My cousin Roman had talked about ‘the monkeys’ up in the high alps. How they chatter, whistle and shriek between themselves up in the alpine valleys.<\/p>\n
I thought he was joking! Monkeys in Austria?<\/p>\n
Call it something lost in translation or perhaps a local joke but then we spotted a pair lingering close to their winter burrow.<\/p>\n
Marmots, marmots, not monkeys! Such was my surprise to find such cute and cheeky critters high up above 2500 m in a place buried by meters of snow in the winter.<\/p>\n
Apparently these guys spend the entire summer grazing on the alpine grasses making themselves round and fat and ready for a long winter’s hibernation ahead.<\/p>\n
Later in the afternoon while out walking on my own I crested a small ridge and startled a small family of marmots grazing in the pastures below.<\/p>\n
After hearing the warning chatter and the whistles and shrieks echoing through the valley I finally understood why my cousin calls them monkeys.<\/p>\n
Photo: Robert Rath, ‘Seeing Double, Hearing Double’, 1\/500s f\/4 ISO320 200mm<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My cousin Roman had talked about ‘the monkeys’ up in the high alps. How they chatter, whistle and shriek between themselves up in the alpine valleys. I thought he was joking! Monkeys in Austria? Call it something lost in translation or perhaps a local joke but then we spotted a pair lingering close to their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7563,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2317,2319,220,1275,259,2320,2321,2318,751],"class_list":["post-7562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alpine","tag-alpinemarmot","tag-animals","tag-austria","tag-critters","tag-hibernation","tag-mammals","tag-marmot","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7564,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7562\/revisions\/7564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}