Marmots of an undetermined species

Warning: I wrote this about three weeks ago but found it dry and long even for me, so I didn't want to feel guilty posting and boring people just when they are like "whoa! post from karen! finally!" So since I just posted a better first finally post, I don't feel as bad.

For those who decide TLDR: Basically I am talking about weird mammals I saw a year ago near my old apartment and how I couldn't figure out what they were. Probably marmots. There's also lots of librarian thoughts about trying to find out what it was.

Last summer was the first time I noticed a pair of strange furry creatures at a heritage farm called Hinkle-Garton Farm near my apartment complex. I saw them multiple times on my walk to and from school but never got a close-up view. I was surprised that any mammals larger than a rat would be living there; there are very busy roads, train tracks, and many buildings in the immediate vicinity. For me, it's similar to seeing a turkey downtown. Colin joked I that I must be making them up, until he saw them himself.

I wasn't sure what they were - pictures online of woodchucks and prairie dogs didn't look right. I'm familiar with beavers and felt certain they were not those; this was confirmed when I spotted the decidedly skinny furry tail. I was fairly confident they wasn't any other aquatic mammal such as muskrats. Further Google image searching led me astray to wild ideas such as the nutria (eradicated a few decades ago from Indiana) and capybara (found only in Central and South Americas).

The one trait that was unique was the shape of their heads. It's not at all like the round ones found in the pictures of woodchucks but much more like the angular ones of the capybara. I discovered the woodchuck is a type of marmot and felt like I was getting somewhere when I saw pictures of other marmot species with the right head shapes. However, I only found instances of high mountain-dwelling types.

There is a library-related tangent to this post topic beyond mapping a research attempt: the value of niceness. One surprisingly helpful resource was Yahoo answers, which I've bumped into many times in other research. The particular page was started with a person who seems dumb since he/she was wondering if it was a capybara and hadn't been able to find information online. This earned him/her ridicule from some people who answered but the best answer gave conducive guidance. I wouldn't be surprised if this person was a public librarian; no matter what you think of the person asking you the question or the question itself, your goal is always to give them the answers they're looking for (which is commonly not the direct answer to their question, but found through what librarians call "reference interviews" since people frequently don't know exactly what they're looking for, even if they think they do). Being nice and helping people who ask for your help is not only common courtesy but a habit that benefits everyone. Seth Godin (who writes blog posts much more frequently than I do) stresses the value of niceness:
it doesn't matter who's "right". What matters is that giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them with respect is not only more fun, it works better too.
If I'm arguing only for my personal gain, I would have had a harder time searching for the answer to my very similar inquiry if the person hadn't answered.

The search of the elusive furry neighbors remains inconclusive, but I'm happy (for now) to call them "marmots of an undetermined species".