Mountain Goat
With their shaggy white wool coats and black horns, mountain goats are distinctive residents of the high mountain peaks of Colorado.
About This Species
The mountain goat, like the moose, was introduced deliberately to Colorado, to expand hunting opportunities. The first such introduction was in 1947, when 14 goats were imported from Montana and released in the Collegiate Range. Later, additional mountain goats were obtained from Idaho, South Dakota (from the introduced herd in the Black Hills), and British Columbia.
In 1993 the Colorado Wildlife Commission proclaimed the mountain goat a native species. However, most professional biologists doubt that the animals ever occurred in Colorado naturally. Some early travelers reported goats in Colorado, but none of those reports is absolutely reliable. Side-by-side, mountain goats and bighorn sheep look very different, but from a distance a person might mistake a bighorn female for a goat, because bighorn ewes have prominent, gently curved horns. Even today, visitors to Colorado’s high country often identify bighorn sheep as “mountain goats.” A bone from an extinct species of mountain goat was found in fossil deposits about 800,000 years old in Porcupine Cave, South Park.
Colorado provides license to hunt Mountain goats through the primary limited license draw. These licenses provide hunters a challenging and rewarding opportunity to hunt this beautiful species.
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Physical Characteristics
With their shaggy white wool coats and black horns, these are beautiful and distinctive animals. Billies range to five feet long and weigh up to 250 pounds; nannies are somewhat smaller. Both sexes have sharp, black horns, six to 12 inches long.
Range
Primarily found on the high peaks in the center of Colorado, they can also be found in the San Juan mountain range.
Habitat
They mostly stay in their high mountain range year around, seldom going below treeline, except in severe winter weather.
Diet
Mountain goats eat grasses, mosses, lichens, and some shrubbery. They tend to eat more broad-leafed plants than do bighorn sheep.
Reproduction
Kids are born in May or June after a gestation period of about six months. Twins occur in about a quarter of all births. Typically half of a local population is made up of yearlings. Because of the mountain goat’s inaccessible habitat, mountain lions are one of their few predators.