Haystacking Pikas

Rock Rabbits: The cutest alpine residents

I hear them before I see them. The high-pitched chirps and squeaks float out of the rock scree. The sounds can be mistaken for birdsong or chipmunk alarms. Pikas’ mottled gray-tan coats camouflage perfectly with the talus (large, broken rock debris) slopes they call home. It’s their movement that gives them away, hopping over boulders and scurrying into crevices.I was on the last steep push to a subalpine peak in the Cabinet Mountains of North Idaho when I heard the squeaky alarm calls. I welcomed the rest and sat down to quietly wait for the pika to resume her daily routine. Watching the rocky slope in front of me, I caught a flash of brown fur. My eyes followed a pika as he disappeared into the grass behind a boulder. I frowned. I thought that must be the main den entrance. She’s scared and has gone to hide.

A minute passes before she reemerges with a mouthful of grass! Boldly hopping over the rocks with an occasional pause to reassess, she is coming toward me. Then she drops down out of sight behind a rock pile three yards away. This is where her haypile is.A few moments later, she pops back out. She pauses, perched upon the rock pile above her den. She calls out. Then stillness. She calls again. And then she’s off, clamoring in the opposite direction. I watched her disappear into the vegetation and waited, poised for her return. A minute later, she appears with a cheeky mouthful of greenery. She bounds back to the rock pile above her haystack, confident and deliberate, stops, then drops out of sight. She is preparing for winter and will repeat this behavior all afternoon.Pikas, relatives of rabbits, cache greens in haypiles for winter forage. They selectively (smartly!) choose plants that preserve well and become more digestible as they break down. An individual pika will make thirteen trips per hour and up to one hundred trips per day stocking haypiles. The piles are often located in the sun where they can dry before being moved into dens below ground. This prevents the stash from molding in storage. These tiny (5-7 inches long) animals don’t hibernate and need to rely on their caches as their only food source for most of the winter.I watched this industrious little rock rabbit for some time before thanking her for being so tolerant of me and hiking back down through the fireweed fields on a gorgeous summer day.

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