Image: wild goat in the northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, by A. Wallach
Goats (Capra aegagrus) are rewilding across Australia, embedding themselves into the ecology of cliffs and gorges, and by doing so are recovering their ancestral population that are threatened with extinction. The seventh in our Black Dog Series plays an ecological function as a browser - a consumer of tree and shrub vegetation. Browsers provide important ecological services by opening up thickets that otherwise become impenetrable. At sustainable densities they help create mosaics of open and closed vegetation. The open patches they create provide the conditions needed for grasses and forbs to thrive, which in turn benefit a multitude of other (native) species.
Like any other herbivore, their beneficial browsing can turn into overgrazing damage when their populations irrupt. One of the most obvious signs of dingo persecution is a tree line, in which the trees are grazed up to the highest point that the goats can reach. It is under such conditions that wild goats are typically studied.
We conducted research on Aboriginal land in the northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, where dingoes had been left unharmed for a few years. Within one of the gorges was a hidden spring where wild goats and other water-dependent animals came to drink. This was the prime hunting ground for dingoes, evident by over fifty dingo kills - and in turn - lush green vegetation at the water. At night we heard the dingoes howl. We returned to the same site a year later following a poison-baiting campaign. We could feel the difference in the dust. The hidden spring was bare and trampled, goat droppings covered everything, and the nights were silent.
Freeing dingoes from persecution would drive the wild goats to the cliffs, not to extinction. And under these conditions wild goats are a sight to behold.
Like any other herbivore, their beneficial browsing can turn into overgrazing damage when their populations irrupt. One of the most obvious signs of dingo persecution is a tree line, in which the trees are grazed up to the highest point that the goats can reach. It is under such conditions that wild goats are typically studied.
We conducted research on Aboriginal land in the northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, where dingoes had been left unharmed for a few years. Within one of the gorges was a hidden spring where wild goats and other water-dependent animals came to drink. This was the prime hunting ground for dingoes, evident by over fifty dingo kills - and in turn - lush green vegetation at the water. At night we heard the dingoes howl. We returned to the same site a year later following a poison-baiting campaign. We could feel the difference in the dust. The hidden spring was bare and trampled, goat droppings covered everything, and the nights were silent.
Freeing dingoes from persecution would drive the wild goats to the cliffs, not to extinction. And under these conditions wild goats are a sight to behold.
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