life in the wilderness. “It was intriguing for sure. We know goats are capable of this sort of behavior and had heard reports, but we had never encountered it before in the park. There are always interesting things like this happening in nature, but we’re not often privy to them,” says Laskin, who works on wildlife research and wildlife-human conflict mitigation in the four Rocky Mountain parks: Banff, Jasper, Kootenay and Yoho. It turned out to be as intriguing for the general public as it was for scientists. Laskin says the Yoho goat-versus-grizzly story went viral, well beyond Canada’s borders, and he welcomes the surge of interest in mountain goats, an animal that Parks Canada considers an indicator species—a species that demonstrates how an ecosystem is faring— because of its unique ability to occupy a harsh and uncompromising alpine ecological niche.
