Montana Goat scouting/inventorying

[sacountry]

Hiked into their living room this weekend, but not quite close enough to be able to definitively identify and age the Billies. So here's a question for this group. If Billies tend to travel in bachelor groups until the rut, if I'm seeing Kids should I be scouting in other areas or would you stay focused on this area. The biologist indicated there to be roughly 50 head of goats in my district so I'm seeing a little less than half of that number in this one spot. Thoughts?

Here's a couple of videos....
Goats #1
Goats #2
Goats #3....about 7 minutes long, but fun to watch 9 goats moving around

A few short videos from the hike I didn't want to do several weeks ago....
How to recruit goat hunting buddies
Steep n slow

 

[Huntmt28]

Awesome good luck!!

 

[andrew11]

"Tell them the bird distance not the actual" Love it!

 

[Mtnhunter1]

You have found the nursery basins. You have seen billies near the top of GN. While you surely could find a mature billy near the nannies and kids, I would poke around a bit more in different areas. Hunters will find an area that has viewable goats and then will continue to return to that area, time and again. There are mature billies in your area, they just might be a basin or two away from where you have been looking.

 

[sacountry]

Thanks, that's the kind experienced based info I was hoping to get.

 

[MinnesotaHunter]

You have found the nursery basins. You have seen billies near the top of GN. While you surely could find a mature billy near the nannies and kids, I would poke around a bit more in different areas. Hunters will find an area that has viewable goats and then will continue to return to that area, time and again. There are mature billies in your area, they just might be a basin or two away from where you have been looking.

I would agree with this. I would add that last year I found a lot of billies in smaller pockets of goat habitat, and they seemed to be more closely tied to the timber. You can watch nanny and kids all day long, not so much with billies....

 

[npaden]

You have found the nursery basins. You have seen billies near the top of GN. While you surely could find a mature billy near the nannies and kids, I would poke around a bit more in different areas. Hunters will find an area that has viewable goats and then will continue to return to that area, time and again. There are mature billies in your area, they just might be a basin or two away from where you have been looking.

Spot on advice here. If you are seeing nannies and kids there is a good chance that there a billies around, but they won't be near as visible. Look above the nannies for some tougher terrain (since the nannies and kinds are hanging out on the sides of cliffs LOL) and they do seem to like the timber early in the season. There could be some billies grouped up quite a way off as well, scout around and keep looking. If nothing else you get your eyes trained to look for goats. It seems like it would just be a slam dunk to spot a white animal on the side of the mountain but it took me a while to get my brain to really key in on them. I glassed way too many light colored rocks early on in my scouting.