This time I had brand new hearing aids, a technological miracle. I felt that silence on my trip to Mount Baker years ago, a day when the life of the mountain seemed somehow smaller and poorer for their absence. They might still be there, but not for us. Yet were pikas to become nocturnal, pika slopes would appear silent to human visitors, who can only climb safely by daylight. As daytime temperatures spike, they adapt, sheltering in the rocks and foraging by night. While researchers have documented pika declines, they have also documented remarkable resilience: So far, populations in many areas, including the North Cascades, are holding steady. All winter long the village will live on summer sun, stored away under the snows. While her back is turned, gathering more, some freeloading neighbor might filch a mouthful for their own provision. She’ll turn her haystacks as they cure and when they’re ready she’ll carry them by mouthfuls safe underground.
The pika watching you - Ah! She’s just chuckled another signal and flickered away out of sight - spotted you because she left her shelter to venture after her food: alpine flowers, cut and gathered into haystacks curing on the sunbaked rocks. They don’t hibernate but munch and scurry through the long winter under the mountain’s carapace of snow. Their village is hidden underground, knitted amidst the cracks and crannies sheltered by rocks that will twist your ankle if you tread them but are rock-solid to them, every turn and cavity mapped out in pika mind. The one you’re looking at, who is looking at you, has just alerted the whole village, and her neighbors are on pause, scanning the airwaves.
Their closest relatives are indeed rabbits, but unlike the floppy loners that casually nibble our backyard flowers, pikas are sociable. Except for their eyes, which are large and alert and miss nothing. They look like baby rabbits with lopped ears, no tails, and hardly any legs, for everything that could radiate heat has been trimmed and tucked in. Pikas fool us with their insane cuteness. We’ll have, as we like to say, the whole place to ourselves.
Too many intrusions from us, too many curious dogs in tow, too many of our greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere we share, and our highland summer recreations will be a lot lonelier. This has indeed been the fate of some low-elevation populations. As global warming intensifies, fears have grown for pika futures while they can move up the mountain as temperatures rise, at some point they will run out of mountain. Above 78 degrees F., they must take shelter or move upslope to cooler air. Pikas, adapted so well to alpine cold, cannot endure lowland heat. Worse, our world intersects with theirs even when we’re not intruding on their slopes. If they make it through this season well, there will be another pika summer. And we visit them only in summers, for us a time to play - “recreation” we call it, or re-creation - but for them a time to work.Īll pika futurity is at stake every summer, for the few weeks between the last snowmelt and the first snowfall are for them the pinch of the hourglass. I will never step out my door and spook a pika from my yard. The pika’s world intersects with ours only when we want it to, for it is we who visit them, never the other way around. But it is theirs, and they’ve seen you, and put their whole world on alert: Watch out! It may be okay this time, but it may not. “Pie-ka” we say today, but as it used to be pronounced, “pee-ka.” Peeeeeee-ka! A flick at the edge of vision, and there she is, watching you. Where? It repeats - EEEEEEP!! - thin, tense, urgent. You must crouch to taste the blueberries and step carefully through fairy gardens - lupine, paintbrush, bistort, hellebore and monkeyflower - until finally you round a rocky point and hear them: a high shrill whistle from somewhere, you can’t say just where, echoing across the slopes.Įeeeep! You stop, and look. You must rise into those places where the horizon leans, where the earth falls away yet towers above, where the forests thin to clumps then draw tight into krummholzen sculpted by wind and snow, where lowland greens contract to heather slopes. This premonition of their absence made me feel how much I would miss pikas if they disappeared, because when you hear them, you know you’ve arrived at a place not our own.įirst there must be an ascent, perhaps from a lowland parking lot, a long climb from a roiling riverbed through close-trunked moss to widening skies perhaps away from a trailhead bulldozed out of some mountain pass or high meadow.
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