Chamois
The chamois, also called the northern chamois, is a compact, sure-footed wild mountain animal native to the Alps, Carpathians, Balkans, Caucasus and northeastern Turkey. It is a goat antelope of the subfamily Caprinae, so it is closer to goats and sheep than to true antelopes or deer. Adults of both sexes grow short, black horns that rise straight up and hook sharply backward at the tip, and they never shed them. The coat shifts from a warm reddish brown in summer to a thick, almost black coat in winter, with a pale face crossed by dark stripes running through the eyes. Chamois are at home on near vertical rock faces, using hooves with hard edges and soft, rubbery pads that grip slick surfaces. Females and young live in herds of up to 30 animals, while mature males tend to live alone outside the autumn rut. They graze on grasses, herbs and flowering plants in summer, switching to lichens, mosses, twigs and conifer needles in the leaner winter months. Since 1907 they have also lived wild in the Southern Alps of New Zealand.
What is a chamois? Goat, antelope or deer?
Many people call it a chamois deer, a mountain sheep or a small antelope, but the chamois is none of those. It is a goat antelope, a member of the subfamily Caprinae inside the cattle family Bovidae, the same group that holds wild goats, sheep and the ibex. The clearest clue is on its head: deer grow antlers made of bone and drop them every year, while the chamois carries permanent horns with a keratin sheath that keep growing for life. Scientists place it in its own genus, Rupicapra, which means rock goat in Latin. There are two species. This page covers Rupicapra rupicapra, the northern chamois, found from the Alps to the Caucasus. The Pyrenean chamois, Rupicapra pyrenaica, lives in the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain and the central Apennines of Italy. The northern chamois has seven subspecies: Alpine, Chartreuse, Tatra, Carpathian, Balkan, Caucasian and Anatolian, the last one living in northeastern Turkey. They look much alike and differ mostly in size, winter coat and the shape of the horns.
How do you pronounce chamois? The name and chamois leather
Chamois is a French word, and in English the animal is usually said the French way, close to sham wah, with the stress on the second syllable in American English and on the first in British English. The cleaning cloth, on the other hand, is usually said shammy, and that is also how many New Zealand hunters say the name of the animal. The plural is written the same, chamois, although the final s can be sounded. In German the animal is the Gämse or Gams, in Italian camoscio and in Spanish gamuza or rebeco. The soft leather got its name because it was first made from chamois skin, tanned with oil until it turned supple and absorbent. Today almost all chamois leather comes from sheep or goat skins treated the same way, so a chamois cloth for drying a car has nothing to do with the wild animal. In the Alps the animal left another mark on culture: the Gamsbart, a tuft made from the long back hairs of males in winter, is still worn on traditional hats in Bavaria and Austria.
Where do chamois live?
Chamois live in the mountains of Europe and western Asia. The IUCN lists the species as native to 21 countries, from France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Austria in the Alps, through Slovenia, Croatia and the rest of the Balkans, to the Tatras of Poland and Slovakia, the Carpathians of Romania, the Caucasus of Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and the Kaçkar Mountains of northeastern Turkey. It was also introduced to Czechia in the early twentieth century and to New Zealand in 1907. Chamois use a wide band of altitude, from about 200 meters up to 3,500 meters. In summer they climb to alpine meadows, rocky ridges and cliffs above the tree line, where grass is fresh and there is always an escape route nearby. When deep snow arrives they move down into steep forests, especially sunny slopes where wind clears the snow and the trees offer shelter. Some populations, such as those in the Jura or the limestone gorges of the Balkans, live mostly in forest and cliffs at fairly low altitude. What every good chamois area has in common is broken, rocky terrain: food close to a wall that predators cannot climb.
What does a chamois look like? Size, horns and coat
The chamois is about the size of a large goat, but with longer legs and a slimmer build. Adults stand 70 to 80 centimeters at the shoulder and weigh about 25 to 60 kilograms, with males heavier than females, especially in autumn before the rut, when they can lose a quarter of their weight. Both males and females have horns. They are black, 15 to 25 centimeters long, and rise almost straight from the forehead before bending back into a sharp hook. Male horns are thicker at the base and more tightly hooked, while female horns are slimmer and open more gently. The face is the easiest way to recognize a chamois: pale cream with a dark band that runs from the base of the horns through each eye to the muzzle. In summer the coat is short and reddish brown with a dark line along the back. In winter it turns thick, long and almost black, with a pale patch on the throat and rump. The hooves have hard outer edges that catch on rock and soft, elastic inner pads that work like the rubber sole of a climbing shoe.
What do chamois eat?
Chamois are herbivores, and the seasons decide almost everything about their menu. In spring and summer they graze on alpine meadows, eating grasses, sedges, clover and flowering herbs, and they browse young leaves and shoots of dwarf willows, rhododendrons and other mountain shrubs. Summer is the time to build fat, because winter will be long. In autumn they still graze, but they eat more leaves, twigs and berries as the grass dries out. In winter, when snow covers the high pastures, chamois move down into forests and onto windswept ridges. There they eat lichens, mosses, the needles and buds of spruce, fir and pine, the bark of young trees and any dry grass they can reach by digging through the snow with their front hooves. This poor winter food is the reason many chamois, especially the very young, the old and males worn out after the rut, die in hard winters with deep snow. Most of the water they need comes from the plants they eat, and they also lick snow and visit salt licks, natural or set out by gamekeepers, for minerals.
How do chamois live? Herds, the rut and kids
Chamois are active by day and spend most of their time grazing, resting and chewing the cud on ledges with a good view. Females, their kids and young animals live in herds that usually hold up to 30 animals and grow larger in winter. Adult males live alone or in small bachelor groups for most of the year, often lower on the mountain and closer to the forest. Everything changes in November and December, during the rut. Males climb to the female herds, mark their area with scent from glands behind the horns and chase rivals at full speed down steep slopes. Fights are rarer than chases, but the hooked horns can cause deep wounds. After a pregnancy of about 170 days, females give birth to a single kid, rarely twins, in May or June, in a hidden spot among rocks. The kid weighs 2 to 3 kilograms and can follow its mother over rough ground within hours. It nurses for about three months and stays with her until the next birth. When a chamois senses danger, it stamps its foot and gives a sharp whistle, and the whole herd runs for the rocks.
How fast can a chamois run, and what hunts it?
A chamois can run at about 50 kilometers per hour and jump about 2 meters high and 6 meters long. Its real talent, though, is not speed on flat ground but control on steep rock. It can bound down a slope of loose stones, cross a ledge only a few centimeters wide and climb a near vertical wall where a wolf or a person would have to stop. That skill is its main defense. The biggest natural predators of adult chamois are the gray wolf and the Eurasian lynx, which hunt them in forests and at the foot of the cliffs, where the chamois has less of an advantage. Brown bears catch them now and then, mostly weak or young animals. Golden eagles take many kids in their first weeks of life, and sometimes knock adults off narrow ledges. In the Caucasus and Turkey, the Persian leopard also hunts them. Nature itself is a killer too: avalanches, rock falls and long winters with deep snow kill more chamois in some years than all predators together. In much of the Alps, where large predators disappeared, hunting by people became the main control of their numbers.
Chamois in New Zealand and chamois hunting
New Zealand has no native land mammals except bats, so every chamois there descends from animals brought by people. In 1907 Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria sent a gift of eight chamois, six females and two males, captured in his Styrian hunting grounds. They were released in the Hooker Valley near Aoraki/Mount Cook, and a second small group followed in 1914. With no predators and plenty of untouched alpine plants, they spread along the Southern Alps, and by the 1990s they occupied much of the mountain country of the South Island, from Fiordland to Nelson. The Department of Conservation describes them as probably the most numerous wild hoofed animal of the South Island after red deer. Because they graze native alpine herbs and tussock that never evolved with hoofed animals, chamois are treated as a pest, and there is no closed season. Recreational hunters in places like Canterbury and the West Coast help keep their numbers down, and the animal is known among them simply as the shammy. In Europe, hunting works the other way: chamois are a regulated game animal, with quotas set to keep populations healthy.
Is the chamois endangered?
No. The IUCN classifies the northern chamois as Least Concern in its 2020 assessment, with a stable population of about 300,000 mature adults and more than 400,000 animals in total. Most of them live in the Alps, where strict hunting rules, quotas and national parks brought numbers back after heavy hunting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The global picture hides real problems for some subspecies, though. The IUCN assessment considers the Anatolian chamois of Turkey, with about 500 to 750 animals, and the Tatra chamois of Poland and Slovakia, which peaked at 1,431 animals in 2018 and has declined since, to be Endangered. The Chartreuse chamois in France and the Caucasian chamois are considered Vulnerable. The Abruzzo chamois of central Italy, often mentioned with this animal, belongs to the other species, the Pyrenean chamois. Threats include poaching in the Balkans and the Caucasus, roads and dams, disturbance from skiing and hiking, mixing with introduced chamois of other subspecies, and diseases such as infectious keratoconjunctivitis, which can blind whole herds, and sarcoptic mange in the eastern Alps. Warmer summers are also pushing the plants they feed on higher up the mountains.
Where it is found
The Chamois can be found in places such as:
