September was a busy month with me, starting with a trip to Churchill to photograph polar bears and ending with a week in the Sierra Nevada, including a few days in the Eastern Sierra photographing American Pikas. They’re such serious little fluffballs, working hard to protect their territories, gather hay bales for winter, and move cured hay from drying piles to deep storage.
They’re also a worrisome story, as they can’t survive temperatures higher than about 78 degrees. They’ve been moving uphill to colder climes ever since the end of the last ice age, and in California are mostly found above 9500 ft or so. They don’t really have any higher to go at this point, so there’s a concern that populations will start to die out as they get squeezed out of their remaining habitat.
However, there’s research showing things aren’t completely hopeless. One of the reasons pikas live in rock piles is to benefit from its natural air conditioning. Some pika populations are adapting by limiting their activity to dawn/dusk, staying in cool deep recesses during the day. This is allowing them to survive at elevations down to about 7500 ft in eastern California.
While this pika’s colony is up at 10000 ft, it was a very warm day and I noticed they didn’t become active until after the sun dipped below the valley walls and temperatures started to drop.
This pika is in the middle of molting from its short brown summer coat to its longer gray winter coat. If you look closely, you can see some mountains reflected in its eye.