It all started with mountain goats

This photo, on my office wall for most of the past 3 decades, captures a moment that shaped my career and changed my life. After my freshman year at NC State University (NCSU), intent on becoming a wildlife veterinarian, I decided to go on student exchange the next year to University of Idaho, where I fell headlong in love with the western US. That led me to a summer biological field intern program in Olympic National Park (nestled in the mountains on the home page). And that's how at age 19 found myself roaming the remarkable wild peaks springing directly from the waters of the Pacific ocean and Puget Sound, and participating in my first wildlife study.

    Mountain goats were introduced (as a species to hunt) to the Olympic Peninsula in the early 1900’s, before the Park was created. As the mountain goats prospered in what became Olympic National Park they swarmed the fragile alpine meadows with high impact foraging and wallows in the soil. Multiple plant species, unique to the Park and defenseless against such mass disturbance, were declining precipitously. The National Park Service had to choose between acting to remove a charismatic introduced species wreaking on the high elevation ecosystem, versus no action which would harm the native plants being hammered by the goats.

       When I arrived summer 1981 the Park was in the 2^nd year of a plan to live capture mountain goats and move them to other mountainous areas elsewhere in their range. My job, a dream assignment really, was to roam the snowfields and rocky slopes and sheer drop-off of the highest peaks with binoculars and record info on every goat I saw. And to help the biologists catch, mark, and remove goats to help guide science-based decision-making on the goat’s population trend and effects of the removals.

      How do you catch and mark a wild mountain goat carrying deadly sharp pointed horns and the strength of a bonafide mountain climber? For me and the other fearless young field hands, the most adventurous technique involved peeing inside and around a lasso loop laid on the trail, then hiding behind a boulder holding the other end of the rope. Mountain goats in early summer are often nutrient starved and seek salt; often they paw and scrape soil on and beside trails where people had urinated. The idea was to pull the loop tight as the goat stepped into it, hang on to the bucking goat, wrestle it to the ground, cover the horns with garden hose, hobble its legs, and place an ear tag.

     More often I accompanied the park biologist with a tranquilizer dart gun on a sneak up on a grazing goat. When his dart hit the mark my job was to follow the goat, often along cliff edges, until the tranqulizer kicked in and the goat laid down. At that point, we could place the ear tag and maybe collect a blood sample. For goats slated to be removed, I got to cling to the cliff as the tranquilizer wore off, hoping that it wouldn’t thrash too much as the helicopter dropped the cable with a sling that I wrapped around the goat, rotor wash blasting, for transport to the processing area.

      But what we did the most was what this picture shows. We’d suspend a giant net over big salt blocks and when the goat(s) wandered in we’d collapse the net and dash in to carry out the hose-on-horn, hobble-leg procedures to prep them for transport.

      On one such adventure the clouds descended into a multi-day whiteout. The exposed drop-offs and lack of visibility made it too dangerous to leave camp for the net area. So we slept late in our tents and chatted through the day. Some veterinarians were with us, and because they and their gear came to camp by helicopter (while us field techs embraced the badge of honor of backpacking the 15 miles), they had wine and whiskey to share.

         Those discussions, the fog tight around us, illuminated my direction in life. The veterinarians mostly talked about how much they wished they could do more of what we were doing here, but instead they had to run the vet office and euthanize and spay domestic animals or maybe zoo animals. Meanwhile, the park biologists talked about their job studying wild animals in places like this.

         And so, when that kid in the picture went back to NCSU for his junior year, he changed his major and set his sights on being a professional field biologist committed to developing science that helps wildlife thrive on a human-dominated planet. And he carried with him the Olympic mountains, where he would return between his MS and PhD degrees to lead research on spotted owls, then again as a university professor to study coyotes and marmots. And eventually, to build a new life.