"The marmots are a genus, Marmota, of squirrels. There are 14 species in this genus. This group of Marmot were seen either in Spiti or near Pangong Tso lake, in the Himachal Pradesh / Jammu & Kashmir region...
Marmots are generally large ground squirrels. Those most often referred to as marmots tend to live in mountainous areas such as the Alps, northern Appenines, Eurasian steppes, Carpathians, Tatras, and Pyrenees in Europe and northwestern Asia; the Rocky Mountains, Black Hills, the Cascades, and Sierra Nevada in North America; and the Deosai Plateau in Pakistan and Ladakh in India. The groundhog, however, is also properly called a marmot, while the similarly-sized but more social prairie dog is not classified in the genus Marmota but in the related genus Cynomys."
