Colorado Voices
Prime Squirrel Time
Clip | 4m 11sVideo has Closed Captions
Studying the ecological importance of ground squirrels at the Rocky Mountain Bio Lab.
Summer mornings at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory are prime time for viewing and studying golden mantled ground squirrels. Caitlin Wells co-leads this decades-long study to learn about the ecological importance of these small creatures, and what their habits can help us learn about climate change.
Colorado Voices
Prime Squirrel Time
Clip | 4m 11sVideo has Closed Captions
Summer mornings at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory are prime time for viewing and studying golden mantled ground squirrels. Caitlin Wells co-leads this decades-long study to learn about the ecological importance of these small creatures, and what their habits can help us learn about climate change.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipSo here in this drawer you can l at our key squirrels in the town site, close up.
So our smallest one is this chipmunk.
that is distinct from the specie that I study.
The golden mantled ground squir which is about four or five time So these are both considered ground squirrels, as is the giant comparatively ma yellow bellied marmot, which is quite a bit larger than either of those.
I'm Dr. Caitlin Wells.
And I co-run a long term study of golden mantled ground squirrel here at the Rocky Mountain Biolo Okay.
Just a chipmunk.
The study was founded in 1990 by Dirk Van Vuren.
The squirrels that we study out here are ground squirrels.
They don't spend much time in tr They dig burrows under the groun So you think she is putting the nesting material in somewhere around those two rocks Im really interested in how the animal behavior, The very beginning of the summer after snow melts, that's when all the adult are emerging from hibernation.
So our focus is safely trapping to identify who they are based on the ear tags that we gi and adding a unique dye mark this is our chea sheet of all of the ground squir So imagine that each rectangle is the back of a squirrel, we add a fur dye to identify with a unique dye mark, who they our goal is to trap them safely and know who survived ove winter or not.
Okay so this is 12701.
She is a reproductive female an a legendary ground squirrel at t She's eight years old.
When most squirrels are luck if they make it to two or three but she's got a really good spo with lots of rocks to look for.
Predators, access to lots of ve to fuel her daily energy expendi and then also store enough fat to survive over winter right now Mid-summer, we're waiting for t who were born underground in ear and are being nursed undergroun to come above ground for the fir where we get to see them we spend most of the morning and every day of the week, 8 to that is prime squirrel time.
So this morning, I was coming d this trail, and I saw one of our pick her little head up and she was munching on a dandel And so I've been here observing her behavior and trying to determine which f based on the work on her back.
the survival of any particular l is always a coin flip.
There are so many thing that can eat a baby ground squir and that's part of wh they're so important as a specie Everything up at this elevation but also they burrow and so they airate the soil and when they collect seeds, they're like little gardeners at this elevation as well.
So they provide a lot of really services, ecosystem services.
We call it an ecology as well as Over the years, as is the case for so many of the studies here this has become a climate change because the climate has changed at this elevation, two degrees w during the summer and winter, l growing seasons, drier condition that a lot of what we're studyin and have the opportunity to use all of these long term da to see how changes in climat are impacting this particular sp in high density years we have t or four or five boxes full of sa This year with so few squirrels in the tow we just have a few.
The more we can draw these links between what's happening with cl and what's happening with our natural world and humanity in general, I think the more people are conv that we need to act.
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