On a North American mammal cuteness scale, the Pika must be close to, if not at the top.
I have always known of the species occurring in BC and Alberta as the Rocky Mountain Pika (Ochotona princeps), but it is now listed online as the American Pika (or dare I say the Canamerican Pika?). While I have never seen (or heard) one here, a friend, George Schultze, saw one in the Telkwa Mountains area many years ago.
A second species, the Collared Pika (Ochotona collaris) sporting a grayish collar, lives in northern BC, Yukon and Alaska. Pikas are also called “rock rabbit” because they reside primarily in colonies in rockslides or talus slopes high up in the mountains of western North America. The name Ochotona comes from a Mongolian word ogotno for ‘pika’ as they are also abundant in mountainous Asia.
Pikas are the smallest members of the Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares and pikas). An amusing description of a pika is “small, short-legged and virtually tailless, egg-shaped” and “look like a hamster or guinea pig”.
But they have gorgeous, very rounded, prominent ears and they emit an alarm call that I like to think sounds more like a sharp “peeek” or “eek” rather than a whistle. Some have described them as “being easy to hear, but not easy to see” as their drab brownish-gray colouration camouflages them extremely well against the rocks in which they live.
Their escape terrain, and where they spend the winters, is underneath the rock pile. They do not hibernate, so they spend a lot of time in the summer harvesting piles of grasses and forbs which they dry in piles on the rocks and store in haystacks underneath for winter use.
Consequently, if you are lucky enough to see one in July or August, it most likely will have its mouth stuffed with vegetation.
Like their relatives, the snowshoe hares, pikas exhibit ‘cecophagy’ meaning they eat, expel, and then re-eat their droppings to get the maximum nutritional value from their food.
But they are still cute!
Even more endearing is that the males sing songs to the females. The female has two litters per year, each of two to six infants.
There is a lot of concern for their survival because of loss of habitat due to climate change. They are very sensitive to heat, especially summer heat, so they are one of the best early-warning systems for global warming in western North America.
A lack of snowfall in the winter for insulation of their rock piles could also be causing numbers to decline. They are being monitored very carefully.
If you happen to see one in the mountains around the Bulkley Valley, please take a photo and let me know.
My thanks to Carolyn Matt who has very graciously allowed me to share her photos of pikas in the Nicomen Valley near Chilliwack with you.
