Canada has just five endemic land mammals — mammals found nowhere else in the world. The Vancouver Island marmot is one of them. Marmots have run wild over North America for millennia. When sea levels fell during a glacial period, the marmots that walked over to Vancouver Island on land bridges were ultimately left to evolve in the mountains when the sea levels rose again. Fast forward several millennia, and today these marmots boast their own unique DNA, culture and set of challenges. 

While mainland marmots are often hunted as pests, Van Isle’s version is no varmint. Found in the subalpine regions stretching from Strathcona Provincial Park south to the Nanaimo Lakes, their deep chocolate-brown fur and white nose patches set them apart from their lighter-coloured cousins. Like all marmots, the Vancouver Island version has prominent teeth, sharp claws and robust shoulder and leg muscles. They need those muscles to dig deep burrows and escape tunnels in the rocky meadows in these mountains, where they spend up to eight months a year hibernating. Adults measure 65 to 70 centimetres from their pointy noses to the tips of their flat, bushy tails and weigh up to 7.5 kilograms, about the size of a very hefty domestic cat.

They bulk up in the short summer season by feasting on more than 40 species of grasses, herbs and wildflowers, then shed up to one-third of their mass in hibernation. Researchers believe these chubby survivors hibernate together in groups called colonies. And when they leave these burrows and tunnel out through metres of snow each spring, a world of danger awaits.

When the first people arrived on Vancouver Island, it’s probable they found a thriving population of the social species flourishing from tip to tip of the Vancouver Island Ranges. Hunters would have definitely heard them — with a piercing whistle and five distinct vocalizations (the most of any marmot species), Vancouver Island marmots are far from silent. However, capturing one is no mean feat. Which brings us back to the parking lot of Mount Washington Alpine Resort, the Marmot Recovery Foundation and Lester’s trusty antennas. 

In the late 1990s, when the foundation was conceived, biologists estimated there were just 100 marmots living in the wild, and the population was crashing fast. Left alone, the Vancouver Island marmot was destined for extinction within a matter of years.

To know how to help a marmot, you must be able to find one. And that is why, in the decades since the Marmot Recovery Foundation was launched, a coordinated effort to save the marmot has included both a captive breeding program and an ongoing effort to track the elusive mammals — implanting marmots with transmitters, then following their progress through the data their trackers send out. That’s why we’re standing here today, antenna aloft, waiting for a signal. 

Lester estimates that around a third of Vancouver Island marmots at most — both wild and captive-bred — have trackers. Each tracker — a heat-sensitive transmitter shaped like a small flashlight about eight centimetres long — is surgically inserted into the marmot’s abdomen. Collars with transmitters are not an option because they would restrict a marmot’s thick neck or slide off its narrow head. All captive- bred marmots are implanted with trackers before they are released, and a Marmot Recovery Foundation vet works with the larger team to locate, trap and insert a tracker into about a dozen wild marmots each summer. The operation takes place in the alpine — in a small surgical tent barely large enough for two humans and a marmot. It’s not ideal, but it’s a lot less stressful to the marmots than transporting them to civilization and then back out again.

Without trackers and telemetry, researchers would have little chance of locating even one marmot in the wild. When you’re a food source, you’re always on the lookout, adept at disappearing at the slightest hint of danger.

The captive breeding program, launched in 1997, has become “a life raft for the species” according to Gourlay. Between 1997 and 2003, some 55 marmots were brought into captivity, kicking off the celebrated breeding program that led to today’s successes. Marmots were sent to four separate breeding facilities, including the Calgary and Toronto zoos. The crowning achievement of this coordinated breeding program is the Tony Barrett Mount Washington Marmot Recovery Centre, named after the foundation executive director who led the fundraising for the centre. Sadly, he passed away unexpectedly before construction was completed.

Built in 2001 on the grounds of the Mount Washington Alpine Resort, the centre is a permanently quarantined safe space where marmot pups are raised to supplement the wild population. As we sneak up on the fenced indoor-outdoor pens, I finally spot one marmot, and then two, and then four. These pups are the promise for the future, desperately needed to lend the wild population the boost to not only survive but grow. 

Since 2003, the captive breeding program has bred and released 576 marmots. There are now 101 marmots and 15-plus breeding pairs at the Tony Barrett centre. Around 50 of the marmots housed there will be released to the wild this summer. There are also 10 breeding pairs at the Calgary Zoo and eight pairs at the Toronto Zoo. 

Over the past two decades, the captive-bred marmots have been spread between a number of key sites, with 70 per cent heading to Nanaimo Lakes and Strathcona, roughly 25 per cent to Mount Washington, and limited numbers to the areas around Mount Cain, Mount Schoen and Clayoquot Sound. Foundation staff have also periodically moved wild-born marmots between sites to shore up select colonies. “Vancouver Island marmots are in a precarious place because they don’t breed ‘like rabbits,’” says Lester, explaining that females often skip a year between litters. “These marmots are in a tough environment, and it’s hard for them to reproduce. We just want to help them.” 

To help boost the captive-bred marmots’ chances of survival, the foundation pioneered a “stepping-stone release” approach to give these inexperienced marmots a more gradual introduction to a free-roaming life in the mountains. “We started using Mount Washington as the boot camp,” says Gourlay, “where we’d release captive-bred marmots to the hill. We’d allow them to live and hibernate their first year in a captive, relatively safe environment.” 

The theory is that captive-bred marmots are naive when first released. They don’t have appropriate hibernation cycles or the skills to select the best hibernation and burrow sites or perhaps to detect and avoid predators in the wild. Once the marmots have obtained these skills in the more sheltered environment of Mount Washington, they have a better chance of thriving at colonies like Strathcona, which has fewer established burrows and is at a higher elevation so endures longer winters.

The presence of the ski hill at the Mount Washington “boot camp” is actually a bonus, as it means fewer predators. That gives the captive-born marmots a better chance of surviving long enough to learn from their more experienced counterparts — how to spot a predator, whistle an alarm call and disappear almost instantly when it hears one. This stepping-stone approach “has been one of the main reasons why we’ve been able to successfully re-establish a few colonies in Strathcona Provincial Park, where the marmots were historically extirpated,” says Gourlay.

When the marmots are released, researchers try to make it as stress-free as possible so the mammals stay in the neighbourhood — and find their wilder counterparts. “That’s part of the major animal management, trying to ensure that these guys can find each other,” says Lester. As Al Green once sang, it’s better if we stay together. With marmots, that’s easier said than done.