WHAT THE.......!!!

This week was all about mysteries my first came via email from my parents a picture of perfectly cleaned off bones which nightly appear on the porch. The bones themselves were tiny about the size of  squirrel and since they have a ton of hawks in the area I surmised the hawk had offed a squirrel and then some other rodent was chewing the bones to get the nutrients from them and since the porch is nice and sheltered what better place to have an nighttime snack.

The second one well that got the whole office buzzing and even made it into our Morning Report which goes out to all staff members so we know about major things happening in the park.  I first heard about the "thing" while working in the visitor's center one afternoon, the exchange when something like this:

                  Visitor: "Have you guys figured out what the thing is up at Cub Lake?"
                   Me:      "I haven't heard about anything unusual up there."

And with that the visitor walked away giving me nothing more to go on.  I gave it no more thought until Tuesday of this week when Leslie walked into the office reporting that she had pictures of the "thing" sent to her by a group of visitors. "I saw Maria's photos of it last night. It's so gross." came a comment from across the room.  Intrigued we waited for the files to open and this is what we saw.

"It's so ugly it's cute." I offered as we all stood around trying to figure out just what the heck it was.  The visitors who emailed the pictures reported it has short silvery looking hair and a white patch around it's nose.  Are our ideas ranged from the just plain goofy, prehistoric rat, to the slightly more sensible, mutant squirrel. We were all stumped and the photos were emailed to the Park's resident mammal  researcher.  In a few days we had an answer as to what it was just not why it looked the way it did.

                                                            

The thing it was reported was a hairless marmot.  While creepy looking the researcher determined it was acting quite normal in foraging, movement, and curiosity.   She also reported there was no explanation as to why it was hairless and that staff were to pass along any other information they got from visitors.  We also found out that this is not the first report of hairless marmots in a National Park.  It appears Yellowstone National Park had an outbreak of hairless marmots back in the late 1980s and the cause of their hair loss was never proven.  

For now our fine hairless friends, yes it was determined there is more than one, will be a creepy curiosity along the trail.