Ground Squirrels

Ground squirrels may be my favorite non-marmot rodent, although, come to think of it, I am very fond of the entirety of the squirrel family (which includes marmots, prairie dogs, and chipmunks, as well as ground, tree, antelope and flying squirrels).

As I grew up hiking in the Colorado Rockies, where the most common ground squirrel has stripes, the first wildlife biology I remember learning was the difference between a ground squirrel and a chipmunk: chipmunks have stripes through their eyes and little pointy heads.

On the recent road trip, The Mister and I drove over Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. At one of the pull-outs, we encountered this attractive and well-fed Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus lateralis), and I refrained from correcting the tourists exclaiming about the cute chipmunks. That's good, because it demonstrates that I can sometimes keep my mouth shut in the face of biological inaccuracies and good because it turns out there were as many chipmunks (which we believe to be Colorado Chipmunks), begging from the rocky slope as there were ground squirrels.

Over the Continental Divide on the west side of the park (near where we encountered this moose and calf), we saw our first Wyoming Ground Squirrel. At first it perplexed us, because it was shaped and sized like a ground squirrel, but living in a colony like a prairie dog. It turns out that that is exactly was Spermophilus elegans does, and it now serves as the squirrel/prairie dog transition in my mind. We saw many of them in North Park in Colorado and along the backroads in Wyoming. They don't seem to be as suicidal as the Uinta Ground Squirrels in Yellowstone or as thieving as the Colombian Ground Squirrels in Glacier, and make a nice addition to our life lists.

Before we left ground squirrel territory entirely, we saw a few Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrels dashing across the road near Pipestone National Monument in SW Minnesota. I'd seen a few previously while doing field work in Nebraska and Kansas, but this was an adult-first for the Mister. Thirteen-lines are also a spotting of significance for The Mister because he has remembered the scientific name (S. tridencemlineatus, literally "thirteen lined") since junior year of high school and actually adds it into conversation regularly.

Here's a chipmunk for comparison.