Yesterday was our first day of marmot habitat restoration this season!

Vancouver Island marmot habitat is created by snow. Avalanches and ‘snowpack creep’ scrape trees off steep hillsides creating and maintaining the open meadows where marmots live. The grasses and wildflowers that thrive in these meadows are the marmot’s food. As well, the open space makes it easy for the marmots to see predators making the slow, challenging walk upslope.  If they need to, the marmots have plenty of time to spot a predator and retreat to the safety of their burrow.

But as our climate warms, many of these mountains are getting less snow and more rain. Less snow means fewer and smaller avalanches and less energy in snowpack creep – and that means that the snow is less effective at scraping away trees.

The result is “elevational tree mitigation” – trees are starting to grow into marmot habitat, changing the meadows to young forest.

Which is where our fall habitat work comes in – or “alpine gardening” as volunteer Kat Schaumberg delightfully termed it. Our team, joined by Tim Kulchyski and Audra Stacey of Cowichan Tribes, spent the day restoring a marmot meadow on Green Mountain. That means cutting small trees and removing the limbs of larger trees so the marmots can again see downslope clearly and the meadow stays open. This material is then carried out of the meadow, and/or thatched so that it does not roll downslope dangerously.

It is not easy work. We wait until the marmots are in hibernation so we don’t steal a whole day or more of feeding opportunity.  Marmots have a short enough active season as it is! That gives us a short window of time before snow gets too deep to work safely.

Yesterday we a had a beautiful, snow free day. Today we are taking a maintenance and planning day, and then it is off to another mountain for more alpine gardening tomorrow!

This work is funded by the Gordon and Patricia Gray Animal Welfare Foundation and donations from people like you. We are incredibly grateful to the Gray Animal Welfare Foundation and everyone who makes this work for the marmots possible. Thank you!