PICTURE A CHUBBY, HAIRY CREATURE that looks like a tailless
squirrel, popping up from the talus on the high Olympic slopes.
It calls at you in short, high-pitched bursts, sounding like a
kid with a neon whistle at a warehouse rave. The animal is a
dusty yellow, the size of a well-fed house cat, and sports the
paunch of a middle-age couch potato—this is the Godzilla of
squirrels. It’s Marmota olympus, our own special marmot. This
summer, more than 100 volunteers will scour Olympic National
Park for evidence of the creatures. When a grad student
discovered several years ago that the marmot population here was
dwindling, park staff were faced with an ecological mystery and
few resources to solve it. Enter the marmot monitors.
"Volunteers augment the funding crunches," says park biologist
Patti Happe. "We can’t keep on top of everything." Buoyed by the
Washington National Park Fund, last year more than 80 volunteers
turned weeklong backcountry trips into scientific excursions.
They checked 260 sites in the park‚Ä