In 2015, staff and students at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on the west coast of Vancouver Island found a marmot wandering on the beach. The Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre studies ocean life. It is at sea level. The animal on its beach was a Vancouver Island marmot, a species that lives exclusively in alpine and subalpine meadows above 3,000 feet and is one of the rarest mammals on earth. Nobody could explain what it was doing at a marine biology station by the ocean. They named him Alan.
The Marmot Recovery Foundation trapped Alan, had him checked by a veterinarian, and flew him by helicopter to Green Mountain in the Nanaimo Lakes region, where an established colony of Vancouver Island marmots was already living. They released him into the kind of habitat he was supposed to occupy: high alpine meadow, rocky talus slopes, wild subalpine flowers, and other marmots. Alan left.
The Foundation's own blog post was titled "Alan is on the move again." He was not the only wanderer. In 2013, the recovery team pulled a marmot named Morgan out of downtown Nanaimo. Another was found living in a woodshed in Qualicum Beach, a coastal town. Vancouver Island marmots disperse naturally, the way all colonial mammals do, but in a fragmented landscape where the mountains are separated by logged valleys, regrown forest, and roads, a dispersing marmot cannot find its way to the next colony. It ends up in places no marmot belongs.
The Vancouver Island marmot exists nowhere on earth except the mountains of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It is the size of a large house cat, has chocolate-brown fur with splashes of cream on its nose and chest, and is the heaviest member of the squirrel family. It hibernates roughly seven months of the year. It lives in colonies where the animals rub noses in greeting and play-fight like boxers. It has the most complex vocal repertoire of any marmot species, including a distinctive call that sounds nothing like a whistle: a sharp, rising kee-aw that no other marmot makes.
A century ago, a Victoria newspaper described swarms of them in the Nitinat Valley. By 2003, 27 were left in the wild. Commercial logging had opened the forest on the mountainsides, and the clearcuts looked like the treeless alpine meadows that marmots naturally colonize. The marmots moved in. Then the trees grew back and the new growth gave cougars and golden eagles stalking cover they had never had before. Entire colonies were wiped out. Logging roads gave predators easy travel corridors straight to the burrows. The clearcuts that looked like opportunity were ecological traps.
The recovery effort that followed is one of the most hands-on wildlife programs in North America. The Marmot Recovery Foundation, established in 1998, partnered with the Toronto Zoo, the Calgary Zoo, and the provincial and federal governments to breed marmots in captivity and fly them by helicopter into the mountains. Since the early 2000s, more than 726 captive-bred marmots have been released onto Vancouver Island's peaks. Field crews hike for hours through steep, brushy terrain carrying telemetry antennas to track individuals by radio signal. They monitor survival, relocate solitary females to colonies with males, and move marmots off mountains where predation is too high. As of late 2025, the wild population stood at roughly 420 animals across 37 colonies.
Alan was one of the ones who did not read the plan. He was placed on a mountain with a colony, good habitat, and other marmots. He walked off the mountain, down through the forest, past the clearcuts, across the lowlands, and ended up on a beach next to a building full of marine biologists studying octopuses. The recovery team caught him and flew him back. The species is too rare for any individual to be written off, even one that treats a helicopter ride as a minor inconvenience on his way somewhere else.
Source: Marmot Recovery Foundation / The Narwhal / Canadian Geographic / Discover Wildlife / BC Ministry of Environment.
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