Halloween in the Burrow: A Marmot’s Guide

For most humans Halloween means candy, costumes and mild regrets, usually associated with alcohol. But for marmots, nature’s roundest rodents, it’s a bit more complicated. See, by the time October rolls around, marmots are deep into their pre-hibernation naps, dreaming of dandelions and disapproving of human noise. But don’t let that fool you. In the secret society of the high alpine burrow, Halloween absolutely happens.

Let’s peek inside.

Costumes: “Fat, but make it festive.”

A marmot’s best costume is itself. Months of pre-hibernation snacking have made marmots perfectly rotund, ideal for impersonating:

• A fuzzy pumpkin
• A bloated beanbag
• A sleepy yeti

Some of the more avant-garde marmots add flair by rolling in fallen leaves. It’s eco-friendly and camouflaged against predators who can’t tell where autumn ends and marmot begins.

Decorations

Marmots don’t put much effort into decorating their burrows.  Any cobwebs located in the tunnels are incidental due to spiders taking shelter for the winter.  And the willow wisps are merely byproducts of too much fiber from eating too many dried alpine grasses.

While humans carve pumpkins, marmots sculpt mud balls. These are rolled meticulously and arranged near the burrow entrance as an artful statement: “Out ‘til spring. We’re sleeping.” At Halloween bats live in dark spooky mystery, while marmots sleep through the winter with warmth and sincerity.

Trick-or-Treating: Mostly “treat”

Marmots don’t trick-or-treat so much as trick-or-eat. They raid each other’s food caches with the subtlety of a toddler in a cookie jar. The alpine code is simple:

If you hid it poorly, it’s community property.

The candy equivalent in marmot society? A forgotten stash of wildflowers or dried grass. It’s not exactly Snickers, but when you’ve got six months of sleep ahead, fiber counts as fun.

A true marmot Trick-or-Treater aims to consume 40% of their body weight in grass seeds, flower heads and mountain greens before rolling back to their burrow.

Haunted Burrows

Every burrow has that one spooky tunnel. The one that creaks in the wind, smells faintly of moss and where Ol’ Whiskers allegedly disappeared one winter.  Older marmots know that Ol’ Whiskers dug a personal cellar to stash dandelion wine, for medicinal purposes, of course.

So naturally, young marmots dare each other to peek inside. They never see a ghost, but when they do encounter a half-rotted root, horror unfolds. Basically, this is a traditional element in marmot horror cinema.

And then there’s the coyote midnight howl that always send chills down marmot spines.

Halloween Games

A popular end of season game is Pin the Tail on the Squirrel.  No real squirrels are used, but marmot lore has it that the game started when a tailless squirrel became lost above the tree line in late season and marmot medics tried graft a strand of foxtail barley to its butt, although woolly lousewort was given serious consideration.

Another popular game is the Great Whistle Warning, where young marmots sit in a circle and pass a predator warning whistle from ear to ear.  The trick is to see if by the time the whistle makes the full circle, if the predator the warning was about remains the same.

The Marmot Seance

Just before the first snow, elder marmots hold the Great Yawn, a solemn ceremony where they commune with the ancestral burrowers of marmot past. The ritual involves synchronized yawning, light snoring and mutual reassurance that they’ll all wake up around May, give or take a snowstorm.

Yawning is a significant cultural practice in the marmot world.  As festivities wind down and the time for hibernation nears, one large marmot will let out a prodigious yawn, a sound that translates roughly to “I am now approximately 90% saturated fat and 10% consciousness”, and the entire colony takes it as the cue to descend into the burrow’s deep for the winter.

If you listen closely in the mountains on Halloween night, you might just hear the marmots murmuring the ancient blessing:

May your dreams be warm and your burrow-mates gas-free.

Afterparty: The Long Nap

At the stroke of midnight, as the veil thins between worlds (and snacks), marmots collectively sigh, scratch and descend into hibernation. Their version of “the morning after” is April. By then, Halloween wildflowers are gone, but the memories live on, somewhere between a dream of clover and a half-remembered ghost story about the owl that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Moral of the Story

If you ever wonder whether you’re doing Halloween right, just remember the marmots. They celebrate by eating well, decorating minimally, avoiding drama and taking a long nap.

Frankly, the marmots might be onto something.