Mountain goat
The white animal on the black cliff. It lives higher and steeper than anything else in these mountains, and it is the reason many of our guests come.
Oreamnos americanus
Built for the cliff.
- Weight
- Billies commonly 70 to 120 kg, nannies clearly lighter
- Horns
- Black, 20 to 30 cm, carried by both sexes for life
- Coat
- Dense double coat, shed in early summer, long again by fall
- Hooves
- Hard outer rim, soft gripping pad, made for wet rock
- Family
- Not a true goat, a relative of the chamois
- Age
- Often 10 years and more, read from the horn rings
Where it lives
Mountain goats stay close to what hunters call escape terrain: cliffs and broken rock where wolves and bears cannot follow. In summer they feed on alpine meadows a short run from the rock. In winter they move to wind-blown ridges or steep timbered faces where the snow does not hold.
On the Motase you find them from the first cliffs above the lakes up to the summits. You see them long before you can reach them.
Four seasons, one cliff.
Spring
Kids are born in late May and June on the steepest ledges. Within days they follow the nanny across the rock.
Summer
Nannies and kids gather in nursery groups. Billies keep to themselves. The winter coat comes off in rags.
Fall
The coat grows long and white again. In November the billies come down to the nannies for the rut.
Winter
The hardest months. Goats hold on small winter ranges and live on what the wind keeps free of snow.
The hardest call in the mountains.
Both carry horns. A billy's are heavier at the base and curve evenly, a nanny's are slimmer and hook near the tip. A billy is deeper in the chest, often alone and often stained from his bed. From a kilometre away, in poor light, none of this is easy. That is what the spotting scope and the patience are for.
How we hunt and watch them.
Goat herds grow slowly, and the nannies carry them. We take mature billies only, a few each season, within the quota the province sets. Guests who come without a rifle watch the same animals through the same scope from the cabin or the ridge. Either way the goat stays on its mountain undisturbed for most of the year.