[EEK] (sound of a pika)
[Sound of Redtail Hawk]
The pika project that we're currently working on is a great example
of collaboration with outside private researchers.
All the information they give us is extremely beneficial to the park.
There's just a passion from
really really deep within I mean when you when you get out here you work
really hard to make it
to these areas and when you hear your first pika, you can watch its behavior
you can watch its behavior and you feel good about collecting
really sound 100 percent meticulous data
And submitting that and saying "hey this is what's going on out here." I mean there's there's
no other feeling like it, it's
incredible.
So we just got to a pika location and we're going to run a habitat transect.
We have a transit rope which is 25 meters long. Pika
territories are about 25 meters in radius. We have a temperature meter
and we create one meter by meter
square plots using just some standard ruler sticks
to delineate the boundary of what we're going to be recording. Use
your stick and also probe down and just find
what is the maximum depth within the plot. So this one is actually about 58 inches.
We'll also set up the temperature meter and record the temperature at the depth.
The temperatures, we wait for them to stabilize.
We end up classifying the vegetation into fairly broad categories
These are all considered bryophytes.
This is moss here. We also have lichens in here
So we'll also record that as a cover type.
Sometimes there will be shrubs, forbs, cushion plants when we get in the higher
elevations
sites but anything that we see within our plot we will record.
Pikas can be
indicator climate change in part because of their sensitivity to high temperatures
They take refuge underneath the cool surface of the boulders
but if you actually have increasing temperatures, if they increase quite a bit,
you can actually see behavioral changes in pikas because they need a certain amount
of time to forage.
They also collect vegetation to put in their hay piles for winter forage because they don't
hibernate.
You might just see them having very limited times to meet their foraging
requirements and energy requirements for summer and winter
and that ultimately would have a negative impact on their survival.
You see some really
amazing things from up here that you could never really
put into words. You almost have to be here to see it. I could I
could
write a book on why I continue to do this work but it's just a
it's incredible to be a part of protecting
this land and species and habitat.
And things that are really important