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Updated: May 12, 2025
There seemed to be plenty of mountain lion signs, and I was surprised that they should frequent such high altitudes, but Pete told me that they were up here after marmots, and were all sleek and fat on that diet. I would not have been surprised if my wild comrade had proposed a feast on these cats.
"But do not the owls eat the marmots?" inquired Basil. "The great owls of the woods prey upon animals as large. I have seen them kill rabbits in the dusk of the evening." "These do not," answered the naturalist; "at least it is supposed they do not. Many that have been shot and opened proved to have nothing in their stomachs but insects and beetles such as these we see upon the prairie.
His huge head was lowered between his high, rocking shoulders, his forelegs were simply great, knotty, cast-iron bunches of fiber and tendons; his long claws worn down by digging in the rocks for marmots were like great, curved fingers. As he stepped, his forefeet swung out, giving to his carriage an arrogance and a swagger that would have been amusing if it hadn't been terrible.
All my first day was pure pleasure; simply mountaineering indulgence, crossing the dry pathways of the ancient glaciers, tracing happy streams, and learning the habits of the birds and marmots in the groves and rocks.
Not long ago the small streams of Northern America and Northern Siberia were peopled with colonies of beavers, and up to the seventeenth century like colonies swarmed in Northern Russia. The flat lands of the four great continents are still covered with countless colonies of mice, ground-squirrels, marmots, and other rodents.
Sometimes, for miles together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen mounds that marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called prairie-dogs, from their squeaking bark.
At this season it would undoubtedly starve had not Nature provided against such a result, by giving it the power of sleeping throughout the winter months as well as the marmots themselves, which it does.
In Alaska I saw one of the common gray mountain marmots kept as a pet in an Indian family. When its master entered the house it always seemed glad, almost like a dog, and when cold or tired it snuggled up in a fold of his blanket with the utmost confidence.
We climbed a long hill and emerged on a sloping plain where marmots were bobbing in and out of their burrows like toy animals manipulated by a string. Two great flocks of demoiselle cranes were daintily catching grasshoppers not a hundred yards away. We wanted both the cranes for dinner and the marmots for specimens, but we dared not shoot.
Many of the species are very prolific, the females bringing forth eight, and even ten young at a birth. "The marmots are extremely shy and watchful creatures. Before going to feed, they usually reconnoitre the ground from the tops of their little mounds. Some species do not have such mounds, and for this purpose ascend any little hillock that may be near.
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