POCATELLO — Yellow-bellied marmots are taking over the Gate City’s Mountain View Cemetery.

To combat the problem, the city has partnered with an obscure and infamous U.S. Department of Agriculture division known as Wildlife Services and is apparently placing poisoned bait at some locations near the northeast corner of the cemetery as a means of controlling the rodent incursion.

“We’re doing everything we possibly can to address this problem,” Blad recently told the Idaho State Journal in response to a question about whether or not poison is being used to combat the marmots. “We’ve tried trapping and relocating them, but this is definitely a problem.”

Blad said Pocatello has been working with Wildlife Services for the past two weeks to try and gain the upper hand on the situation. The marmots, also known as rock chucks, have been causing quite the disturbance at Pocatello’s graveyard, burrowing underneath headstones and digging as deep as the concrete that encapsulates the caskets.

“This is a problem because the cemetery is sacred hallowed ground,” Blad said. “One thing that I think is important for folks to know is that we are only doing this at the cemetery. We’re not going after the rock chucks at Ross Park or around the levee system. But cemeteries are sacred ground and the last resting place for our loved ones and they’re destroying it right now.”

The Journal first learned that the city may be using poison to control the rock chuck problem at the cemetery via posts on social media. While Blad and other city officials would not directly confirm the use of poison, the Journal visited the cemetery this week and discovered several signs placed on trees in the northeast corner of the graveyard.

The signs read, “Danger — Poison,” followed by, “Poisoned bait is being used in this area to control damage to livestock, forest rangeland, wildlife or crops. Avoid any bait and keep your pets away from this area.”

While at the cemetery, the Journal observed several dozen rock chucks meandering around the headstones.

For the unaware, rock chucks are large, stout-bodied ground squirrels of the marmot genus. Yellow-bellied marmots such as the ones at the cemetery are one of 13 species of marmots and are native to mountainous regions of North America. Typically, they live in burrows in colonies and hibernate for approximately eight months of the year from early September until May.

“I’m no expert, but if you pay attention to the rock chuck cycle for lack of a better term, they are active here between June and July but by August they tend to stay in their holes quite a bit because it’s just too hot outside,” Blad said. “But in the early fall they may come back out before going back into hibernation.”

Blad said this isn’t the first time there has been a rock chuck problem at the cemetery, but this is by far the worst it’s ever been.

“We’ve had rock chuck problems at the cemetery before but we’ve trapped and relocated them and it was never this big of a problem,” he said. “You can literally see down the holes into the tombs where the concrete box is. We have headstones that are falling over and marmot scat all over the headstones.”

Blad is hopeful the city’s partnership with Wildlife Services resolves the problem, because if it doesn’t he said he is stumped as to what to do next.

“I don’t know what you do,” Blad said when asked what will be the next step if working with Wildlife Services doesn’t turn out to be effective. “Honestly I don’t know what you can do.”

Blad said the city reached out to Wildlife Services as a last resort. Wildlife Services is the same agency that in 2017 placed an M-44 “cyanide bomb” on a hillside near Buckskin Road. A dog belonging to a local boy, Canyon Mansfield, accidentally triggered the device and died from the poison while Canyon suffered severe injuries as a result of the incident.

M-44s have been banned in Idaho and a few neighboring states since the 2017 incident and earlier this year the Bureau of Land Management said it was permanently discontinuing the use of the devices.

The city will be paying for the work that Wildlife Services does using the Pocatello Parks and Recreation budget, which is the city department that oversees Mountain View Cemetery, Blad said. The amount hasn’t been disclosed.

“We’re just doing it on an individual basis for how long each one of the Wildlife Services agents are out there working,” Blad said. “It’s not a big contract. They are only spending a couple hours per week at the cemetery.”

Blad said he expects Wildlife Services to continue working with the city for the next couple weeks. He said it probably won’t be immediately clear whether the agency’s efforts to curb the cemetery’s marmot population are successful.

“The city is aware of the rock chuck problem and situation at the cemetery and we are doing everything we can to get the problem under control,” Blad said.