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!

50 Years of Marmot Research!!!

Building upon the pioneering efforts of Ken Armitage and the efforts of numerous marmoteers over the years, Dan Blumstein now oversees the marmot research project. As a result of these collaborative efforts, this project has been going for half of a century now.


Most projects only last for 3-4 years (the duration of a dissertation or granting period), so this is quite an accomplishment. To celebrate our golden anniversary, Dan made T-shirts! Check out the logo below:


And the current crew in the field wearing our shirts with pride!

Here's to another 50 years of new discoveries...and FUN!!!

Bear!

Yes. That's right. Bear! A big one! A bear recently broke into the dining hall. It was looking for food and obviously did not check the schedule. If it had bothered to look up the meal plan online, it would have noticed that the dining hall doesn't open for quite sometime and there isn't much to eat right now besides pots and pans. But in all seriousness, RMBL has had a rather large bear problem over the past years. During the summer of 2009, bears repeatedly broke into the dining hall as well as several cabins. In fact, a marmot field assistant was interrupted from a peaceful sleep by this particularly frightening brand of intruder. Thankfully, there have been no injuries and the bears typically retreat once they are spotted and chased. However, this conflict between researchers and wildlife is of great concern.

According to the Colorado Division of Wildlife "Bears that become aggressive in their pursuit of an easy meal must often be destroyed." At RMBL, we therefore take every precaution to keep bears wild and deter them from thinking that are cabins and dining hall are part of the buffet line. It's their wilderness and we are simply visitors, so it is our responsibility to prevent encounters wherever possible. The dining hall staff has posted signs on the kitchen door stating "No bears allowed". And in case the bears are illiterate, the rest of us will properly dispose of our trash and appropriately manage our food storage.

Click here for more information on bears in Colorado and living with bears.