Studies of mountain ungulates are relatively few compared to those on, for instance, deer and antelopes. The reasons lie largely in the combination of rugged terrain, severe climate, high altitude and/or latitude and difficult access, all of which complicate logistics, increase funding needs and demand high levels of effort to complete periods of field work. These issues have been successfully overcome in this welcome study, the first to deal in-depth with the North American mountain goat Oreamnos americanus (a rupicaprin, related to chamois, serow and goral, rather than a member of the genus Capra).
The authors, Festa-Bianchet, Chair of the IUCN/SSC Caprinae Specialist Group, and collaborator Côté, report the findings from the first 16 years of ongoing research carried out on Caw Ridge in Alberta, Canada. The two significant features of this study are its long-term nature and the reliance on marked individuals for data collection. It is one of only a few comparable studies on mountain ungulates and the first one carried out on a population in an area where the full suite of natural predators remains present.
The book is written in a clear style and is divided into 13 chapters. The first three introduce the background and aims, and describe the study area and methods used. The latter section candidly details the unexpected negative effects of capture and chemical immobilization on mountain goats and subsequent changes to the methodology. Eight chapters then detail the scientific results. Topics covered include reproduction, body and horn growth, population dynamics, predation, mortality, home range size, survival and dispersal, and population regulation. Each of these chapters has a short introduction and is followed by a concise, bullet-pointed summary of the main findings. Readability is further enhanced by grouping the results of statistical tests together at the end of each chapter. Chapter 12 draws conclusions from the results for management and conservation, particularly on harvest levels for trophy hunting programmes, providing an important applied focus. The final chapter summarises the benefits of long-term monitoring of marked individual animals and advances in ecology and conservation, and points the way to the future. The benefits of such long-term studies using marked individuals are convincingly expounded by the authors and are difficult to argue with. As the authors point out, the processes affecting population dynamics develop over many years and cannot be understood without monitoring over a comparable time scale, while variations among individuals can only be understood if those individuals can be recognized and followed over the long-term.
The results are a rich source of data and insights on mountain goats, with many lessons for other mountain ungulate studies. The main limitation is that the data relate only to the 4-month long summer period: severe cold, short daylight hours and deep snow in the study area presented logistical challenges too great even for this otherwise indefatigable team, although the current phase of the study is starting to rectify this aspect of the research. Nonetheless, this remains an impressive study, of interest to all those concerned with mountain ungulate and wider ungulate studies. One can only admire the determination and ingenuity employed to achieve these results and welcome the enlightened attitude of their main funding sources, who demonstrate a welcome contrast to the short-termism and early ‘project fatigue’ shown by many donors.
The book also integrates conclusions from comparable long-term studies on mountain ungulates—all conducted so far in North America and Europe. Perhaps a further benefit of this book will be to stimulate similar studies in Asia, where so many little-studied mountain ungulate taxa are distributed.
