Marmot Madness on my Instagram and other social media accounts this week, so I'm sharing a mad Marmot! 😡

If you've seen a few of my pics, you know I use ethical wildlife photography practices in order to minimize stress on my subjects. One such measure is to distance myself from them, hence why I almost always photograph wildlife with the 600 mm lens. On this occasion, I quietly and slowly made my way to a comfortable rock in the talus field (is there such a thing as a comfortable rock? 🤔) to observe and photograph this (likely male) Marmot, about 100' away. While there, other people walked near where I was shooting, talking loudly to each other, perhaps not realizing I was there, let alone this Marmot.

The Marmot was clearly distressed by the loud passers-by and started moving in my direction. He would advance, stop, look toward the voices, look at and observe me, look to the voices, look at me, seemed to gather up his courage, then advance more. He repeated this process until he had crossed perhaps 60' of talus, when he began giving more obvious non-verbal clues to me, such as this one, when he raised his bushy tail, flicking it a bit and looking at me with what I can only describe as Marmot dagger eyes. 🗡👀😠 I knew he was agitated, but thought it was only due to the disturbance of the voices. After covering another 20' of talus and when he was only 20' away, he gave me one last look and dashed headlong toward me. I thought, "am I in for a Marmot attack??!!!" 😲😧

Come back tomorrow for the conclusion of this Mad Marmot Tale!

Photo recipe: 

Canon 5D Mark IV + 600 mm lens
ISO 1000
F 7.1
SS 1/3200