Fish and Game offers 20 permits Wednesday for a Resurrection Peninsula goat hunt

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game will issue 20 registration permits beginning at 9 am Wednesday, Oct. 21, for a late-season mountain goat hunt on the Resurrection Peninsula in Unit 7. The hunt runs Nov. 1-14, and Jason Herreman, an assistant area wildlife biologist, is the department's contact for it.

On the Kenai Peninsula, the department pairs an early drawing-permit season with a late registration season that opens only if harvest opportunity remains after the early season.

The rules for this hunt center on nannies. (A billy is a male goat; a nanny is a female.) Anyone who takes a nanny is barred from hunting goats in Units 7 and 15 for five regulatory years, and taking a nanny accompanied by a kid is prohibited outright. The bag limit is one goat.

The harvest objective is seven goat points, with one point for a billy and two for a nanny, so each nanny taken uses up twice as much of the season's room.

The nanny rules have a long history on the peninsula. The department's Mountain Goat Management Report and Plan says nannies with kids were protected from harvest in 2001 to address population decline, and the five-year penalty followed in 2009.

"Recovery of minimum count numbers occurred after nannies with kids were removed from the harvest and a new management system was instituted that included a 5-year no hunting penalty for any individual that harvested a nanny," Herreman, who works in Homer, and John P. Skinner of the department wrote in a 2024 research paper. The paper reported that goat counts from surveys beginning in 2021 were back near historic levels and that the peninsula-wide harvest rate had stabilized around 3%.