Pika in a time of Climate Change The Rocky Mountains are known around the world as a great place to spot wildlife.  Although most visitors to the area are looking for iconic animals like elk, bighorn sheep and bears, some of our tinier residents can be equally exciting. One of the more fascinating alpine animals is the pika.  If you’ve never seen a pika —relax, you’re not alone.  I remember my first sighting.  I was nearing the summit of Nigel Pass in Banff Park, when all of a sudden I started hearing some strange sounds.  They could only be described as a sort of bleating ‘Eeenk’. I would have quickly discounted them as a ground squirrel or marmot had they not come from the middle of a large, seemingly lifeless rock slide.  Somewhere within this maze of boulders was an invisible animal. The problem was only compounded when I moved in for a closer look.  That single ‘Eeenk’ suddenly became several —I was surrounded.  I assured myself that I wasn't going crazy and became determined to discover the maker of these strange noises. As I watched and listened, I was astounded at how the sound of a single call seemed to come from all directions—almost like a ventriloquist throwing his voice.  This must work very well to confuse predators; after all, it confused me.  After about ten minutes, I resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to find my strange beast. I struggled on with my pack and was about to continue down the trail when a flash of movement caught my eye.  About thirty metres away was a small gray animal.  It resembled a guinea pig and blended in so well with the limestone that I almost lost it in the rocks.  Out came the binoculars for a closer look.   It was hunched on a rock and I could see that it was about 20 cm long with short rounded ears and no visible tail. When I finally returned home to my field guides, I flipped through the pages until, right after the rabbits, I found him.  He was a pika and was part of the order Lagomorpha.  This meant that they weren’t rodents, as I had suspected, but were more closely related to the snowshoe hare (who is also a member of this group). Unlike most other small members of the alpine community, the pika does not hibernate. It spends most of the summer months collecting plants and building large hay piles (some of which may be as large as a bushel) and leaving them to season, much like a farmer leaving out his bales.  It will be these stores that will get it through the eight or nine months of winter. Often, it must leave the security of its rock or talus slope in order to collect these plants.  Recognizing its vulnerability, it spends as little time in the meadow as possible.  Quickly gathering plants, it places them cross-ways in its mouth and returns to the talus. Being related to hares and rabbits makes the pika a hindgut fermenter. Like all herbivores, the digestion of cellulose is done by bacteria in the gut. Unlike animals like elk, moose, and deer, which sport a four-chambered digestive system means that the fermentation process takes place prior to reaching the actual stomach. This also means that they need to essentially cough up their partly digested meals and re-chew them to help further break them down and allow for additional digestion. Unfortunately for animals like snowshoe hares and pikas, the fermentation process takes place beyond the stomach, in the Cecum. They will also have an intestinal tract that can be up to 13 times the length of their body. Once the food passes through the stomach, the fermentation takes place in the cecum and the large intestine before being coated with mucus and being excreted. These are referred to as cecotropes and are eaten again to allow the food to pass through the digestive system a second time to absorb additional nutrients. After this second passing, so to speak, they produce the hard p