If you have ever wandered around Mt. Washington in the summer months, you may have come across a plywood box with a hole in the front and wondered what you were looking at. If that’s the case, you discovered a Vancouver Island marmot nest box! Vancouver Island marmots are currently bred at the Toronto and Calgary Zoos, which have housed and bred marmots for the recovery program since 1997 and 1998, respectively. When in captivity, marmots don’t have access to the deep soils in which they would typically dig burrows; instead, they are given nest boxes to use. Captive marmots use nest boxes just like wild marmots use burrows – they sleep in them, raise their young in them, and hide in them.

Nest boxes actually have two holes, one in the front and one in the back. So when captive-bred marmots are released to the wild, they are released into a nest box that is connected to a true marmot burrow. When field crew install nest boxes, they line them with bedding used by the marmots in captivity so that the nest box will smell like home, and they provide a few snacks to help them get through the first day. And as soon as the last marmot is released through the nest box and into the burrow, the entrance door is temporarily blocked by a piece of wood or a rock (as shown in the photo). This usually happens for just a few minutes, to encourage the marmots to explore the burrow and learn that it is safe before they start exploring the rest of their new habitat. Captive-bred marmots may continue to use their nest box to access this burrow, but they will no longer sleep in it – once they are in the wild, captive-bred marmots sleep underground, too.

The nest boxes used in 2015 have now been removed from the wild in preparation for winter. But if your eyes are sharp enough to see a nest box in the future, be sure to look out for its new residents – Vancouver Island marmots!

Photo credit: Patrick Reid.