Boolie’s Blog

Olympic marmots are the only marmots in the Olympic peninsula so there isn’t any trouble identifying them, but compared to hoary marmots in Mount Rainier you can see the different brown patches that are prevalent in the Olympic marmots instead of the white fur of hoary marmots.

All marmots will stand up on their hind legs or sit on their ample hindquarters at times, giving them an elevated view compared to being down on all fours. I found these marmots in the afternoon and hoped to photograph them in better light later in the day, but unfortunately they weren’t around when I came back in the evening.

I saw at least four species for the first time on my Washington trip, three of them mammals and two of them marmots. In addition to the hoary marmots I saw at Mount Rainier, I was lucky enough to see Olympic marmots in Olympic National Park, one of the species that is unique to the peninsula.

I expected to see them in rock formations along the trails in the Grand and Badger Valleys but neither saw or heard them. I did see a couple on the road between Obstruction Point and Hurricane Ridge, I would have missed them if a friend hadn’t seen them there on an earlier visit. The road is quite narrow with occasional steep dropoffs and made me more nervous than any of the trails I hiked, but in this particular location there was enough room to park on one side of the road and be clearly visible to traffic from both directions.

This particular marmot was wearing a fashionable ear tag.

A couple more pictures of the marmot from the Skyline Trail. With such close-ups, I could see that it still had a bit of its breakfast on its teeth and that it could have used a Kleenex. I don’t know why it surprised me that the same cold and rainy weather would give the marmot a runny nose just as it did me. You can see a bit of the rain in the second picture.

“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle during the 1988 Vice Presidential debate

I’ve often wondered what wildlife thinks of me when I pass them on hiking trails, do they consider me to be some sort of hairless bear? I got my answer on my recent trip to Mount Rainier when a black bear passed this hoary marmot and its colony beside the Skyline Trail. The colony let loose with a raucous series of calls when the bear got close and kept it up until after it left.

I couldn’t see the marmots as I was too far down the trail to see that high in the talus field, but upon hearing the chorus of boos that rained down from above, the bear climbed up onto the rocks. It was a very casual pace and the bear wasn’t trying to catch the marmots, it seemed more curious than anything, but the marmots had good reason to be upset. According to my field guide, bears do eat marmots, especially in the spring when they dig out marmots that are still hibernating.

But to answer my question, marmots at least certainly don’t think of me as some sort of bear. I never got anything like the reaction the black bear got — I saw many marmots on my hikes and while I heard an occasional alarm call, it was always short and usually due to a hawk flying overhead or some other perceived threat.

This picture was taken the following day from the bear encounter and is from the last series of pictures before I left the park to go to Olympic National Park. I brought along the big lens on this hike and took shots both with it and my telephoto zoom, in this case I preferred the pictures from the big lens. I chose a position to give a background with gray from the rocks and green from the foliage.

My favorite moment with this bear, after stopping to eat huckleberries beside the trail (the picture in the previous post), it returned to the trail but soon turned aside again, stood up on its hind legs and began rubbing its back up and down on this tree. I guess it had an itch that needed scratching.