State Agency Puts Goat Hunters In No-Win Situation

Michael O’Neil won’t get his goat this year. The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission got it.

Initially, the bowhunter from Nine Mile Falls was elated to draw one of Washington’s rare mountain goat permits.

Bowhunting for mountain goats requires tremendous determination and endurance. Yet more than 2,900 hunters applied for the 126 goat permits offered by the state this year.

For 10 years, O’Neil had fruitlessly filed his application for one of the coveted tags.

This year, his number came up. He drew one of 25 permits offered for the Quilcene Unit, which is in the Olympic National Forest adjacent to Olympic National Park.

So what’s he bleating about?

The goats are gone, and the Fish and Wildlife commissioners knew it when they authorized 25 permits for the last spring.

False advertising, pure and simple.

But O’Neil wouldn’t have known this if it weren’t for Allen Rasmussen, a retired wildlife agent who has done goat surveys in the Quilcene unit for 20 years.

Since Olympic Park officials began the eradication of mountain goats within the park several years ago, the number of goats outside the park has plummeted, too, Rasmussen said.

Park officials say native plants, which the park is designed to protect, are being destroyed by goats, which apparently are not indigenous to the area.

The park’s controversial program to capture or kill goats within the park has caused great head-butting between West Side plant advocates and those who like to see mountain goats moping around eating junk food left by park visitors.

Meanwhile, hunters outside the park have felt the program’s impacts. In 1993, only four of the 25 Quilcene goat hunters filled their tags. Last year, only one of 25 tags was filled.

No wonder. In the Fish and Wildlife Department’s July 1994 field survey of the area, only one goat was found in the unit.

This year, none was found in the unit, but the commission decided to issue 25 permits anyway.

Rasmussen was so incensed, he wrote a letter to each of the permit holders, telling them of the injustice done at their expense.

“I feel as though I’ve been sold down the river,” O’Neil said.

Dr. James Walton, commissioner from Port Angeles, told the Tacoma News-Tribune that he supported keeping the number of permits the same as in previous years even though the goats had vanished.

“We didn’t want to send a signal to anybody either way because we’re right in the middle of finding out what’s going on and whether we should support the extermination of the goats or not,” he said.

This middle-of-the-fence philosophy either should have been explained to hunters in the hunting regulations pamphlet, or the hunt should have been put on hold for the year.

Meanwhile, with more scapegoats than mountain goats in the Quilcene this fall, O’Neil’s going to stay home.

“The cost of the permit isn’t what bothers me, even though I don’t just go around throwing away $60” O’Neil said.

“But I’ve been putting in for a goat permit for 10 years and when I finally got one, it’s for an area where there’s no real chance to get a goat. The worst part is that now I can’t even apply for another goat permit for five years.”

Working marshes: Wetlands aren’t good just for ducks.

A 6-acre experimental plot of reclaimed wetland has reduced by 99 percent the pollutants from a 410-acre northern Illinois watershed, a study has found.

Taken with other results from marshes on the site, “the findings made possible a startling calculation,” the New York Times reports. Donald Hey, a hydrologist with the Des Plaines River Wetlands Restoration Project, estimated that the Mississippi River could have been kept in its banks in the 1993 floods if 3 percent of the upper watershed were restored to three-foot deep marshes.

According to Nancy Philippi, a private consultant who co-wrote a paper with Hey in the journal “Restoration Ecology,” there is already 13 million acres of idle agricultural land, which means the idea of distributing wetlands throughout the watershed “is not impossible, unreasonable or even expensive.”

It might even work in the Palouse.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review