A travel tip I wouldn't have considered

 

I've never thought that wrapping up my vehicle might be a worthwhile precaution before hiking a trail, but it turns out that in parts of this country, it's not a bad idea.

From the awe-inspiring views of the Grand Canyon to the geysers of Yellowstone, millions of people travel to national parks across the United States every year. The parks are home to countless animals, including one mountain-dwelling critter that can ruin a day in the great outdoors.

Marmots will pillage backpacks left unattended in search for a snack, and at Sequoia National Park's Mineral King trail, the rodents have been known to chew on tubes and wiring on the underside of vehicles.

To prevent damage in such a remote location, officials recommend hikers wrap their vehicles in a large tarp, which looks unusual, but deters marmots from chomping on a radiator hose or a brake line.

. . .

In the past, hikers used to surround their vehicles with chicken wire, but over time, the marmots learned how to evade the wire and reach the vehicles.

"On several occasions, marmots have not escaped the engine compartment quickly enough and unsuspecting drivers have given them rides to other parts of the parks; several have ridden as far as Southern California," the NPS explained.

There's more at the link.

I'm not familiar with US marmots, but I've had lots of encounters with the very similar species that South Africans familiarly refer to as dassies (actually a species of hyrax).  They're endemic on Table Mountain in Cape Town, and have "colonized" the area around the upper cable car station.  They unashamedly beg food from patrons at the restaurant there, so much so that they're typically so rotund and corpulent that they can't move in a hurry.  That provides the local eagles with a plentiful meat diet, but there are so many dassies waiting their turn at the tourist buffet that the numbers never seem to drop.

No need to tarp your vehicles there - for a start, they're 3,000 feet below, parked on the road leading past the lower cable car station, and besides, the dassies are so well fed by tourists that they'd turn up their noses at engine cables and wires.

Be that as it may, I suppose marmots, hyrax and similar critters have developed all over the world to fill a specific ecological niche.  We're simply supplementing their diet by parking nearby.  Does that mean that tarping one's car to keep them out is interfering with natural selection?

Peter