Elusive Animals Get Trappers’ Goat

A Southern California cowboy and his hired hands set out in high spirits after sunrise Friday to capture the last wild goats believed to roam the stony ridges and plunging valleys of Santa Catalina Island.

But soon the nine goats had the herders and their dogs in a dither. Those descendants of thousands of goats that have been destroying native plants and denuding hillsides since the Spanish conquest would go on eating Catalina for at least another day.

Seeing the animals was the easy part. No sooner had Ralph Lausten and his crew clambered several hundred feet down to the bottom of Swains Canyon just northwest of Avalon than two goats dashed through the gantlet of lassos and disappeared in a thick stand of Catalina cherry, prickly pear and scrub oak.

For the next five hours, the men--communicating with walkie-talkies--chased the animals up and down steep mountains, never getting closer than a few hundred feet from the brown and black shaggy goats. The half-dozen hounds, quietly trailing just behind with their noses to the ground, seemed to lose the scent again and again.

Lausten, 52, is legendary among island ecologists for having rid Santa Cruz Island of its cows and 6,000 sheep a decade ago. So he was not going to give up quickly. The roundup was expected to take several days.

Stopping to swig from a water bottle and catch his breath, the tall, lanky cowboy mused, “We can see ‘em. We can smell ‘em. They’ve got to make a mistake sometime. When they do we’ll take advantage of it.” With that, he strode back into the dense brush just behind his hounds.

The goat roundup marks “a momentous event that snaps this island into a new phase of recovery,” said Deb Jensen, director of education for the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy, the nonprofit agency that owns 86% of the island, 22 miles off the coast.

The conservancy hired Lausten and his crew to remove the goats quickly and safely for transport to a new home on the mainland, which officials declined to identify.

“For decades, we’ve been losing species and topsoil on intensively overgrazed and overused land,” Jensen said. “Removing the goats relieves the island of one of its primary stressors.”

The hardy, prolific and remarkably adaptive goats have thrived on the island since members of a domestic breed were turned loose by Spanish missionaries in the 1820s. By the 1970s, they numbered in the tens of thousands, munching everything that grows with no predators to thin the herds.

On an island that evolved for most of its history without herbivores larger than ground squirrels, a unique array of delicate, thornless shrubs and grasses became what biologists euphemistically refer to as “ice cream plants to goats.”

But over the decades, the animals also became an integral part of the culture of the island. Growing up in Catalina during the Great Depression, old timers say, meant going out with one’s father to hunt goats that have left the mountainous island crosshatched with trails.

Initial eradication efforts, including shootings, began four decades ago, sparking anger and resentment among animal activists and residents for whom feral goats and pigs were part of local history.

But environmental groups such as the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and the conservancy, which operates under a mandate to restore the island to its natural state, insisted that the animals had to be removed if the almost defeated ecosystems are to recuperate.

Tensions between animal activists and ecologists stretched to the breaking point in the early 1990s, when about 6,000 goats were hunted and killed by helicopter-borne sharpshooters.

Recoiling from the negative publicity, island caretakers approved a series of capture programs led by herders hired to snare the remaining animals with lassos, or even grab them with bare hands. Some of those efforts were failures, with nearly all of the stressed goats dying quickly after capture.

In 1999, one capture collected 120 wild goats that were shipped to Long Beach in a World War II-era landing craft, then loaded into cattle cars and trucked north to a Bay Area goat sanctuary. There they are being used to clear hillsides of fire-fueling brush.

The goats remaining on Catalina are confined to the east end of the island; two roam the woodlands above a rock quarry, four find refuge in the rugged canyons northwest of Avalon, and three live on the edges of sheer cliffs plunging into the ocean southwest of the city.

Friday’s assault on the goats began with Lausten’s group loading up at a wilderness base camp and taking two jeeps and a truck to rugged Swains Canyon. The strategy was: Spot a goat, send in dogs to hold it at bay, then grab or lasso the animal, carry it back to portable dog kennels in the vehicles. Lausten’s wife, Susan, helped monitor the goats’ movement from a ridge top with binoculars.

But by sundown, they were empty-handed and called it quits for the day, aiming to return early this morning.

As his dogs panted hard, Lausten conceded, “Well, boys, we got our butts kicked by the goats today.”

Meanwhile, the capture attempt continued to provoke debate.

Bruce Moore, who was born and raised on Catalina Island, said, “most people feel a great deal of sympathy for the goats.”

“It was exhilarating to run into goat herds out on a mountain trail,” he recalled. “But I’ve also seen huge oak trees seemingly standing on their tippy toes because 15-feet of denuded topsoil had been washed away from their roots.”

The bottom line is his loyalty to the island: “Those animals don’t belong here.”

Russ Armstrong, who owns a popular Avalon restaurant, disagreed.

“It used to be a thrill to glide over a ridge on a bike and see hundreds of goats in the valley below,” he said. “I’ll miss them. They’re not native to Catalina but, hey, I’m not either.”

With only a few goats left, the recovery of native plants and grasses is well underway.

The bush poppy, a shrub with bright yellow flowers that was hard to find only a few years ago, now grows almost everywhere. Toyon trees, which produce red berries that attract finches and mockingbirds, are thick on hillsides that were once so barren that children slid down them on cardboard.

“For the first time, I’m seeing wild hyacinth and Mariposa lilies outside of protective stands of cactus,” said conservancy naturalist Karen Gordon. “Those flowers are flashes of liberated nature that one day we hope to see island-wide.”

But there were nine goats to go.

“It may take a while, but we’ll get ‘em,” Lausten said. “We just have to figure ‘em out.”