Columbia Gorge Pikas Are an International Curiosity

You might hear this animal before you see it.

“Hike the Columbia Gorge this summer and piping from the rocks you might hear something that sounds like a squeak toy on steroids,” says the Oregon Zoo. “It's the alarm call of the American pika alerting other pikas to your presence.”

If you see it, you might mistake it for a mouse because of its ears. Pikas have distinctively adorably round ears. But they aren’t rodents; they’re part of the rabbit family. And you won’t see any mouselike tails. They are seven to eight inches long and have brown and black fur.

The local pikas are a curiosity among researchers because they live at a much lower elevation than pikas elsewhere in the world — as low as 200 feet above sea level (Pikas are one of the only creatures that live above the treeline in the contiguous U.S. — they’re rarely seen below 6,000 feet.)

“The Columbia River Gorge is the lowest elevation where we find this species,” says Cascades Pika Watch scientific adviser Dr. Johanna Varner. “We can learn a lot from monitoring them in this unusual habitat.” (The Oregon Zoo has ongoing research projects on the species.)

They’re usually thought to require a long snowy season. They can’t handle temperatures above 78 degrees. Instead of hibernating, they collect grasses during the summer months and eat the hay pile during the winter.