Defenders of Wildlife Climate Change and the Pika Description & Taxonomy

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: British Columbia; Burrows; Canada; Yukon; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.360.8298; http://www.defenders.org/sites/default/files/publications/carbon_dioxide_and_the_pika.pdf

Pika is the name given to roughly thirty species of hamster-sized animals that live in some of the coldest regions of the world, mainly the mountains and steppes. Most species of pika live in Asia and Europe, but two are found in North America. The collared pika (Ochotona collaris) lives in Alaska and the Yukon, and the American pika (Ochotona princeps) is distributed more widely through British Columbia and the western U.S. Range Mountainous regions of the Western U.S. and Canada, from California north to British Columbia, and through the Rocky Mountains to northern New Mexico. Due to their sensitivity to high temperatures, pikas are confined to the highest elevations in the southernmost part of their range. Behavior Pikas live on rocky mountain slopes called talus, located adjacent to patches of grass and other vegetation where they can feed. American pikas don’t dig burrows so they need rocks big enough to have spaces underneath where they can shelter from predators or extreme temperatures. Pikas are colonial, with individual territories of 0.1 to 0.2 acres within the colony. As mentioned above, they communicate with each other extensively with whistles, bleats and sharp alarm calls that send the animals scurrying for cover when a predator nears.