The golden-mantled ground squirrel, which certainly affords park guests as great an amount of entertainment and opportunity for behavior study as any member of our wildlife group, was only moderately common during the 1949 season. Good indicators of the size of the squirrel population are the maximum number of squirrels that can be seen at one time at the head of the Lake Trail and the number of squirrels resident in the upper part of the Rim Camp area. To see twelve squirrels at a time at the head of the Lake Trail, and all of them big ones, means a big park population. Sample observations made during 1949 gave the writer an eight squirrel maximum and a mode of four. Some of the squirrels were yearlings and one was even a young of the year. No such callow operative could have maintained a pitch there during the roaring 30's. He wouldn't have lasted an hour. One squirrel only has been around the upper Rim Camp area.

Young of the year came out of maternal burrows in the rim area during the first week of August, 1949, in numbers much under modal, and gave no support to the theory that a rather sparse population of adults is necessarily favorable to population replenishment. In 1947 squirrels were so plentiful on highway 230 that they constituted a driving hazard. This year the area is so largely deserted that it must be concluded that squirrel scarcity is a more than local phenomenon. Be that as it may, the individuals that are with us are acting as though they are convinced that lean squirrel years need not necessarily produce lean squirrels.