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Olympic Marmot
Hopefully I'll get back and get some better photos of these guys, but for now this little fellow (about a year or so old) was the only marmot I saw and he disappeared into the tall grass pretty quickly. Olympic marmots are a species unto themselves and are only found on the Olympic peninsula. The area was an island of open land among the glaciers during the ice age, and so developed a fair number of endemic species - some 25 or so plants, insects and animals are found only there.
These guys aren't particularly shy, so I'm sure I'll see one closer.. but apparently this year the low snow pack was not particularly kind to the marmots - it made digging the hibernating animals out of their burrows much easier for their predators, and marmot numbers may be a little lower than normal, at least in the Hurricane Ridge area.
The Olympic marmot is a rodent in the squirrel family Sciuridae; it occurs only in the U.S. state of Washington, on the middle elevations of the Olympic Peninsula. The closest relatives of this species are the hoary marmot and the Vancouver Island marmot. In 2009, it was declared the official endemic mammal of Washington.
This marmot is about the size of a domestic cat, typically weighing about 8 kg in summer. The species shows the greatest sexual dimorphism found in marmots, with.. more
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