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 starting at 9 am Wednesday, Oct. 21, for a late-season mountain goat hunt on the Resurrection Peninsula, across Resurrection Bay from Seward. The hunt runs Nov. 1-14.

The late hunt follows the area's drawing season, which ran Aug. 10 through Oct. 15 with up to 45 permits. On the Kenai Peninsula, the department opens a late registration season only when there's harvest room left after the early season.

The rules center on nannies, the female goats. Anyone who takes a nanny can't hunt goats in Units 7 or 15 for five regulatory years, and taking a nanny with a kid is prohibited. The bag limit is one goat.

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

Those nanny rules grew out of a decline. Goat numbers on the Kenai Peninsula fell in the 1990s and early 2000s, which "may be attributed to overharvest among other factors," according to the department's Mountain Goat Management Report and Plan. Nannies with kids were protected from harvest in 2001, 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," Jason Herreman, an assistant area wildlife biologist in Homer, and John P. Skinner of the department wrote in a 2024 research paper. Surveys beginning in 2021 found goat counts back near historic levels, and the peninsula-wide harvest rate had stabilized around 3%, the paper said.

On the Resurrection Peninsula itself, the department's most recent count, in 2021, found 342 goats, including 57 kids, and rated the herd stable. In 2022, the last year in the department's management report, hunters there took nine goats in the drawing season and three in the late hunt.