Montana holds 504 yellow-bellied marmot records, and the map is exactly what a rock-loving mountain rodent should produce. The heaviest counties, Carbon, Missoula, Sanders, Ravalli, Gallatin, and Park, wrap around the state’s great ranges, with Glacier National Park, the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, and Gallatin National Forest among the most recorded places.
A marmot of rocks, not just of peaks
Yellow-bellied marmots den and raise their young in burrows dug beneath boulders, talus, and outcrops, feeding in the grassy meadows and slopes around them. That ties them to broken rock at almost any elevation. Records reach from high country in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness down to rimrock in Yellowstone County and the rocky breaks along the Missouri River, where Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge gives the species an eastern Montana foothold far from the alpine zone.
Eight months underground
The record runs quiet from November through February and swells from May through July, and that is the marmot’s real calendar. Yellow-bellied marmots are among the deepest hibernators of any North American mammal, spending up to eight months a year in a burrow. The short active season is a rush of feeding and fattening, with pups emerging in early summer and sentinel marmots whistling alarms from lookout rocks, the sound that gives the group its whistle pig nickname.
Status in Montana
NatureServe ranks the yellow-bellied marmot S5, Secure, in Montana, and the species is native across its Montana range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state, and the IUCN lists it globally as Least Concern.
Full species profile
