Palouse River
A grizzled brown marmot with a bushy tail sprawled belly down on the sun warmed rock, surveyed his Palouse kingdom and ignored us as we photographed.
Sea Bird guests rode buses from our Zodiac landing site upward onto rim rock benches where yellow-bellied marmots live and where Palouse Falls plunges 184 feet into a canyon carved by Pleistocene floods.
This family of marmots literally lives on the edge at Palouse Falls State Park in southeast Washington, close by the lower Snake River. The Corps of Discovery journals first made this plump two-foot rodent known to science along with 43 other animals never before described or collected, including mountain goat, prong-horned antelope and prairie dog.
On Aug. 20, 1805, Lewis and Clark mentioned the thick fur marmot robes worn by the Shoshone people, and later they saw a pet marmot the natives called “moonax.”
Our basking marmot was on a skinny projection with a 400-foot sheer plunge beneath it and a cyclone fence behind to secure the people parade that daily, in spring, entertains the marmot and its family.
The marmots at Palouse Falls use rock fissures that form galleries. They extend deep beneath the rim edge to join in a grass- lined communal chamber where they snooze in a heap for seven months. They only emerge between April and July, or while the land is green. The long summer torpor or aestivation is followed without a break by winter hibernation.
In the burst of spring green dining the marmots double their weight, but one is always on guard to provide an “early warning system” of piercing whistles should a Golden eagle or Red-tailed hawk circle their canyon rim. The marmots have used the same foraging route so regularly along the rim that there is a discernible marmot trail.
This spring the marmots have new neighbors. A pair of Peregrine falcons have an aerie in the basalt cliff directly across from the marmot colony.
A grizzled brown marmot with a bushy tail sprawled belly down on the sun warmed rock, surveyed his Palouse kingdom and ignored us as we photographed.
Sea Bird guests rode buses from our Zodiac landing site upward onto rim rock benches where yellow-bellied marmots live and where Palouse Falls plunges 184 feet into a canyon carved by Pleistocene floods.
This family of marmots literally lives on the edge at Palouse Falls State Park in southeast Washington, close by the lower Snake River. The Corps of Discovery journals first made this plump two-foot rodent known to science along with 43 other animals never before described or collected, including mountain goat, prong-horned antelope and prairie dog.
On Aug. 20, 1805, Lewis and Clark mentioned the thick fur marmot robes worn by the Shoshone people, and later they saw a pet marmot the natives called “moonax.”
Our basking marmot was on a skinny projection with a 400-foot sheer plunge beneath it and a cyclone fence behind to secure the people parade that daily, in spring, entertains the marmot and its family.
The marmots at Palouse Falls use rock fissures that form galleries. They extend deep beneath the rim edge to join in a grass- lined communal chamber where they snooze in a heap for seven months. They only emerge between April and July, or while the land is green. The long summer torpor or aestivation is followed without a break by winter hibernation.
In the burst of spring green dining the marmots double their weight, but one is always on guard to provide an “early warning system” of piercing whistles should a Golden eagle or Red-tailed hawk circle their canyon rim. The marmots have used the same foraging route so regularly along the rim that there is a discernible marmot trail.
This spring the marmots have new neighbors. A pair of Peregrine falcons have an aerie in the basalt cliff directly across from the marmot colony.
