Feed the goat and he will gnaw!

WHAT could have been a better start to the year last week than photographing some wild goats on a steep hillside with a background of snow capped hills?

There was a group of 10 goats slowly moving across the moorland seeking out what food they could, which seemed to be mainly grasses.

One goat obviously had taken a liking to the mosses and possibly bark on an old tree root and spent most of the time I was watching just gnawing away.

There was a mixture of billies, some quite old, and nannies. The difference after a certain age with goats is apparent as the billies have long curved horns, with those of one I was photographing about two feet long and very imposing.

The nannies had much shorter, although still curved, horns and the one at the tree stump had them only about eight inches long.

With the billies, the annual growth rings are fairly easy to count even from a distance. With the nannies, the rings are much closer together and more difficult to see and count.

The collective name for goats is a tribe although I find this confusing as the 10 I saw would scarcely have warranted such a grand name. Perhaps it refers to the goats as a whole in the strath and would include the other group I saw further along, of 18 individuals.

The goats, as is often the case, varied in colour from pale grey to black and white and one or two completely black. The billies and nannies are together now but soon they will separate when the nannies have their kids in February/March, irrespective of what the weather throws at them.

The last two winters have not been good for them, so let us just hope we do not have more bad weather to come in the next month or so.

The mortality is high for a variety of reasons. One is the weather, particularly heavy and prolonged rain, and there are also predators such as golden eagles and foxes. This leads to rigorous selection, so that only the strongest survive the elements and predation. In the long run this, it seems, is what matters for their survival.

Unfortunately people have a mixed reaction to wild goats, despite their often ancient lineage. In the last decade or so, for example, many landowners have turned against them.

This seems to be basically for two reasons. One is the fact that goats will eat almost anything and that means young trees, whether planted or natural regeneration. Another factor that seems to be very prevalent at present is the unfounded worry that goats will help the spread of ticks, which adversely affect red grouse stocks.

More than one Highland estate has decimated their wild goat tribes by over shooting. They claim an increase in red grouse stocks which is the capital interest syndrome. These estates tend to ignore that neighbouring estates who have not killed large numbers of goats but have had the same numbers of red grouse.

In one case, where an estate has refused to go down the route of heavy goat kills, the red grouse numbers are even larger in 2010 than the other estates. Nobody seems to listen about this.

So much misguided killing of goats has taken place in the last decade or so there is now real concern from some quarters as to their future.

There has been no comprehensive survey of goats since the late 1960s and it is long overdue. So I did wonder whether readers might help over this lack of information. We know that some tribes have long gone, like the one on Brin Cliff just south of Inverness. Others were shot out by the Forestry Commission when they planted ground many years ago.

But what has happened to many of the others? Are there, for example, any wild goats left on Munlochy Cliff near Inverness?

In contrast, a few years ago wild goats were released in one of the glens around Glen Affric and they appear to have survived, albeit in small numbers.

Others were released for sporting purposes near Beauly but have these died out?

Are there still goats at Loch Fleet on the Mound and are they still just south west of Ullapool and on the hills near Dundonnell? The tribe on Inverpolly were shot out years ago but are there any north of that area?

What about the Fort William area and the Ardamurchan peninsular?

What has happened to those at Inverfarigaig and are there any still in the Western Isles at all?

If you know where wild goats are still to be found or, just as important, where they are now extinct, please contact me, preferably by e-mail on rvc@tesco.net. The sources of information will be kept confidential and the results included in a future column.

All white on the flight

THE record of the week is not, unfortunately, mine but came from a reader near Fort William. He e-mailed me a text and photograph of a white bird in his garden.

He suggested it could be a white chaffinch and this does seem to be the case.

I have seen white pheasants, white blackbirds and white carrion crows but never a white chaffinch, so it is a fascinating record.

Presumably, apart from the shape and size of the bird, the white chaffinch could be identified by the way it behaved compared with nearby normal chaffinches.

To see a white form of a bird is unusual but to get a good photograph, as the reader did, is even rarer.