Vancouver Island Marmot

(Marmota vancouverensis)

These marmots, about the size of a domestic cat and weighing between five and fifteen pounds, are extraordinarily attractive. With their thick chocolate-brown fur, white muzzles, and engaging expressions, they look just like characters in a Walt Disney classic. Historically, they lived on Vancouver Island in the sub-alpine meadows that are created and maintained by avalanches, snow-creep, storms, and fire. Such meadows tend to be rare on Vancouver Island, which is why these marmots have never become more plentiful.

It was not until 1910, when some were killed to provide museum specimens, that the Vancouver Island marmot was recognized by science as a species. After this, confirmed sightings were rare until 1973, when Doug Heard of the University of British Columbia began studying marmot behavior in two colonies. Several years later, local naturalists began systematic population counts. And in 1987, Andrew Bryant began a study that, originally planned as a short-term master’s project, has already lasted more than twenty years! It has involved him, deeply, in efforts to prevent the Vancouver marmot from toppling over the brink into oblivion.

Meet Andrew Bryant, Marmot Man

In December 2007 I called Andrew, who lives on a small farm near the city of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and we talked—about marmots—for a long time. As with so many of the other individuals featured in this book, I longed to sit down with him and have a face-to-face conversation. And in November 2008, I was able to do just that over a quiet lunch at the hotel where I was staying in Vancouver. Originally I had planned to visit the marmots themselves—but it was the wrong time of year, and they were all hibernating. In fact, they hibernate for many months each year. So he brought me a gift of a stuffed toy marmot instead! And in fact, having the chance to sit and talk with the man who has worked so hard to save them was, in a way, even better than seeing the marmots. For he is a man after my own heart, with a great sense of humor, an obvious passion for his work, and a deep love for the marmots to which he has devoted so much of his life.

Andrew Bryant has devoted his life work to protecting these enchanting mammals. Shown here with Barbara at Pat Lake, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.(Andrew Bryant)

Clear-Cutting on Vancouver Island

In the spring, Andrew told me, young marmots, during their “teenage years” (usually when they are two years old), traditionally left their mountaintop homes and traveled to the tops of nearby mountains where they bred and lived for the rest of their lives. But by the time he began his study, years of unregulated clear-cutting of the forests during the 1970 and 1980s had led to a change in marmot behavior. The timber companies, inadvertently, had produced new habitats similar to the marmots’ preferred natural one—treeless regions that are open, covered with grasses and other plants to eat, and with good soil in which the marmots can make their dens.

And so many of the adolescents no longer bothered to journey to the next mountaintop, instead colonizing the clear-cut areas. The additional habitat enabled their population to boom, likely doubling from 150 to 300–350 by the end of the decade. “If it didn’t influence predator populations, clear-cut logging would likely be beneficial for marmots,” Andrew told me.

However, the marmots preferred to use logging roads to move about in their new habitat, which made them easy prey for the many cougars, wolves, and golden eagles that also lived there, especially where the trees had started to grow back, thus providing cover. The rich new areas, Andrew told me, “became ‘population sink,’ since few of the marmots who moved there survived for long.” And so the wild population plummeted. By 1998, there were only about seventy marmots in the wild, and five years later the number had dropped to thirty. Ironically, a contributor to this final decline was the collection of marmots for captive breeding programs—fifty-six wild-born marmots were taken into captivity between 1997 and 2004.

“If It Hadn’t Been for the Logging Companies …”

In the early days of his study, Andrew was heading up the mountains on a nearly daily basis to observe the marmots on the privately owned logging land they inhabited. He would often sign in, at around 3:30 or 4 AM, as “Mr. Marmot, heading up Green Mountain.” As the months went by, the loggers became curious as to what he was doing on their mountain in the early hours, and one morning Wayne O’Keefe, a logger who worked for MacMillan Bloedel Limited, decided to drive up and see what “Mr. Marmot” was up to.

“All of the elements were perfect that morning,” said Andrew. “I was able to tranquilize a female and tag her, and get a photo of Wayne holding the marmot with his wonderful Day-Glo safety vest and hard hat glistening in the light. The man said, ‘Wow, this is cool—you should come down and talk to the guys over lunch.’ So I did.”

Wayne O’Keefe, a logger who worked for MacMillan Bloedel Limited, holding Iris. This was the moment that led to major changes in logging practice to benefit the Vancouver Island marmot. (Andrew Bryant)

The talk was a big success, and led to his meeting with first the logging foreman, then the woods manager, and finally with Stan Coleman, a highly placed manager within the company. “I found myself in the boardroom of a logging company, armed with photos and slides and maps, and told the man what I thought I knew about marmots and the effects of logging.” After listening patiently, Stan asked, “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I told him he could take ethical responsibility for the animals now, or have their demise on his hands when the species is lost,” Andrew said. After that meeting, Stan became one of the marmots’ greatest advocates, encouraging the company to do all it could to support marmot conservation efforts.

Andrew loves to point out that, while the Vancouver Island marmot was the first species to be officially listed as endangered in Canada, and was also listed as endangered by the IUCN and by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, these listings “ultimately did little or nothing to help marmots—but the love-of-the-landscape by a local woodcutter eventually led to something that did.” A donation of a million dollars Canadian helped establish the Marmot Recovery Foundation (MRF), a nonprofit organization to which Andrew continues to serve as scientific adviser.

The lands were later purchased by Weyerhaeuser in 1999 and subsequently resold. Today the marmot habitat is owned by Island Timberlands and Timber West Forests. So far all of the landowners have honored the commitment to marmot protection in the form of ongoing financial support. “And the great irony of it all,” Andrew says, “is that if it hadn’t been for the logging companies, we never would have gotten started!” He told me that, while logging still continues, there are protected areas now; as the forests regenerate, conservation measures can be implemented.

The Recovery Work Began in Earnest

The Marmot Recovery Team estimated that a total population of four to six hundred marmots would be necessary, dispersed in three separate locations on Vancouver Island, to constitute full “recovery” of the species. From 1997 through 2001, the team drew up a recovery and reintroduction plan that included a captive breeding program to be implemented by the Toronto Zoo, Calgary Zoo, the privately owned Mountain View Breeding and Conservation Centre in Langley (near Vancouver), and a specially designed facility constructed at Mount Washington on Vancouver Island. Release sites were selected where the habitat was appropriate and predation less prevalent. The first pups were born in the breeding program in 2000, and the first of these were released into the wild in 2003.

Field observations after release showed that captive-born marmots had retained natural predator-recognition skills, often whistling to alert other marmots when a cougar or wolf approached, or when an eagle flew overhead. In 2004, the team achieved something of a milestone when a captive-born marmot mated with a wild female, and the following year the first litter from a captive-born pair was recorded. They were living in a fully protected natural habitat where an earlier colony had become extinct.

When I met Andrew, he told me that 2008 had been a hugely successful year for the marmots. The captive breeding program had “the largest litter ever recorded—nine pups weaned—and fifty-seven marmots were released into the wild.” And eleven litters totaling thirty-three pups were recorded in the wild, most of them from captive-born parents. As of October, there were 190 individuals in captivity and approximately 130 in the wild. “The grand total of 320 marmots is a far cry from the estimated total of 70 individuals in 1998,” Andrew said triumphantly. Moreover, these individuals are distributed over a dozen mountains—whereas five years before, no more than five mountains had been occupied.

Each wild pup is tagged, each individual of the population is known—all of them by number, many still by name. And the genetic profile of each individual is known, too. The Marmot Recovery Team is justly proud of the fact that genetic variation has been maintained—that not one allele has been lost since the start of the captive breeding program (although some genetic variability was undoubtedly lost when whole colonies became extinct).

The recovery plan requires captive marmots to be released each year to boost the wild populations until a self-sustaining population of four to six hundred marmots is achieved—which should be sometime during the next fifteen to twenty years, Andrew believes, although he points out that many factors have to be considered in a long-term perspective—such as numbers of predators, continuing support, and global warming. Nevertheless, all in all he remains highly optimistic that the Vancouver Island marmot will be fully restored to its traditional habitats on the mountaintops.

Oprah Winfrey, Franklin, and All the Rest

And of course there are the marmots themselves, each with his or her own personality and contribution to make. When Andrew began writing up his data for his degree, his supervisors chastised him for using names instead of numbers to identify individuals. He told me that, for him, names were easier to remember—something I, of course, agree with! He knew the marmots as individuals: “I knew where they lived, I knew what they did, and I knew how to find them,” he told me. He named his favorite female Oprah Winfrey, and he knew her for ten years, during which time “she had eleven pups before she was killed, probably by a wolf.” Then there was Franklin, who was tagged as a (nameless) pup, monitored for a while, but by the following year had vanished. Five years later he turned up, alive and well, on Mount Franklin—hence his name. “Since then,” Andrew told me, “Franklin has sired a whole gaggle of pups.”

Andrew is unstinting in his praise of all who have helped make this recovery effort possible. “I had the luxury of some rather tall shoulders to stand on and a large number of supporters. More importantly, without the dedication of a huge and very talented array of people—staff and volunteers—dreams would have remained just that. I can’t stress this enough … it is teamwork that has given this species a potential future!”

But no one has done more to ensure the survival of these delightful creatures than Andrew himself. I asked what kept him going during the past twenty years, through the downtimes when things go wrong He smiled as he answered, simply: “I truly love those little guys. They are real survivors: They have learned to live where few creatures dare.”