![]() ![]() “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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