California’s 3764 yellow-bellied marmot records belong almost entirely to one mountain range. The Sierra Nevada holds the great bulk of them, with Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park leading and the high country of Tulare, Tuolumne, Mono, and Inyo counties carrying the record from Lake Tahoe’s side canyons south to the range’s highest crest.
A talus specialist with a short summer
A marmot needs two things close together: a boulder field or rock outcrop to den beneath and a green meadow to feed in. It grazes grasses and forbs through the mountain summer, and the colonies that result are a fixture of Sierra meadows, where a fat, grizzled animal sunning on a warm slab is often the first large mammal a hiker sees. John Muir Wilderness, Kings Canyon National Park, Desolation Wilderness, and Ansel Adams Wilderness all hold clusters of records in exactly this kind of granite country.
An eight-month disappearance
The calendar of this record is the sharpest in the state’s mammal atlas. Marmots are true hibernators, spending up to eight months of the year in a burrow with body temperature and heart rate dropped to a fraction of their summer levels. California’s counts sit near zero from November through February, begin climbing with the snowmelt in May, and peak from June through August, when the animals feed almost constantly to build the fat that has to carry them through the next long winter.
Status in California
NatureServe lists the yellow-bellied marmot as SNR, Unranked, in California, though the species is native to the state and globally secure. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
