5 COUNT: 5 Mobile Mountaineers

THE DALLES, Ore.—Oreamnos americanus, it turns out, can be anything but just another alpine homebody.

Take the billy that showed up in the middle of a wheat farmer’s field in North-central Oregon one day.

“If I hadn’t seen pictures or heard about another one,” the farmer told Keith Kohl, an Oregon state wildlife biologist based in The Dalles, “I wouldn’t have known what it was.”

Next the goat checked in at Macks Canyon on the lower Deschutes, and, when last seen in August, he was hunkered down near the river’s mouth eyeing anglers. As the story goes, one fisherman shouted to another standing across the river, “Hey, look behind you!”

And no, we’re not talking about some poor farmer’s escaped and possibly randy goat behind the guy. We’re talking about one of those white fluffballs.

“A mountain goat is 15 yards behind him,” recalls Kohl, who was told the story by Bill Monroe of The Oregonian. “So there’s a picture of a guy taking a picture of a goat.”

All along the banks of decidedly nonmountain goat habitat approximately 135 air miles west-northwest of the species’ Elkhorn Mountains stronghold.

ANOTHER GOAT WAS SPOTTED in –  of all places – an onion field southeast of the Elkhorns near Ontario last fall, and Kohl recalls the tale of a third bizarro billy that has gone even further.

WHO KNOWS WHERE THIS GOAT WILL END UP. IT WAS BORN IN OREGON'S ELKHORNS, EMIGRATED TO THE DALLES, AND WAS LAST SPOTTED IN WASHINGTON'S SOUTHERN CASCADES. (KEITH KOHL, ODFW)

“In September 2006 we got a report of a mountain goat at River Mile 38 on the John Day. A guy came into the office with a digi cam. He’d taken a picture of it on his property. ‘Is it still there?’ I asked. ‘Yeah.’ We went out and got to within 100 yards of it. The landowner said it had been there about a week.”

Next, it turned up in a cement culvert beside a paved road in Sherman County, where Kohl stuck it with a dart, but apparently not in the right spot.

Then the yearling billy ran off to The Dalles. When it was spotted in an equipment yard on December 26, Kohl managed to hit the right spot and slapped a radio collar on it.

So of course the mountain goat decided to hold tight almost a year, bouncing around the cliffs along I-84 near Browns Island, “playing tag” with semi-trucks and cars from time to time.

It wasn’t till fall 2007, as the rut came on, that it decided to turn its furry back on the Beaver State.

As Kohl drove up Washington’s Klickitat one November day with a receiver, he got a signal.  “Just out of Lyle, ‘beep, beep, beep.’ ‘That’s gotta be someone’s fish with a radio in it,’ I thought.”

Turned out it was the goat.

It’s since moved all the way upriver to the slopes of Mt. Adams where it presently lives.

THAT’S WHERE YOU’LL also find our fourth explorer, a Carl Lewis of a mountain goat that one day decided to strike across a vast gulf of flat forest on the northwestern edge of the Yakama Reservation.

“There are a lot of jokes about it standing on the edge of the Goat Rocks Wilderness, looking around and saying, ‘That looks like goat habitat,’ and sprinting” for Mt. Adams, says Dr. Scott McCorquodale, a state Department of Fish & Wildlife deer and elk specialist in Yakima.

Cliff Rice, another reseacher at the agency, recalls another unusual wanderer (see graphic).

“We collared him near Basin Lake east of Crystal Mountain Ski Area and it went east out to Fifes Peak, turned around, went back south of its previous area south of Crystal to the east slopes of Mt. Rainier. Then down to Ohanapecosh, Stevens Canyon and the Tatoosh Range,” he says.

GPS COLLARS ALLOW BIOLOGISTS TO TRACK DAILY MOVEMENTS OF BIG-GAME CRITTERS. (WDFW)

SO WHAT IN THE hell are these animals thinking?

Why are they leaving their cozy upland homes, walking across terra ingoatnito, confusing farmers and semitruck drivers, crossing huge rivers and climbing volcanos?

Well, perhaps it’s not so mysterious if, say, your last name is Vancouver, Lewis, Clark or Thompson.

“That’s what males of every species do, they seek out new territories,” says Kohl.

McCorquodale agrees. “The young males are just prone to dispersal. Probably it’s to maintain gene pools. But they will suffer higher mortality as a whole. Females don’t tend to do it as much. They tend to inherit their home range from their mom.”

Rice estimates there are between 2,401 and 3,184 mountain goats in Washington (25 percent of which occur in the three national parks).

Sixteen hunting permits were given out for this fall’s season, 11 in Oregon.

Oregon’s herd took form in 1950 when five goats were transplanted from Washington’s Mt. Chopaka. Today there are 800 or so, 300 of which live in the Elkhorns.

Or were. Perhaps the next Onion Boy, Deschutes Dude or Gulliver has already bailed out of there. –Andy Walgamott

5 More Weird Wanderers

A bear nicknamed “Urban Phantom” and a young cougar both made news this spring and summer when they found themselves in a park less than 4 air miles from Seattle’s busy Pike Place Market. They came in from Snohomish and King County’s woods, not far as the crow flies.

But some Northwest predators do make pretty good jaunts. Case in point, the big cat that was collared in the Thorpe, Wash., area, released then disappeared. The GPS device was thought to have malfunctioned, but a year and a half later, a hunter came in with it and the cat.

“We got a call, ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s on this collar!’” recalls WDFW’s Scott McCorquodale. “It had traveled all the way down to just above the Columbia River, stayed there awhile then walked back to Oak Creek Wildlife Area,” covering some 175-plus air miles.

Females don’t always stick around the homestead either. WDFW ungulate researcher Woody Myers says that a cow moose captured in Spokane and moved 20 miles northeast of town showed up the next year 175 miles south, outside Riggins, Idaho, where it was unfortunately road-killed.

McCorquodale notes that during a study of Klickitat County mule deer, one doe tagged above the Columbia at Rock Creek, well east of Highway 97, went all the way to the west side of Mt. Adams, a distance of nearly 80 air miles.

And he adds, “One of the L.T. Murray (Wildlife Area) cows repeatedly went to the upper Green River on the Westside.”

But unlike the Blue Mountains yearling bulls that have dispersed from Washington to Idaho, the doe and cow were migrators, making those trips several years in a row.

THEN THERE’S THE UNUSUAL CASE of 05LO25. Oregon biologists are still puzzled by what this bighorn ram is up to.

It first was captured on winter range at the northern end of the rugged Wallowas in December 2005 when it was 11⁄2 years, and found again there the following December.

“After that he disappeared,” says Roblyn Stitt, a wildlife tech with ODFW’s Hells Canyon Initiative in Enterprise. “He was not located again until by fluke, he was seen in the main Eagle drainage on the southern end of the Wallowa Mountains on March 17, 2007 with two yearling rams. They had crossed the ridges and peaks of the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the dead of winter!”

"I WONDER WHAT'S OVER THERE," BIGHORN RAM 05LO25 (THIRD FROM LEFT) SEEMS TO BE SAYING. (ODFW)

For good measure, they crossed back over the range, reporting into their northern range two months later.

“Why did he do it? We haven’t figured that out,” says Stitt.  “But not too surprisingly our itchy-footed bighorn ram was missing on the most recent telemetry flight. We are confident he will show up soon, but where will it be?” –A.W.

Goat-lickin’ Good

When Cliff Rice wasn’t, well, clamboring around cliffs during five years spent studying mountain goats in Washington’s Cascades, you could find him behind a desk creating two- and three-dimensional maps of their movements.

His data, based off GPS collars, revealed a not-well-understood reason behind some of the species’  movements: mineral licks. While some goats hung close to these sources of mainly sodium, but also calcium and potassium, a couple traveled up to 20 air miles, crossing some incredibly rugged terrain in surprisingly fast marches.

One important lick can be found at Gamma Ridge, high on Glacier Peak’s northeast side. Rice’s maps show how it was visited by a pair of goats, 033GPF and 053GPF.

On June 29, 2006, the latter nannie headed out from Gamma, crossed east over the Cascade Crest and strode well down Chelan County’s Napeequa River in just four days. But the call of salt turned ol’ 053 in early July and she climbed up onto the knifebacked White Mountains and began to make another dash back towards the lick. However, in the high country, she hemmed and hawed for half a week before striking over Clark and Ten Peak mountains in a single day. Then, for 10 days, she repeatedly crossed and recrossed snowfields to access the lick. By early August, she’d pickled her tongue, recrossed the crest and returned to the low country of the upper Napeequa. –A.W.