(pika squeaking)
- [Narrator] In 2016, we introduced you
to this little guy - the American pika.
It's a Lagomorph, which means it's a member
of the rabbit family.
As well as being ridiculously cute,
pikas are also pretty easy to find in Oregon.
- [Shankar] It's not too far.
- [Narrator] Just a year before the Eagle Creek Fire
would change this area forever, Shankar Shivappa
and these volunteers from Cascade Pika Watch
only had to hike a few hundred yards
up the Angel's Rest trail to hear a pika call out.
(pika squeaking)
- Did you see something, Rachel?
- Yep.
- We usually hear the pika before we see them.
(pika squeaking)
- [Narrator] This is typical pika habitat,
up on the highest peaks living in the rocks
where it's snowy and cold.
So what were they doing in the Gorge?
- Pikas in the Gorge may be
one of the most accessible populations of pikas
actually anywhere.
Here we go everybody.
- [Narrator] Dr. Johanna Varner has been studying
this unique population of pika
as part of a longterm research project
on how they're impacted by climate change.
(pika squeaking)
- He's under the rocks but really close.
- [Narrator] Johanna's research suggested
that these moss-covered talus slopes
might be providing a sort of climate change refuge
for the pikas that live here
just a few hundred feet above sea level.
- The fact that we find pikas in the Columbia River Gorge
is actually really interesting
because it does sort of upend the idea
that pikas require long winters with extended snowpack.
The moss is acting a little bit like a thick blanket of snow
would up at high elevation.
We're finding actually that the temperatures
in the rockslide are very unusual.
About a meter below the surface at this site,
it stays a pretty cool and constant 45 degrees every day
and every night throughout the summer.
So even though it could be 90 degrees at the surface
for us walking around, the pikas are actually experiencing
a much cooler, more stable microclimate
and temperatures in this rockslide.
- [Narrator] Since cool temperatures seem to be the key
to these pikas' survival, Johanna could only watch
in distress as the Eagle Creek Fire swept
through the Columbia River Gorge in September of 2017.
- I think that I first saw information about the fire
on Twitter actually,
and I was following the #eaglecreekfire.
And I just like sat all day hitting reload on the hashtag
looking for new maps of the fire progression
and trying to figure out like,
are they burning my field sites and how are my pikas doing?
And you know, you can't spend that long in a place
and not feel a real personal connection.
- [Narrator] All told, the Eagle Creek Fire
burned some 47,000 acres
and scorched much of the pika habitat
Johanna had been studying for years.
- The fire burned nearly their entire distribution
on the Oregon side of the Columbia Gorge.
- [Narrator] The fire also torched Johanna's research plans.
- I had plans to come out to check
the occupancy status of my sites in the fall.
And as a result of the fire,
I wasn't able to access those sites.
So it did result in a gap in data for the year.
When we came back, following the fire,
the percent of sites that were occupied before the fire
was something about 80% in 2018 a year after the fire,
it was closer to about 50%.
So we definitely did see a decline in the percent of sites
that were occupied.
- [Narrator] While that might not sound surprising,
What is remarkable is what didn't happen.
- Some temperature sensors that were out in the pika habitat
were in place during the fire.
And so they did record actually the temperatures
in the talus during the fire.
I also had sensors at the surface of the fire
and some of those sensors didn't fare so well,
but the sensors that were down below the rocks were actually
miraculously pretty intact.
And surprisingly to me, the temperatures in the rock slide
during the fire were actually quite cool and quite constant.
They never got above about six to eight degrees Celsius,
which is something like, you know,
in the low forties in Fahrenheit.
And so that is still basically the temperature
of a refrigerator, even while the fire was raging
and exploding my sensors at the surface.
And so some of these rockslides
might be really quite deep on,
and there might actually be year-round ice
where the snow and ice sort of trickled down into the rocks.
- [Narrator] While 2018 surveys showed the pikas
had disappeared from about half their normal sites,
2019 surveys showed some promise.
- We are seeing more pikas out there in 2019
than we did in 2018.
About half of those sites that went from occupied
to unoccupied have now been recolonized.
- [Narrator] Two years after the fire, pika colonies
in the Gorge seem to be rebounding.
And then Johanna's research hit another snag.
- The COVID pandemic has definitely been
a second big setback in the research
largely because, you know, parts of the national scenic area
are still closed off to the public.
So out of an abundance of caution that Oregon zoo has
put a pause on all of their volunteer programs
and that includes the Pika Watch.
- [Narrator] For Johanna, who now lives in Colorado,
volunteers like Cascade Pika Watch are essential.
- Two pika, audio.
- On the bright side, it seems that overall
the fire was pretty severe in some places,
but not completely destroyed.
And I think that there are a lot of parts of the Gorge
that actually the fire is gonna prove to be
sort of stimulating of new vegetation for pikas.
That's kind of a similar pattern
to what we saw on Mount hood in 2011
after the Dollar Lake Fire
and these sort of intermediate burned sites
tended to actually have the highest abundance of pikas
in two to three years following the fire.
unfortunately, because of the pandemic,
we're probably gonna lose another year of occupancy data.
And so what that would have told us would have been
because the population really rebounded,
are they continuing to rebound or is it just sort of
part of this annual fluctuation?
And that's one of the questions that I'm not sure
whether or not we'll be able to answer this year,
but hopefully next year (chuckles).