By now almost everyone who posts here must be aware of global warming. The vast majority of scientific research and record-keeping indicate that it is due to human activity. I am completely convinced by the evidence. But even if you don't agree that humans are a major cause, the temperature records don't lie; the earth is warming - quickly. And most have heard of the predicament faced by low lying coastal areas and in particular oceanic islands. But there is another "island habitat" of sorts - high mountains whose environment most closely matches habitats hundreds or thousands of miles closer to the poles. These islands stand like islands and island arcs high above much warmer environments. As global warming progresses, warmth creeps upslope much faster than sea level is rising in the oceans. Species that depend upon not having to endure higher temperatures are rapidly, and literally, losing ground, just like mountain glaciers around the world.

One of these species is the American Pika, the smallest North American member of the rabbit family.

Pika and range map credit: http://www.washington.edu

The Pika lives in rock talus areas that accumulate beneath mountain cliffs. It collects grasses, dries them into hay on rocks in the summer sun, and stores the hay away for the long cold months of mountain winters. The Pika is disappearing from recorded colonies at low altitudes (particularly from low latitude mountains). The evidence is not absolutely conclusive yet, but the habitat loss is very likely due to global warming. Pikas have dense fur which is not shed in summer and temperatures above 75 degrees F are quickly fatal. As higher temperatures climb the mountain slopes the pikas are being forced higher and higher and within a very short time will be in just as much of a predicament as oceanic island dwellers.
Below are several links:

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Clambering through a pika-less stretch of "talus" -- fields of rock fragments fallen from the peaks above where pikas hide from predators and the hot midday sun -- Ray told us how these "local extinctions" point to global warming. "They're going extinct from many of the lower elevations," Ray said. "If the current trends continue at the rate they're going right now, it's very likely that pikas will be extinct within the next 100 years."

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"There's less snow cover now, due to global warming," biologist Andrew Smith of the University of Arizona told ABC. "A number of the empty colonies we're discovering in spring have hay piles only half-eaten. It's strong evidence they died during the winter, and the winters -- especially at those lower elevation colonies -- are often seeing less snow now because of global warming."

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Longtime pika scientist Erik Beever reports that of 25 well-documented sites he has studied in the Great Basin (the area between the Rockies and the California-Oregon ranges) he now finds eight of them empty.
"The pikas are completely gone from a third of their sites, " Beever told us. "It's clearly related to global warming."
"Pikas are poor dispersers -- they can't just race over and recolonize an old site from another mountain," Beever explained.
"It's almost always too hot down in the valleys they'd have to cross," he said. "They'd run into uncrossable highways that weren't there when the last ice age ended. And they'd have to be out in the open, so they'd be in great danger of getting picked off by hawks."
So, with temperatures rising, the only way pikas have to go is up, chased by the steadily climbing warmer air that climate change is bringing -- and will continue to bring -- for at least the next 50 years, scientists say. And when that heat reaches the top of a peak, that mountain's pikas are finished.

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