“We use the mountain goat in a lot of our cultural events — songs and dances and stories.”
For thousands of years, members of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation in Canada have prized the mountain goats that roam the craggy peaks of British Columbia’s central coast.
Goats in Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory are thought to occur at lower densities than farther east in the goats’ range in the higher Rocky Mountains. But there has been “almost zero research” on British Columbia’s coastal mountain goats , until now, says Tyler Jessen, a conservation biologist at the University of Victoria in Canada.. Numbers of the animals do seem to have undergone a decline since the 1980s, the team reports March 8 in.
“One of the biggest challenges we have in science, especially with population trends, is that knowledge is primarily based on the length of the study, which can be extremely limited,” says Elizabeth Flesch, a wildlife geneticist at Montana State University in Bozeman who was not involved in the study.