![]() ![]() Gilpin’s plan was to find a population and then snipe them out with a pair of. Pikas offered a convenient study subject because their populations are naturally isolated in high-mountain rock slides that are often miles apart, separated by forests and valleys. Are these fragmented populations more vulnerable to extinction? And if they disappear from an isolated spot, will they ever return? Researchers wanted to know what happens when humans carve up wild landscapes, breaking up wildlife populations and isolating them from each other. His field was concerned with conservation, but also its opposite: extinction. Her professor, Michael Gilpin, was an early conservation biologist at the University of California, San Diego. But 15 years later I don’t.” A Laboratory in the SkyĬhris Ray first arrived in Montana as a college student in 1988, ready for work with a rifle in hand. “And 15 years into it, I started to feel like I understood the system. “You’ve been there every year for 30 years, you’d like to feel like you start to understand the system,” Ray told me recently, thinking back on the summer’s work. But part of it may be that the climate is changing so fast now, it’s hard to keep up. Part of this uncertainty, Ray says, is that even after decades of research, scientists still have only glimpses into the inner workings of complex ecosystems. High in Montana’s Gallatin Range, pikas live in rocky outcroppings, or talus slides, that provide protection and shelter. And because pikas occupy a habitat that’s critical to life across the West-mountain snowmelt is the primary source of water for the farms and cities that have fueled the region’s growth-pika research may have a lot to say about our own future, too. They live high in the mountains, where temperatures are warming faster than the global average. The rabbit relatives are highly sensitive to temperature changes. Pikas have become a cuddly proxy for the pernicious effects of climate change, and for good reason. She wants to know what allows pikas to scratch out an existence in such an unforgiving environment, and increasingly, what may be contributing to their decline. She came when she was pregnant with her son Max, now 11, and she came the following year too, nursing him in between bouts of field work. Ray is a research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and she has been coming to this site every year since 1988 to chronicle the pikas who live here, making it one of the longest-running research projects of one of the West’s most adorable creatures. Biologist Chris Ray has been studying pikas in the western United States and documenting their changing populations for three decades. ![]()
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