Remember the marmot. Specifically, remember the marmot from my piece last week, the one that turned up in Antioch, out in the East Bay, and baffled everyone, because marmots, the big whistling ground squirrels of the Sierra Nevada, do not live in the Bay Area. They live hours away, up where the air is thin and the granite is cold. A marmot in the East Bay is a statistical impossibility wearing fur.

And now there's a second one. Smithsonian Magazine reports that two large, mountain-dwelling marmots have now been found wandering the Bay Area, separately, and nobody can say how they got there. Two. In a region with no marmot population at all.

Here's why this is better than it sounds. One animal in the wrong place is an anecdote. My standing rule applies and has always applied: the boring explanation is almost always the correct one. A single marmot stows away in a vehicle, and marmots are documented stowaways; they ride along somewhere strange and end up far from home. I said as much last week. Case closed, cute story, everyone goes home.

Two animals makes it a pattern, and patterns are where I stop being able to sleep.

The possibilities, roughly in order of boringness: they both stowed away independently, which is plausible but weirdly coincidental, like getting struck by lightning twice in the same parking lot. Or someone is relocating them, either a well-meaning person who found them somewhere and dumped them, or a person who kept them as exotic pets and lost control of the situation, which happens more than you'd think with wildlife. Or, and this is the one I pulled on at 3 AM like a loose thread, there's a small established pocket of them nobody has documented, descendants of released pets, quietly living on some brushy hillside in the East Bay, and these two are just the ones who got noticed.

That last one is the fun one. It's also the least likely. But I keep coming back to how unlikely animal populations actually get found: by accident. A species can persist undocumented for years in a metro area of millions, because nobody is looking for marmots in the East Bay hills. They're not calling wildlife services on themselves. They're just... up there. Whistling where nobody expects whistling.

Wildlife officials are, per the reporting, still trying to figure out the animals' origin, and until someone does the boring work of checking trapping records and rescue intake logs, every explanation stays on the table. I like them right where they are. The questions are always better than the answers anyway; the answers just close doors.

I'll be watching this one. If a third marmot turns up in the Bay Area, we stop talking about coincidences and start talking about a colony, and I will be back here so fast your head will spin. And if it turns out both of them rode in on the same truck from Truckee, I'll happily file it under boring-explanation-wins-again, my favorite and most crowded drawer.

Meanwhile: if you live in the Bay Area and hear a high whistle coming from a hillside that has no business whistling, you know where to find me.