Courmayeur · Italy
The whistle in the meadow
Walking in a high meadow you will hear a sharp whistle, and when you look for its source you will find nothing. The marmot saw you long before you saw her. The whistle is an alarm, and the colony listens: whoever was out stops feeding, rises on the hind legs and, if the alarm continues, disappears into the burrow. Generally a single long call signals danger from the sky, an eagle, while a series of short calls signals an approach on the ground, a fox or you. It is worth stopping and waiting in silence: after a few minutes a head comes back up to check. Marmots spend more than half the year asleep underground, in deep hibernation, the heart slowed to a few beats a minute. What you see in summer is an animal with a limited number of weeks in which to do everything.
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Where do I find them?
In open pasture above the treeline, between roughly 1,800 and 2,500 metres, where the ground is deep enough to dig and open enough to see a predator coming. In Val Ferret and Val Veny there are colonies along the valley-floor paths. Early morning and late afternoon are the best times: in the heat of the middle of the day they stay underground. Look for disturbed earth at the mouth of a burrow, and wait with your eyes on that spot.
May I feed them?
No, and the reason is practical rather than moral. A marmot has to reach autumn with a store of fat built from mountain plants, because that fat must last her six months of hibernation. Bread and biscuits fill her without feeding her, and an animal that grows used to people loses the caution that keeps it alive. In protected areas feeding wildlife is forbidden. Watching from a distance, standing still, costs her nothing and is also how you see most.
What else lives up here?
The ibex, which in these Alps survived by a hair: in the mid-nineteenth century a few hundred were left, all in the Gran Paradiso massif, protected because they were reserved for the king's hunting. The entire Alpine population today descends from that remnant. Then the chamois, commoner and shyer, the mountain hare that turns white in winter, the golden eagle circling high over the pastures and, since the 1990s, the bearded vulture, reintroduced after being wiped out.
Where it is
More stories in Courmayeur
- The Aiguille Blanche
- The Aiguille Noire
- Duke of the Abruzzi Alpine Museum
- The Brenva Spur
- The Guides' House
- Church of Saint Pantaléon
- The quiet col
- The Col de la Seigne