Just a small mouthful

Just over two months ago, on 19 August 2014, I was lucky enough to have the chance to try and photograph a couple of these absolutely adorable little creatures : ) After a while, I was beginning to despair of ever getting any decent shots at all. These tiny Pikas, also known as Rock Rabbits, hardly ever remain still and they are extremely fast! Imagine a mountain hillside covered in sharp, jagged rocks of all sizes and then try to picture how difficult it is to find in the viewfinder the single rock on which one of these Pikas might happen to be sitting for a second or two, lol! By the time you find the rock, the Pika is long gone. This is a highly zoomed shot, so not the greatest quality, but still very cute : )

They rely on existing spaces between the rocks for their homes - they don't dig a burrow, though they can dig to make their home bigger. Because the Pikas are a similar colour to many of the surrounding rocks, it is so difficult to see them - unless you happen to catch sight of some movement or you see a bunch of greenery moving at top speed over the rocky mountain side. At this time of year, they are so busy collecting plants and leaves to store in their little cave for the winter. This photo shows one of them with a mouthful of greens ready to store. Often, they collect a bigger mouthful than this before running at top speed back to their cave.

As time passed, I managed to take quite a lot of photos, though quite a few needed to be deleted. Hope you don't get tired of seeing these little guys, but they are just so very cute. They are only about 15 to 23 centimetres (5.9 to 9.1 in) in body length, so really are pretty small. And, no, I didn't put one in my pocket to bring home with me!

"The American Pika is a generalist herbivore. It eats a large variety of green plants, including different kinds of grasses, sedges, thistles and fireweed. Although pikas can meet their water demands from the vegetation they eat, they do drink water if it is available in their environment. Pikas have two different ways of foraging: they directly consume food (feeding) or they cache food in haypiles to use for a food source in the winter (haying). The pika feeds throughout the year while haying is limited to the summer months. Since they do not hibernate, pikas have greater energy demands than other montane mammals. In addition, they also make 13 trips per hour to collect vegetation when haying, up to a little over 100 trips per day." From Wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_pika

Link to a video that someone has posted on YouTube, to see and hear these little Rock Rabbits:

youtu.be/W4U9IxhQSTc

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I've only been on Flickr the last half hour, but I see that they have still not fixed the "views" problem that has been going on for many hours now. The Stats for Your Account (only available to the old Pro account members) seems to be working OK, but the number of views under each individual image is either stuck at 0 or counts just a very few of the actual number. Apparently, Staff do know about this issue.

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Looks like we had maybe 2-3" of snow yesterday and overnight. As I type, there is just very fine snow falling, barely noticeable. I think it may be very slippery out there, so it will probably be another day at home. It's 1°C right now, supposedly climbing to 3°C this afternoon. I was hoping that the snow on my car would all melt, but it doesn't look like that will happen.