{"id":58239,"date":"2018-04-12T06:30:06","date_gmt":"2018-04-12T12:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=58239"},"modified":"2018-04-12T09:46:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-12T15:46:08","slug":"five-yellow-bellied-marmot-pups-investigating-their-new-rocky-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/12\/five-yellow-bellied-marmot-pups-investigating-their-new-rocky-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Yellow-bellied Marmot Pups Investigating Their New Rocky World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three days ago I spent 35 minutes photographing most of a large family of Yellow-bellied Marmots. When I first arrived at their den entrance in a pile of rocks there were 6 of them, 5 young pups and a single adult, but as soon as the adult could see I was no threat to the pups it wandered off into the grasses (presumably to feed but I lost track of it). Over the next half hour or so I took almost 900 shots of the pups as they scurried over the rock pile and investigated their new world.<\/p>\n

I had more fun than should have been legal.<\/p>\n

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One of the pups was smaller and grayer in the face\u00a0than the others and I’m not sure why since I assume marmots are born as a litter at about the same time. Perhaps it was just the runt of the litter.<\/p>\n

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I managed to catch the pup at bottom in the middle of a yawn which showed off its impressively long chisel-like lower\u00a0incisors. Their incisors are rootless and grow continually so they must be worn down by gnawing at about\u00a0the same speed as they grow or the result will be severely overgrown teeth (which is often fatal when it happens in rodents).<\/p>\n

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For the first few minutes I was with them (and\u00a0after the adult had left)\u00a0the pups were a little wary of the presence of my pickup and this one just sat there and watched me for\u00a0a few moments. But that didn’t last long and soon they were\u00a0all scurrying\u00a0about as they checked out the rock pile and each other.<\/p>\n

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They did a lot of snuggling and cuddling\u00a0with each other in its\u00a0various forms. They seemed to enjoy the close presence of their litter-mates so after wandering independently for\u00a0a\u00a0while they would usually come back together in groups of 2-3 to regain the apparent comfort and security they were\u00a0accustomed to after being raised together in their burrow.<\/p>\n

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I never did get any images of all five siblings together that I liked but here’s three of them.<\/p>\n

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Whenever they came together again “kissing and snuggling” seemed to be the order of the day.<\/p>\n

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Some of this\u00a0behavior was so prevalent and human-like\u00a0I\u00a0had to force myself to resist being anthropomorphic about it. They were constantly putting things in their mouths or very nearly so, including twigs, portions of rocks,\u00a0clumps of dried grasses and even parts of each other. At one point\u00a0I photographed a pup as it took the snout of a sibling into its mouth. I suspect\u00a0this behavior\u00a0is\u00a0the “oral mouthing stage” that many young mammals\u00a0go through, including humans.<\/p>\n

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And when they weren’t mouthing things they were smelling them.<\/p>\n

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This wasn’t my best shot of the morning but I had to include it because this little guy reminds me of a koala. How about it, EC – agree or disagree?<\/p>\n

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Despite the wire in the background I wanted to include this photo because I like the walking pose and tail position. And the icing on the cake\u00a0(not an appetizing analogy I know) was the marmot dropping on the rock. I guess that’s the biologist in me coming out…<\/p>\n

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I caught this little fella as “he” was scratching below his left ear but I didn’t have enough shutter speed (1\/640 sec) to get that blazingly fast scratchin’ foot sharp (apologies for not including all of my image techs but I simply ran out of time). This is one of those cases where I think a little\u00a0motion blur is both appropriate and acceptable and perhaps even preferred.<\/p>\n

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I think I did pretty well to get almost to the end of\u00a0this long post without using the word “cute”, but dammit these guys were cuteness personified. More than most images I take I’m dreading\u00a0culling\u00a0866 photos of these pups down to a manageable number.<\/p>\n

Many\u00a0of them are going to be hard to say goodbye to…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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I had more fun with these pups than should have been legal.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,3953],"tags":[1549,3957,1532,3222,2944,3956,3954,3955,557,311,1512],"class_list":["post-58239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mammals","category-yellow-bellied-marmots","tag-babies","tag-dropping","tag-feces","tag-incisors","tag-marmota-flaviventris","tag-oral-mouthing-stage","tag-pups","tag-runt-of-the-litter","tag-teeth","tag-utah-2","tag-yellow-bellied-marmot"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-1238-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-f9l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}