In her debut as a book author, Josephine Woolington turns back the clock to examine events that have shaped Pacific Northwest wildlife in an effort to provide a deeper sense of place for those who call this unique and beautiful region home. Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest sheds light on the diverse species whose populations are slowly declining. Woolington previously worked at several newspapers in Oregon and is also a musician and music educator. She lives in her hometown of Portland with her love and their fur child, Gladys the cat. 

Here is an excerpt as it appears in the book

Suzanne Cox Griffin assumed Olympic marmot populations were healthy. Given that more than 90 percent of their home is protected within Olympic National Park, the nation’s fourth largest national park, she wasn’t worried. For her dissertation at the University of Montana in the early 2000s, she initially set out to study how climate change could fragment marmots’ alpine habitat and ability to establish new colonies in the future. She soon realized, though, that marmots were already gone from places where they had always been. Many colonies were extinct.

Park biologists first learned about population declines from community members who asked about the marmots. They described to park staff, who also had assumed the marmots were fine, common colonies in the southern reaches of the park that were no longer there. No one knew why.

During the winter, Griffin knew where marmots slept because she previously implanted radio transmitters inside some of them to get better data. One year, she noticed coyote tracks in the snow leading from one burrow to another. “They were checking, ‘Are the marmots up yet?’” Griffin says.

Once the marmots emerged, adult females were dying before they would normally have babies or begin nursing in June. Females were out in foggy weather and in the evening when other marmots were cozied up inside their burrows. “They were acting in a very easy-to-catch way for the coyotes,” Griffin says.

Scientists studied nearly one thousand scat samples across the marmots’ range. The majority belonged to coyotes. They hunted marmots in most regions of the park, the researchers found, and were marmots’ primary predators. Scat also lay around recently extinct colonies, like those near Hurricane Ridge.

Some burrows that used to support marmot families are now empty. Of the 28 colonies observed since the 1950s, 40 percent are gone. At least five colonies went extinct sometime in the early 2000s near Klahhane Ridge.

They’re not found at Deer Park anymore. Most are gone from the southern part of the park too, and no one has observed marmots colonizing new meadows in the entire park.

“I wasn’t expecting coyotes,” says Griffin, who studied the marmots for nearly ten years and helped the park establish a volunteer marmot monitoring program to track their populations. Biologists don’t know how many marmots live in the park. Marmot researcher David P. Barash estimated in the 1960s that there might be about two thousand, but it’s hard to know precise numbers of animals. The park says there might be less than one thousand marmots now.

Marmots here evolved with relatively few predators. They learned to live with cougars, bobcats, and golden eagles over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Wolves typically didn’t venture above sixteen hundred feet, so marmots didn’t have many encounters with canines. They’re relatively naive when it comes to coyotes.

When loggers clear-cut the lowland forests surrounding the park, coyotes came in. They’re not forest animals and prefer to move through a habitat that’s open, like a freshly logged forest. In the 1800s and early 1900s, newcomers to the area also thought gray wolves — who kept coyote populations in check and perhaps out of the park — posed a threat to their livestock. They killed so many that they went extinct by 1935. People reported the first coyotes in higher elevations in the Olympics soon afterward in the 1940s, which was also when marmots experienced a similar die-off.

Coyotes, it’s thought, do well in low-snowpack years. When marmot populations declined in the 1940s, the park saw several unusually low-snow years. Snowpack ebbs and flows over decades as weather patterns change, but overall trends show a sharp decline in the last eighty years, with the lowest recorded snow levels in the 1990s and early 2000s when Griffin researched the marmots. “What we do know about marmot populations is consistent with coyotes being harder on them in low-snow years than high-snow years,” she says.

Snowpack was relatively higher in subsequent years, which is also when the marmot population appeared stable. Surveyors from 2010 to 2015 even noticed marmots in colonies thought to be extinct. The park doesn’t have any recent data analyzed to know how the marmots have since fared. Biologists are busy removing goats, reintroducing fishers, and researching martens — an ever-lengthy to-do list that keeps pushing marmots down on the park’s priorities. Griffin’s work, which is twenty years old, is the most recent in-depth look at the marmots, and the park’s wildlife biologist Patti Happe says it’s tough to get funding to do more research. So far, recent anecdotal reports of the marmots don’t seem good, she says. 

Researchers and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recommended that the park consider killing coyotes to save the marmots. When just one coyote was killed in the park in the early 2000s after threatening a child near Hurricane Ridge, marmot survival rates in nearby colonies jumped from 60 percent to 80 percent the next summer. Happe says it isn’t feasible for the park to control the coyote population, and that reintroducing wolves is a more likely solution.

 

A wildlife biologist who confirmed wolves were gone from the peninsula in the 1930s also recommended that they be returned to the valleys once the national park was created in 1938. A 1974 management plan and 1981 National Park Service advisory board recommended staff start planning reintroduction programs. Decades have now passed, and wolves still aren’t back. 

Wolves have naturally made their way back to Washington state, though they haven’t crossed into areas west of Interstate 5 yet, and it’s not guaranteed that they will. Reintroducing them remains on the park’s to-do list, but such an endeavor will be slow to navigate through the muck of bureaucracy and politics.

Marmots might not have time to wait.