More the merrier
Our coastal goats—since October anyway—have been hanging out in pretty small, compatible groups, dispersed all over Goatlandia (my name for winter Oreamnos habitat observable from our Highlands neighborhood). I’m excited to find the occasional larger party—however ephemeral—because there’s usually interesting behavior to learn from. This 4-minute narrated video offers my best take on who’s who in a 6-member nanny group, and how the pecking order shakes out. Chickens got nothin on Jánwu for powergames.
I filmed this about a month ago from 250 yards away with a Lumix fz70, zoomed out to 1200mm, 1925×1080 video. More recently, I’ve moved to digiscoping with a PhoneSkope attachment, connecting my aging iPhone to Cathy’s 88mm Kowa spotscope, zoomed to ~50x. This allows me to film at 4K. Vimeo doesn’t support that higher resolution, but shooting at 4K allows considerably more cropping in your movie-editor before video gets too grainy—a nice option when sharing those tiny white specks on the mountainside.
Of course, a Nikon P1000 shooting 4K at 3000mm would be sharper yet . . . . 🙂
For basic information on mountain goats, here’s the category page. I hope to considerably expand this section of JuneauNature as we develop k-12 and citizen-science networks around this most observable of the large terrestrial mammals in Áak’w Aaní.
