Vancouver Island marmot

September 19, 2004

Imagine a babysitting job where your two-year-old charges take off for other communities and you have two boys who fight constantly over a girl while predators hover nearby, waiting for an opportunity to devour them. That pretty much wraps up the challenges faced by 21-year-old Jackie Churchill and Crystal Reid, 25, who spent most of each week this summer at Haley Bowl, southwest of Nanaimo, chasing after juvenile Vancouver Island marmots.

They’re camping at the end of a logging road that is rocky as a riverbed. The only sound of civilization they hear is the whine of logging equipment farther up the valley.

A female named Haida and males Onslo and Dylan are among six captive born marmots released to Haley Bowl in early July.

Haida and Onslo stayed put. Dylan left for a while and explored the area only to return and fight with Onslo over Haida’s affections.

A female named Denai left the area and travelled eight kilometres to Green Mountain. A male, Macumba, followed.

Newman headed off to Buttle Mountain, 10 kilometres away, where he is living by himself.

Shepherd Crystal Reid monitors a marmot’s heart rate. Transmitters are lodged in the bellies of the beast. Photos by Darren Stone/Times Colonist

While the wandering is upsetting for the marmot shepherds, this behaviour does not surprise scientists. Marmot researcher Andrew Bryant said the two-year-olds, even though they were born in captivity, acted like their wild-born kin, “doing what marmots do, seeking out new territory.”

The marmots are tracked with the help of radio transmitters implanted in their bellies. Collars can’t be used because the rodents grow too fast, said Bryant in an interview en route to Haley Bowl.

He took a Times Colonist reporter and photographer for a visit to one of the oldest known colonies of the endangered Vancouver Island marmot. The animals were first recorded at the site in 1915 and at their peak, they numbered 30 to 35 animals.

The last wild marmots died there in 1999, so the release this summer of captive-born young was significant.

“I was proud to be able put marmots back here five years after extinction of the colony,” Bryant said.

The oldest record of the Vancouver Island marmot goes back 16,000 years — meaning they survived the ice age that wiped out the mountain goat and other species once here.

“The marmots managed to hang on by their toenails,” said Bryant.

Just keeping the three reintroduced young at Haley Bowl happy and healthy until hibernation is a full-time job and a major worry for Churchill and Reid.

“I heard of the job from a teacher,” said Churchill, who earned a biology degree from Malaspina College in Nanaimo.

“I thought, ‘what could be better than go following cute little fuzzy things around as opposed to working at a gas station.’ ”

They camp out in any of a handful of tents scattered around the site, where battery-powered radios blast day and night with noise to scare away bears or cougars.

They get paid $16 an hour, but they’ve already used up their allotment of 623 hours of their contract and are working for free until a new contract is drafted.

They dry socks over the defroster vents of the half-ton pickup that goes with the job. Cold is a constant companion. There are no flush toilets, no showers, and you can easily twist an ankle tramping through the bush. Between the spells of panic when the marmots seem to vanish, a lull of boredom settles in.

An eagle hovering overhead recently prompted Churchill to fire off noisemakers, a non-lethal deterrent. The women don’t even have a firearm to protect themselves from the wildlife. They rely on vigilance, noise and their own wits to stay safe.

The best way to keep marmots safe from predators is by having humans nearby, said Bryant.

That lesson was learned at another colony when, a short time after humans left, a cougar moved in and killed marmots. The natural population swings of predators and marmots now bode well for the rodents, said scientist Rick Page.

“For the last 10 years we’ve had a massive increase in the numbers of wolves and cougars on the Island and with fewer and fewer deer, they’ve been hunting the marmots. But naturally the numbers (of predators) are going to go down anyway. You’ll find that no matter if the predators are hunted and trapped — and they’re not — it does appear that the numbers have gone done now.

“There are no wolves in this valley this summer and we haven’t seen any cougar up here either.”

The predators will likely move out of marmot habitat to hunt, which is good news for the marmots, Page said.

“I think the worst is over. By the time this natural decline (of predators) occurred, if we hadn’t intervened the marmot would probably have been extinct. With moving marmots around and having the captive breeding program, the marmots have a chance to rebound. The predator problem may have taken care of itself.”

Scientist Rick Page pauses near one of the marmot-watchers’ camps. “The worst is over ” for the rodents, he believes. Photos by Darren Stone/Times Colonist

Of course, the marmots under the shepherds’ watch have no sense of their own vulnerability. Watching them at play is entertaining, say Churchill and Reid.

“Onslo is sort of pushy — he wants Haida for himself,” said Reid, who has a degree in psychology.

“They get into some good scraps, those two.”

Churchill said, “I saw them fighting, rolling down the hill together.”

Marmots love to wrestle with each other even when there’s no female involved. It’s playful bonding behaviour.

Which brings us to the best part of being a marmot shepherd, watching marmots being marmots. And the worst part of the job? “Sitting out in the cold like this — the weather can really drain you,” said Churchill on a day when the clouds swirled in the valley, the dampness creeping through all layers of clothing. Oh, and there are bears. “I was flossing my teeth and I could hear one breathing right below me,” said Reid. Fortunately, the beast was more hungry for berries than humans. The marmots were elusive on the day the press came to call. Their radio beacons are programmed to sound only between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. to prolong the life of the implanted batteries. So an attempt at 5:15 p.m. to locate the marmots using hand-held antennas was unsuccessful.

However, a scan with binoculars of their usual hangouts picked up Dylan a few hundred metres away, standing on a rock.

He saw the group of people standing on the side of a hill but he never whistled in alarm.

“They’re getting used to us,” said Churchill. “They haven’t whistled at us for like two months or so.”

Nine captive-born marmots were released to the old colonies of Vancouver Island this season. The others included two females, Virginia and Hayley, let go on Mount Washington.

Four-year-old male Landalt was set free on Heather Mountain where he bred with the lone female living there. The welcome result was a litter of pups.

Aside from the release of captive-born animals, 11 pups were born in the wild and three animals died. That’s a net gain of 17 animals in the mountain colonies like Haley Bowl.