Marmots! Threatened! Most people don't think much about yellow-bellied marmots. If they do it's usually because they are a pest. In fact, most states that marmots call home designate them as varmints with no legal protection. So, marmots were not really paid that much attention in Great Basin National Park. However, after three years of climbing and traversing the south Snake Range we have not seen another marmot outside of Baker or Lehman Creeks. Then a scientist came through and told us that a resurvey of all known marmot populations in Nevada found marmots may be extinct in three mountain ranges and severely reduced in two others! These events led us to take a closer look at marmots.

This past summer we spent time looking for and trying to determine how many marmots we had. We searched Baker Creek and Lehman Creek and areas where we have historical records or observations of marmots. All we found were the marmots in Baker Creek, about 12 individuals. They are apparently in two colonies, one near the Baker Creek campground and the other near the Baker Creek trailhead. Both colonies are using the road fill for burrow sites despite extensive rock talus nearby. Marmots like to burrow and sun themselves among large rocks and boulders, hence their nickname rockchucks. No other marmots or marmot signs (i.e., feces, burrows) were found in Lehman Creek or areas of historical records and observations. Finding no marmots in Lehman Creek was surprising because we know there were marmots there in 2002.

However, we learned that we only had a short time to look for them. Marmots spend over 80 percent of their time in a burrow and this includes hibernating! The marmots in Baker Creek first appeared the end of March and were last seen about the end of June. If they don't appear again until April 2004, that means they will have hibernated for nine months after being active for only three months!

So what is happening to the marmots? From marmot biology we know they prefer boulder fields or large rock talus slopes adjacent to meadows or shrub and grass uplands. Being near standing water helps too. The key seems to be lots of grass and forbs to gorge themselves on, and nearby rocks to escape predators and facilitate burrowing. Based on this, one possible reason for the marmot decline is that forests in the park, including pinyon and juniper and mixed conifer, have become denser and have expanded their distribution into shrub and grass uplands and even meadows. Marmots do not like conifer cover, especially when it begins to reduce the grass and forb understory. So several sites in Baker Creek and Lehman Creek, adjacent to the existing marmots, have been identified to remove the pinyon and juniper and restore marmot habitat.