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Our voyageurs saw that there were two kinds of them, entirely different in colour, size, and other respects. The larger ones were of a greyish yellow above, with an orange tint upon the throat and belly. These were the "tawny marmots," called sometimes "ground-squirrels," and by the voyageurs, "siffleurs," or "whistlers." The other species seen were the most beautiful of all the marmots.
Without shade or water or verdure it stretched before us to distant table-lands, upholding mountains whose peaks were veiled in cloud. The solitude of the plain was rendered more impressive by the absence of wild creatures of any kind: there were no birds nor insects nor ground-squirrels nor snakes.
Its cousin, the ferruginous rough-leg, lives largely on ground-squirrels, rabbits, prairie-dogs and pouched gophers. This species also never attacks birds, and neither do any of the four members of the kite family.
The fact that the plague already has such a start among the squirrels opens a new and very serious phase of the problem of suppressing the disease. All who have hunted the ground-squirrels will testify to the readiness with which the fleas from them will bite those who are handling them.
Rabbits injure trees in the same way, often during the winter ruining an entire orchard in this manner. Squirrels, ground-squirrels, gophers, prairie-dogs, and other small animals do serious damage in the course of a year on almost every farm. The rough-leg hawk feeds entirely on meadow-mice, but if the supply fails, it eats mice, rabbits and ground-squirrels, but in no instance attacks birds.
James Bryden, who grazes his sheep on the Tahoe reserve near Downieville, lost sixteen sheep in one night in July, 1911. There are three kinds each of chipmunks and ground-squirrels. All of the former have striped backs and do more or less climbing of trees.
It swarmed with sand-antelope and Gurnuk: the ground-squirrels haunted every ant-hill, hoopoos and spur- fowls paced among the thickets, in the trees we heard the frequent cry of the Gobiyan and the bird facetiously termed from its cry "Dobo-dogon- guswen," and the bright-coloured hawk, the Abodi or Bakiyyah , lay on wing high in the cloudless air.
This close association of the rats and the squirrels affords a good opportunity for the fleas infesting them to pass from one host to the other. So far only two species of fleas have been recorded from the ground-squirrels. One, Ceratophyllus acutus, is very common, sometimes literally swarming over the squirrels, particularly if a squirrel is sick or weak from any cause.
At our feet wild flowers bloom, the twittering of birds is heard overhead, nimble ground-squirrels fearlessly cross our path, soft mosses and thick grass form a verdant carpet, and on all sides nature presents us one of her most charming phases, a picture from Arcadia framed in the heart of a scene of hurry and turmoil undescribable.
The fat, gray conies chirped at us from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly multiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, kept the dogs unavailingly chasing hither and thither whenever they were loose.
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