The Keepers of the Goats

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Armenia’s unlikely conservation success has brought about an unexpected challenge: a rising human-bear conflict. 

At Noravank Monastery, tours don’t typically involve binoculars and a 4×4, but the two rangers in the car are no typical tour guides. At this early hour, the hum of the engine is the only sound that breaks the hush of the morning. Driving at a crawl through the narrow canyon, Samvel Karapetyan is hunched over the wheel, staring up towards a cliff face to the left of the car.

“Look, look, look,” he says, pulling over to one side. He steps out of the car and pulls out his binoculars. An untrained eye would see barren trees clinging to the cliffs, their branches twisting and jutting out like gnarled limbs. But Karapetyan sensed movement. 

Fifty meters above where he stood, about a dozen goats were frozen in place. Their curved horns almost indistinguishable from the branches they mimicked, and their bodies blending seamlessly with the reddish-brown color of the rocky terrain. As if they had heard the engine’s vibration, they stared down at the rangers below. Then, one by one, they began to scale the cliff face with astonishing grace, their hooves finding invisible footholds in the steep rock. A van heading towards the monastery sped past the two rangers, oblivious to the gathering above. 

Samvel Karapetyan is the leader of four rangers—or caretakers, as they prefer to be called—tasked with monitoring this land. Before the first light of dawn and again at dusk each day, he and his crew navigate a perilous landscape, a daily pilgrimage of sorts in the lands surrounding Noravank monastery, in Armenia’s southeastern Vayots Dzor region. For hours, they rattle along the unforgiving mountain roads, and wind their way through stomach-turning curves carved out of the cliffs. Their goal: to protect Armenia’s rarest inhabitants from the human predators who would seek them out. 

Karapetyan’s discerning eye can tell the age of an animal from a single glance through his binoculars. “These ones are young,” he says. Their horns are only partly formed. 

The rangers climb back into the 4×4 and ease onto the road. Silence settles in again as their eyes stare intently on the rocks above. Vardges Ghahakhanyan, seated on the passenger side, points to another cliff on the left and says, “that rock”. Up high, there are about 100 animals scattering in a frenzy. They’re agitated—a telltale sign that there is a threat present, such as a predator or a poacher. Today, there’s no immediate danger. But unable to tell friend from foe, the goats are unsettled by the sound of the 4×4. “They’re careful,” Karapetyan says. “If you stay quiet, they won’t be scared.” 

The animals’ fear seems almost hardwired. These are Bezoar goats, a Red Book-listed species characterized by their impressive, spiraling horns which can grow up to a meter and a half long in males. This distinct feature also makes them valuable to trophy hunters and poachers, who slaughtered them to near-extinction by the 2010s. But now the goats are making a comeback. Karapetyan and Ghahakhanyan are caretakers of the Arpa Protected Landscape, an unlikely conservation success story in the Caucasus, a region which is not particularly known for its environmental record. The reserve is community-run, meaning people from local villages play an active role in managing and protecting the area. Efforts to keep hunters and poachers out have successfully revived the once-dwindling Bezoar goat population. But more than a decade into the project, things might have gone a little too well. A small population of the elusive Caucasian leopard has resurfaced, and brown bears—who are far less shy—have returned as well, creating new tensions with nearby villages.

When Karen Manvelyan, the former director of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Armenia, first floated the idea of creating a protected landscape in the early 2010s, the situation was already dire—there were only 40 or so Bezoar goats left in the cliffs surrounding Noravank monastery, he says. By contrast, today, there are more than 700. 

At that time, the government had proposed a national park to safeguard the area’s struggling wildlife. But local communities pushed back, wary that stricter regulations would threaten their livelihoods. Many rely on grazing animals for income, a practice which would have been curtailed under national park regulations. Manvelyan saw an alternative opportunity: an area that locals could manage themselves, but still protect. “The only distinction was to have no hunting, no illegal logging, and no overgrazing,” he explains. 

Today, the reserve spans approximately 3,000 hectares, and has served as a pioneering model for community-managed conservation in Armenia. It inspired several additional community-run areas, collectively forming part of an 80,000 hectare wildlife corridor across Armenia—a designated space where populations of wildlife can safely migrate and breed. 

In the beginning, the idea was a tough sell for hunters and poachers who viewed the terrain as theirs for the taking. But eventually, whether they agreed or not, the threat of hefty fines and even prison sentences for illegal hunting and poaching changed attitudes. “If we compare how hunting was 20 years ago, it’s land and sky,” Manvelyan says. “These days they know that this is a restricted area.” 

But it’s not hard to find traces of the region’s hunting past. In one local bed-and-breakfast, an adult-sized Bezoar goat skull—its distinct horns spiraling upwards—sits on display in the living room among family photos and old keepsakes, a relic of a wilder time. The owner recalls the 1990s as a kind of free-for-all, when he and others would shoot the goats simply because they could. He insists he only ever killed one. 

That lifestyle made its way into the cuisine, too. A few decades ago, almost every restaurant in Yeghegnadzor used to have Bezoar goat on the menu, says Manvelyan, adding that now “it’s rare.” Only a few local hunters remain, providing goat meat to restaurants, according to Manvelyan. “Some passed away, some are old,” he says. In a neighboring area, a company that used to charge recreational hunters about 8,000 EUR to kill Bezoar goats no longer operates. Poachers have also stopped frequenting the area. In the past, many targeted brown bears, another inhabitant of the reserve still recovering from overexploitation. Poachers would sell to the wealthy, who displayed bear skins on their walls, or even kept live bears as a symbol of status. “They’re afraid now,” says Manvelyan.

Without the pressure from poaching, the number of bears has begun to increase. Back in the 4×4, Karapetyan pulls over again, this time, for something he spotted on the ground. Two sets of faint paw prints belonging to brown bears. Only about 2,000 are estimated to remain in all of the South Caucasus. Karapetyan logs the discovery on an app, noting the bears’ age, sex and time the paw prints were made—details he can identify by sight. He believes the prints are only a few hours old, from when the bears wandered down to the river in search of water. 

But they wander further, too. “At the moment, we really face a huge issue regarding human-wildlife contact,” says Arus Nersisyan, the director of the Arpa Protected Landscape. Villagers here grow grapes for winemaking, they keep apple orchards and peach trees, they cultivate hundreds of beehives—all tempting for a bear hungry from hibernation. And the Armenian bears, clever and persistent, have figured out how to access the bounty. From January to September 2020, the WWF recorded 157 incidents of bears causing damage in the villages surrounding Areni, Yeghegis, Gladzor and Zaritap. The bears destroyed beehives, ate chickens, and stripped fruit trees clean. 

The majority of cases happen in springtime, says Nersisyan, when there are not enough berries in the mountains for the bears to eat. “They enter the village to find some food,” she says, adding that they also forage for food in the household garbage left out in the open. A series of hydro power plants operating on the Arpa River also robbed the bears of a food source, says Manvelyan. With much fewer fish than before, the bears enter villages in search of food instead, he says. 

Local news outlets have reported several incidents of bears attacking humans, too. “We’re the ones that are in the bear’s home,” says Karapetyan. “We came into its home and we want to take it from its home, that’s why it attacks.” 

That the bear-human conflict exists at all speaks volumes about how much attitudes have changed, says Manvelyan. In the past, there would have been no hesitation to shoot the bear, but now, locals call 911 instead. Yet, solutions are far from simple. One of the earlier proposals was to translocate the bears—essentially darting them with a powerful sedative, locating the immobile bear about 20 minutes later, and transporting them to the north of the country. In Shatin, a village where Manvelyan describes helping set up cameras to gauge the bear populations, they anticipated finding only a couple of troublemakers. Instead, they counted 11 bears. “How can you translocate eleven?” he says. “If it was one or two of course we could.” 

Unable to move the mischievous bears, the residents are compensated for the damages. But Nersisyan says she suspects some locals have intentionally damaged their orchards or beehives, seeking compensation from the foundation, pointing out repeat offenders. 

Other measures appear to offer a more sustainable solution in the long run. The foundation is funding electric fences and noise deterrents along the boundaries of vulnerable villages. The idea is to undo the bears’ learned behavior for located food sources. A bear will teach her cubs where to find food, often introducing them to villages as reliable spots. Manvelyan describes this as a “genetic issue”, suggesting that a painful electric fence could serve as a way to disrupt this habit and reset their instincts. “It’s taking a long time, it’s a bit difficult, but it’s better to go in this direction rather than to provide some compensation,” says Nersisyan. 

The bears, bolder than ever and growing in number, are putting the delicate balance of conservation to the test. For one of the masterminds behind the Arpa Protected Landscape, the conflict isn’t a failure, but part of a step toward a broader harmony between humans and animals. “Nature is the music of God,” Manvelyan says. “You can listen to this music, and if one note is missing, if one part is missing, then it is not the same, it is not good music.”

Raw & Unfiltered