Marmot Infestation

[MossRoad]

It has been a year since my last post about our marmot infestation. I was optimistic things were going to be better after trapping 155 of the critters last year; 37 out of a single barn door. It was a cold wet spring and I didn’t see many of the critters until a week or so ago. Then they were everywhere.

I got out my traps and went to work 5 days ago: in that time I have trapped an additional 12 marmots, 10 of them out of the same barn door. That makes 167 total in a little under two years, with 47 from a single barn door. It really is a bit mind-boggling.

I don’t know if this post is an update for those of you who are interested, or a statement of hopelessness. It looks like the only option is to keep doing what I am doing. Reminds me of the saying I heard somewhere: Only a fool keeps doing the same thing and expects a different outcome.

As I mentioned before, it reminds me of our mole infestation. Over 50 per year on 1 acre for 6-7 years, then they finally stopped. Now just a few.

But perhaps, as others have mentioned, if you trap out your marmots in a small area, there are going to be more waiting to move in.

 

[M59]

I moved onto a few acres in eastern Washington two years ago (moved from western WA—those who know will understand). We are located on a rocky shelf with a columnar basalt cliff rising maybe 50 feet in my front, and another basalt cliff 400 feet to my back, dropping off maybe 100 feet. There is a very thin layer of cultivatable soil, supplemented with trucked in dirt to actually grow things. To give you an idea of the thin soil, I have to pile rocks around the t-posts to hold up the chicken yard fence. There is a small orchard with cherry, apple, and plum trees, a berry patch with 120 feet of thornless raspberries, and a fairly large garden. I’ve got a few chickens for eggs, and am thinking about adding a few more animals eventually.

The foregoing is a lead into the actual problem. Yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) are an absolute infestation in the area. Also known as woodchucks, groundhogs, and whistle pigs in other parts of the country, these critters occupy nearly every cavity, crack and hole in the rocky landscape, and they relish my cultivated vegetation. The neighbors up the road, down the road, and up the cliff have all given up and signed a formal surrender.

I started out shooting the offenders, but quickly saw that my thin soil will not support a mass marmot graveyard, so I began live-trapping them, and hauling the catch off a few miles to a nature preserve. In the past year we have relocated 72. I have three traps in operation all the time, but haven’t seen a decline in the visible population. We have tried different baits, from green beans to cantaloupes, but find apple cores to be the perfect lure.

I thought about eating them, after all they are just big ground squirrels, and I grew up eating squirrels. 72 varmints at 10 lbs average comes out to 720 lbs, or a dressed weight of half that. But I can’t bring myself to put them on a plate. Marmots can be a source of several diseases, including bubonic plague, and are a banned meat in some locales.

So what else shall I do with this bountiful harvest? I don’t expect to surrender my little plot of ground to them, but I don’t know what I will do with an annual crop of 6 dozen. Fortunately, the nature preserve is several hundred acres of rocky basalt, so should be able to support additional residents, but I am just moving my problem elsewhere.

Does anybody have any suggestions, short of skinning them and selling the pelts, or eating them? Right now, the only thing I can see to do is make transporting marmots my retirement hobby.

I know, I know, this is a tractor forum. One day I can talk tractors, but right now this tops the list. Thanks for your help.

RockWrangler,

I am laughing too hard to type a response to your infestation. Having spent considerable time in Bellevue and the surrounding mountains I know exactly what you are faced with. They seem to infest every nook and cranny and their damn fast when they want to be.

I suggest a poured concrete pad over your entire property and fake grass on top.

 

[jyoutz]

Build a fence around your garden and place wire mesh about 18” into the ground around the base of the fence. Be happy that the fenced in area is your territory.

 

[M59]

RockRangler,

Now that I have stopped laughing at your description of marmots running rampant in your garden, I took the time to read some more entries.

If your still interested in a pellet gun, I use the following on my chipmunk & squirrel population. Very effective at 800+ fps with 22 caliber pellet and much lower noise than 22 LR at a reasonable price. I have had this for more than 10 years and thousands of pellets with no reliability issues.

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I recently became aware of the following for rodent control. Contrapest doc attached.
Contrapest recently arrived on market and is aimed at mice and rats but might work on marmots. It is birth control for both male and female rodents. Might give you some breathing room by controlling how rapidly they repopulate while you trap and remove. I presume any marmots on neighboring properties who decided to spend a randy night at a lady marmot's den on your property can have all the fun they want but no new little ones to contend with.

Hope this helps

 

[MossRoad]

Looks like you don’t have many options other than make the place less attractive to marmots. Yikes.

Population threats​

There are currently no significant threats to Yellow-bellied marmots. Some people consider them a pest, but human hunting does not affect the stability of populations. However, habitat destruction and pollution are always a threat.

 

[MossRoad]

Might want to look into a Cairn Terrier (Like Toto). They were bred for that job. Go into the cairns (rocks) and flush out badgers and foxes for the big dogs to kill. If they’re fierce enough to flush badgers, marmot teeth and claws would not be as big of a concern.

We had one back in the 80s-90s. Tenacious little dog. Smart as heck. Easily trained. Good in the house. Great with kids and cats. Loved to chase small animals like rabbits, possums, raccoons, etc. Typical terrier. Neat coat of double fur takes a little special grooming. Protects them from rain.

Maybe a Cairn or two harassing the marmots all day would make the area undesirable for them and they’d move along.

Also, they are great car/truck dogs, and small enough to take when you travel, as you mentioned.

 

[Rockbadchild]

my suggestion is to get two dogs … and problems solve.

as a kid we had groundhog everywhere and my dad got a black Lab, she got bit pretty bad on the first encounter then she went on a mission to exterminate them and she succeeded then moved on to the muskrats she had trouble with them but then we got a other black lab and they started to work together to get the muskrats again with great success.

 

[RockWrangler]

I guess I get my entertainment in unusual ways. I happened to look out the front window this morning and saw a FedEx truck parked up at the road and the driver walking down my driveway with a package in his arms. He suddenly stopped and turned toward my side yard. When I opened the front door, he looked over at me and said, “It sounds like a couple geese fighting over there.”

He didn’t look like he was going to continue walking to me, so I walked to him, explaining that we don’t get many, if any, geese up on this rocky shelf. I went to the fence to see what the ruckus was about, and he followed.

There, under the plum tree, a couple of the biggest boar marmots I have ever seen were growling out the strangest sounds I have yet heard from the creatures. It wasn’t exactly a roar, but it wasn’t a squeak or whistle like you usually hear. They reminded me of a couple of sumo wrestlers, as they bashed belly-to-belly and tooth-to-tooth, in a bare knuckle contest over my orchard or some hidden female.

I told the driver it was marmots, not geese, making all that noise. I pointed to the basalt cliff 100 feet away across the road, and said they come down to my little oasis to recreate and procreate. He replied, “I didn’t know they had beavers up here.”

By this time the marmots noticed us a few feet away and one of them took off while the other fatso turned toward us in a position of challenge. I repeated to the driver that these are marmots, not beavers. From his quizzical look, I could see he didn’t know what I was talking about, so I said: groundhogs, whistle pigs. He nodded and said, “I’m from Bakersfield, CA. We don’t have those there.”

We reminisced a bit about my time in the High Desert in CA, and he went on his way. Now I am wondering whether CA would like some of my marmots. Anyway …

 

[Powereng]

Hunting woodchucks has to be one of my favorite hunting activities. My neighbors are large cabbage and pepper farmers. They start the plants in their greenhouses, then transfer the young plants to their field. Woodchucks will will go right down the rows and gorge themselves on the newly planted plants. I have a 1 acre yard, but have free rein over their hundreds of acres to shoot woodchucks. They love me for it. There is a large dump about 5 miles away that has attracted turkey vultures over the years. Any woodchuck I shoot I just leave and the vultures will have it cleaned up by the next day.

 

[the old grind]

Powereng, please share some nomenclature on your 'harvesting' device, model, caliber, optic, etc. Asking for a friend.