Our soon-to-be famous marmots

Film crew recording marmot behavior

This week, I got to show these two and their big fancy cameras around our valley. They are filming a nature documentary about the mountains in the Western U.S. and asked us to help them find unmarked marmots to record. I'm proud to say that almost all of the marmots in our population are currently marked, so we had to travel a ways up valley to find some pristine individuals, but we did it. 

I sat with them for a day and they got some pretty cool footage- marmots crossing snow plugs, alarm calling, foraging (of course), even an aggressive chase or two... Looks like it should be a nice story and I'm excited to see the final product!

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Wake up marmots!

Blogger: Lilah Hubbard

It’s that time again! Last week, four of us early-season researchers skied 3.7 miles into our field station, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), to record when the marmots emerge from hibernation. Although the weather over the last few weeks was showing signs for an early spring, we arrived to Colorado just as a huge storm rolled through, dropping up to 13 inches of fresh snow in just one day. The local residents (people and wildlife) of Gothic, Colorado were getting excited about the snow melting and temperatures increasing, but it turns out that Punxsutawney Phil may have predicted correctly: winter may not be over quite yet!

 

As a first-time early-seasoner coming from sunny Los Angeles, I’m pretty excited that the snow is still here and we get to ski around for a while. Yesterday we went up valley to one of our field sites and, using our spotting scopes, we detected 4 yearlings and 2 adults out and about in the snow! One of the yearling marmots, referred to as “Danger” since it has a fur mark of a warning sign, seemed especially excited to run around in the snow and refused to follow her siblings back into the burrow when it started to snow again (I guess the “Danger” fur mark was appropriate)! 

But researchers aren’t the only ones keeping an eye out for marmots… there are a variety of predators in the valley too! Yesterday morning, we saw a hawk circling the field site we were observing. Then, in the afternoon, one of our team members spotted a red fox hanging out near our cabin. After exploring the area for a while, the fox suddenly darted across the road and up onto a huge snow pile. After a few seconds of digging, we realized it was uncovering a secret stash of mice! It munched out on a couple mice right in front of us, and then continued on its way. Who knew that the snow outside our cabin was also a freezer for a fox’s meal?!

 No signs of woken marmots at our other field sites yet, but stay tuned for more updates!

"Little" man?

Our field season is nearing to an end which means that marmots are putting on body fat in preparation for hibernation.

Photo by Jenn Smith

Above and below are recent photos of the marmot with the mark, "little man." Judging by the size of his stomach relative to his front legs, we need have to consider renaming this marmot "pudgy little guy".

Photo by Jenn Smith

The ladies sure seem to like him though; he currently defends the largest harem of females out of all of our colony sites!

Marmot days of summer

July is here and it is officially summer at RMBL.


Most of the snow has melted from the mountains and this water is helping to turn the landscape green.


The vegetation is now growing, waterfalls are rushing, and flowers are blooming.



Marmots enjoy the benefits of this extra cover because it provides them with new opportunities to forage.


They also use tall vegetation, such that shown below, to seek protection when faced with predation risk.


Of course, because this extra food brings multiple marmots out of their burrows to forage at once, marmots are also spending much of their active time socializing with their group-mates.


We paint a unique dye mark on the back of each marmot to keep track of which animal is which. For example, you can see "Y" is the adult female on the rock in the middle of the photo below.


Team marmot is now busy recording social behavior and trapping marmots from our study population. However, not all of the marmots are easily convinced that they should go inside of our traps!


Luckily, for Team Marmot, our days in the mountains are long, so we can take full advantage of this active time to collect data and spend many hours surrounded by beautiful scenery. Yes, the life of a marmoteer is certainly rough these days.

The circle of life...

The winter has been so long this year and emergence of a lot of species has been delayed. As researchers, we have to deal with this by just sitting in the snow for long periods waiting for our study animals to emerge. While observing we can just have a granola bar if we get hungry, but what about predators if their prey are not around?

Photo by Rebecca Richardson

This is the story of the coyote that lives in our study area. When we arrived, he was in good shape, very active looking for something to eat, but as the time has passed, this coyote was getting more and more skinny.

This was the early June, the marmots were out and the coyote very hungry. We had some new individuals down valley that we have been observing carefully and waiting for the right time to start trapping to give them a name and a mark. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen to the small one.

It was this morning when all of marmots were sitting just next to their burrows when one marmot met some misfortune. He was in middle of nowhere when he met face to face with the coyote!

The marmot fight against the coyote is depicted below. I am sure the coyote got bitten by the marmot, but this was not enough of a fight for this marmot to escape from a starving coyote.

Photo: Adriana Maldonado

After handling the marmot for about 30 minutes, the coyote left the site, but the other marmots just stayed safely inside their burrows and the morning went so slowly after this incident.

To read more about coyotes, check out the wikipedia...

Summertime & living is easy

As this marmot, "G", sits on her front stoop, she is probably thinking about the weather, and this week at the RMBL, it is as if someone has come by and flipped the switch!


Despite the long and harsh winter, now summer is officially here and the afternoon highs are reaching up to 70 degrees F.


Whereas for Team Marmot this means that we are finally moving in full-swing--trapping, observing, and conducting field experiments, the marmots are just happy to eat-up, kick-back, and take in the sunshine!

Amazing Nature

While observing the behavior of marmots, we get the chance to see all kinds of wild animals such as porcupines, woodpeckers, robins, chipmunks, ground squirrels, foxes, coyotes... but if you are very lucky... amazing bears!

I was doing my observations as I do every day, but on this particular morning, the marmots were just flagging their tails and sitting next to their burrows. Marmots are very vigilant but even if they are just laying on their bellies, they are aware of all what is going on around them.

Suddenly all of the marmots were starring at one same point, I was wondering...what are they looking at? and I told myself to look-up because there might be something big around!

This was the first time I had ever seen a wild bear, but more amazingly, it was a mommy with her three cute and big cubs walking just by the other side of the river! I was so excited that I could barely grab my camera. But I did it! and so, this is the proof of what I saw:

Photo: Adriana Maldonado

Bears are usually vegetarian, but they also eat small mammals. I have yet to see a bear eat a marmot, but Dirk Van Vuren, another researcher here at RMBL, found that predation accounts for 98 % of mortality during a marmots active season (spring, summer & fall) and that bears are on list of predators; anyway, the marmots I was watching didn't seem to be afraid of these bears--but perhaps they should have been!

I scream, You scream, We all scream for Ice Cream!

Yes, so you must be thinking that with all of that snow out there, "How could she possibly be thinking about ice cream?"


Well, for those of you that know me well, you might not surprised that I have in fact been thinking ice cream would be a tasty treat. However, for now, I suppose a marmot sighting will have to do! Let me explain...


I was on my way to the cabin called Red Rock this morning and thought I saw one of the logs of the cabin moving! Low and behold it was a marmot.

After careful inspection, I ascertained that the identity of this marmot was "Ice Cream." Her fur is marked with a dark dye in the shape of circle over a v. What a tease, now I will just have to look forward to ice cream on hot summer days as the snow slowly melts.

The Trials and Triumphs of Marmoteers: Field Observations

After reading a few of our blog entries, you may begin to suspect that the life of a marmoteer is by no means glamorous. I (Yvonne) can help confirm your suspicions.

Consider the picture on the right of my fellow marmoteer, the Leon.

Leon is making his third hour of observations in the River colony on a hot, mid-July, and absolutely marmotless afternoon.

As Dan wrote in an earlier entry, observing marmots is all about patiently waiting. This waiting could result in sitting through sun, rain, hail, snow, flesh-eating flies, and sometimes all of the above within half an hour, in repetitive succession. BUT. As soon as that first patch of brown fur darting through vegetation is glimpsed, discomforts are temporarily forgotten, replaced by a mild sense of victory as this observation is quickly recorded.

On a typical summer morning, marmots come out of their burrows at around 7:00. We try set up at our assigned observation sites before they emerge so that we don’t miss out on any of the action. Binoculars are useful for quick scans of the area for marmot activities. But the enhanced magnifying capacity of a spotting scope is usually necessary for identifying the individual’s mark.

Every marmot’s location, action, and interaction must be recorded in order to generate as complete as possible a database on which numerous ongoing studies are dependent. Thus, we dutifully record the time, location, and a detailed summary of each event, such as when Five Dice Dots cheek-rubbed (scent marked) the rock on Six Dice Dot’s burrow (oh snap!); or when IX alarm called 283 times for fifteen minutes straight because first some kayakers and then a fox (predator!) swung by its place; or when Happy Face was foraging by tower mound but then Mickey Mouse chased and beat the bejeezus out of (play wrestled with) him.

Observation sessions usually run for about two to three hours. After the morning session, we regroup, trap marmots, break for lunch, then do it all over again in the afternoon. Long hours of waiting are rendered exciting by the occasional spectacular showdown. On my last day of observing up valley, I watched, as if in Planet Earth high definition slow motion mode, an eagle swoop down and snatch a marmot pup off a rock just 20 feet away!

It was legit.

There are other rewards, of course. Consider, for instance, the view that Leon enjoyed during that marmotless afternoon.

Where are all of the marmots?: Emerging from hibernation

We start the field season in mid April. That’s when marmots wake up from hibernation. There is always a lot of snow, which might last for another month or so. It takes a while to habituate to the silence and quietness, especially coming from a city like Los Angeles. But it is breathtaking and probably my favorite season. Every morning we visit the locations where we know there were marmots the year before (and for the last 50 years, as marmots are quite faithful to their burrows). When we get to one of the marmot colonies, we sit in the snow for a while, and we write down if we see any marmots.



It can take days to see the first one, but when we see it, it’s very exciting! I get impatient to see which of the youngest animals will emerge. They are the ones that were born the previous summer, and as hibernation lasts so long (around 7-8 months), many of the little ones do not make it.

When one marmot emerges, we try to identify it. We recognize them because each marmot has an individual mark on their back. We draw these marks with black dye and a paintbrush. With spotting scopes, these symbols are easily identified, even from a far away.

The Art of Patience: Waiting, Watching and Listening

I really am inspired to share my excitement of field research with others. Each year we have 8-12 people (mostly volunteers) working on Team Marmot. And, each year we have to train these folks to properly collect data. It takes a while, but once trained, students learn that they can help collect high-quality data that can help us explain the diversity of life.

Training involves going out with folks and watching marmots. Marmot watching isn't quite like you may have been led to believe by watching National Geographic nature shows (OK, I'm dating myself--I should have said Discovery Channel nature shows). There's a lot of sitting and waiting.

Waiting for the marmots to emerge from their burrows. We do this because we want to know where they're sleeping and with whom--it's a bit of a soap opera out there.

Waiting for them to engage in social behaviors. Social interactions allow us to understand how embedded into their group they are--a factor that turns out to have major consequences for dispersal. Waiting for predators to walk, run, or fly by so that we can see the marmots' responses.

We have to teach people to read the marks. Using fur dye we paint numbers, signs, symbols, and letters on the marmots' backs. With these, we can identify animals from afar. Reading marks is sometimes a challenge. A's look like deltas or P's depending upon the angle you're looking at the marmot from. We wait and wait for them to turn, and then blink and boom--they're gone. Positive identifying the individuals we collect data on, however, is essential.

Learning to wait, watch, listen, and perceive what's going on around us is a good skill. And our field sites are in very pretty locations, which makes the wait all the more worth it.