If it’s fall, it must be time to look for pika!

As always, we are going out as part of the Colorado Pika Project, a Citizen Science project monitoring pika throughout the Colorado mountains.

This is the meadow (11,598 feet) where we start our search for pika. They live in the rocks directly in front of the camera, but even more so in the scree slope to the left behind the spruce trees.

Every year we’ve come up here, we actually hear the pika’s squeaky-ball calls before we even get out of the trees. It was no different this year — we had already heard them squeeking before I took this photo.

This is looking south up the slope to the scree where we usually find the pika. “Scree” is a jumble of loose rocks that have broken off the top of the mountain and end up in a loose pile wherever they end up when they stop sliding. Scree is slippery, unstable and jagged — we wear leather gloves (lower left corner) when we crawl over it.

After dropping our day packs by the big rock in the center right of the above photo, we start scrambling over the rocks in the middle of the photo, looking for little piles of grass and flowers that the pika cut and bring back to the rocks. They lay the leaves out to dry, turning the plants into hay. This is what the pika will live on through the winter.

We quickly found hay piles — lots of hay piles — tucked into spaces in between the rocks. We continued to hear them calling across the slope But we didn’t see any pika, which was unusual. Every other year, two or three pika have been scampering across the rocks a hundred feet or so away from us.

We were a little discouraged when we went back down to the big rock to have our lunch.

While we were sitting on the rocks, eating our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, we heard another pika call from the scree slope directly behind us. We slowly turned around. And there, closer than any pika had ever come before, sat this little guy.

Have you ever tried to slowly move very fast? That’s the way I felt as I reached for my camera.

But it didn’t matter. This pika had decided that we weren’t a threat, and it went about it’s business without another thought for us. It had hay to put up for the winter.

I had never had a chance to see pika in depositing their plants in the alcoves before. But I got a shot of this one doing just that.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that one of the big challenges of photographing these little critters is that they move. They dart and dash over and between and behind the rocks. For them to sit still is the exception, rather than the rule.

I love the shot below because it shows what acrobats pika are. This pika is banking off the rock as it sprints out of a crevice towards the plants it needs to harvest. I call it “pika parkour”.

For me, the holy grail of photographing pika is to catch them taking plants back to the drying areas. I’d gotten a few blurry shots before but nothing I was very satisfied with. This day, I found the grail.

Another good day with the pika. They seem to be doing well. We’ll keep going back to make sure.