Marmot moments

I've been hanging around marmots lately, which is something you normally don't brag about. I mean, you wouldn't walk into a bar and proudly proclaim that you've been hanging around marmots because people will get the impression that your weird.

Those people, of course, would be right.

You have to be a little weird to hang around marmots. Marmots are rodents. Big rodents. Montana has two kinds of marmots that I know of, one is the hoary marmot and the other is the yellow-bellied marmot.

The hoary marmot is half silver, half brown. You'll see them waddling around the edges of the Sun Road, chewing on folk's brake lines.

I know of at least one occasion where a marmot managed to hop into a car and wasn't discovered until the guy made it to Kalispell. He then had to return it, of course, because marmots don't make very good house pets. They dig big holes and they have big rodent teeth that can gnaw through just about anything.

The rangers at the Belly River Ranger Station know this for a fact. The Belly River Ranger Station doesn't look like great marmot habitat. It's sort of wooded and at lower elevation and plug full of predators like coyotes and eagles and hawks and owls and bears and so on and so forth.

Yet the area right around the ranger station is full of yellow-bellied marmots. It's a little marmotville. Yellow-bellied marmots are different than their alpine cousins in one key way - they have yellow bellies and no hoary looking hair.

Other than that, through my careful scientific analysis, I could see no difference, but the rangers there say yellow-bellies are fairly rare in the park.

Rare or not, they're a bit of nuisance. They burrow under buildings and then gnaw up through the floor and then pretty soon they're in the building looking out at you.

It's an odd feeling, particularly if the building is locked.

All I could think of when I saw it was that old song. You know the one: How much is a marmot in the window?

Park rangers live trapped a bunch of them last summer and put them on the other side of the Belly River, but the marmots, whether they swam or what, are back.

The plan know is to try to live with them and marmot-proof the buildings as best as possible.

I spent the better part of an evening photographing them. I came to the following conclusion: Marmots aren't all that interesting. They remind me of big, fat, guinea pigs.

But there was this pretty cool hoary marmot the other night. I was on the Highline Trail and the sun was going down and this marmot was on a rock squealing over and over again (marmots have a high pitched squeal that's a couple octaves higher than a pig). It squealed over and over again and though I was just a few feet away from it, it was obvious it was not squealing at me.

I thought, hmmmm, that's strange. Marmots squeal (or whistle as its often referred. They're also called whistling pigs) when there's danger. So I started looking for obvious signs of danger, like a griz above the trail or an eagle in the sky.

Nothing.

I gave up, started walking away and took one look back.

A wolverine bounded down the slope and the marmot took off.

The wolverine went behind a big rock.

Oh cool, I thought. I'm going to get to watch a wolverine eat a marmot.

But nothing. I waited and waited and waited and the wolverine never showed up ever again.

It had gone into a hole.

I waited some more. I waited until almost dark. Then I went home, whistling like a pig down the trail just in case there was a bear somewhere near.

Marmots know more than you think.