Goats bring smiles to Glacier Park visitors

For hours on end in the summer of 2013, University of Montana graduate student Sarah Markegard sat near Glacier National Park’s Hidden Lake Overlook Trail and watched mountain goats.

She also watched the people, taking notes on her tablet, gauging the emotional response of visitors as they came upon the goats.

The resulting study found that goats living along the Hidden Lake Trail are remarkably tolerant of people, even though most human interactions were well within the 25-yard minimum viewing distance for wildlife set by the National Park Service.

Markegard found most human-goat interactions were 30 feet or less, and yet she could only recall one instance in more than 1,600 observations where a goat was aggressive toward a person. That goat chased a boy, she said.

“I expected more aggression, based on managers’ descriptions,” she said.

Good habitat

The Hidden Lake Overlook area is good goat habitat, with grassy meadows and nearby cliffs. But goats are also attracted to the area for salt, notably from human urine on the ground and sweat on the overlook railings.

The goats also seem to use people as protection against predators. When people are around — often hundreds of people — the likelihood of a predator attacking a goat is reduced, Markegard surmised.

“Perhaps they are trying to insert themselves into a larger ‘herd’ to decrease their chances of becoming food for a grizzly bear or mountain lion,” she said.

She classified 42 percent of human-goat interactions as “negative” — the most common being when a goat simply walked away from a person or became alert and stopped what it was doing to keep an eye on a person.

Goats fled from people about 1 percent of the time. The four most common goat behaviors were walking, foraging, being alert to humans and lying down.

Goats saw a lot of people along the popular trail. The average human-goat interaction involved seven people, and about 77 percent of interactions involved photography.

Park visitors often created negative situations. About 24 percent of the people left the trail to get a better look at the goats, and 18 percent approached the animals — both of which are highly discouraged by Park personnel. Markegard found that Park visitors didn’t feed goats, and goats didn’t look at people for food.

“I never saw them come up to people for food,” she said.

From an emotional standpoint, goats brought smiles to visitors’ faces. Markegard found that the most frequent emotional response to a person seeing a goat was first interest and then joy. Perhaps even more interesting was that when people saw a goat on cloudy days, they were more apt to be joyous about the encounter.

Happy faces

Markegard’s study is one of the first to gauge an emotional response by people to wildlife through observation. Previous studies have surveyed people after the fact, she said.

And how did the goats react to her as she sat taking notes? Aside from the first week or so, when it was snowy and few people were around, the goats ignored her, she said.

Markegard’s work is part of a larger study of visitor-use along the Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor. The Hidden Lake Overlook Trail is one of the most heavily used trails in Glacier Park, with more than a thousand hikers on a busy summer day.

Based on her observations, Markegard suggests the Park put up more signs to educate people about goats. She advocates educating people about goats before they get to the overlook, particularly between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. when most human-goat interactions take place. Currently, the interaction between Park staff and visitors is often tense.

“I didn’t see a whole lot of preventive education (by Park staff),” she said. “There was a lot of yelling, and it was really negative.”

More signs

Park personnel could encourage people to stay on the trail and educate them about dangers presented by goats and make it a more positive experience. She also suggests extending the boardwalk to the overlook. Currently the boardwalk stops about two-thirds of the way up the trail. Where there is a boardwalk, people have a tendency to stay on it, she said.

A separate goat population study at Logan Pass is still underway. More than 25 goats have been radio-collared, and their year-round behavior is being studied by UM biologist Joel Berger and graduate student Wesley Sarmento.

Preliminary data from the Berger-Sarmento study indicates that Logan Pass goats stray much farther from the safety of cliffs than the Park’s more wild goats, which don’t see nearly as many people. Berger and Sarmento’s study is expected to last through 2016.

Markegard said she, too, wanted to compare Logan Pass goats to other goats in the Park, but was limited by funding. She now works as a seasonal bear management technician in Rocky Mountain National Park.

A draft version of the Going-to-the-Sun Road Corridor Management Plan could be released by the end of the year.