Staying Warm

The core body temperature of cold-blooded animals (such as reptiles, amphibians and fish) is directly dependent on how hot or cold their environment. When the sun is out, their bodies soak up the heat, they warm up, and they become more active. When it’s cold, they tend to be a bit sluggish as their bodies slow down to conserve energy.  I’m jealous that these animals have a reason to sit out in the sun all day.

Collared Lizard by Sarah Waterworth

Keeping a Full Belly

Warm-blooded animals are able to regulate their own body temperature, which requires a great deal of energy. When warm-blooded species get cold, they must generate their own heat by converting food to energy. Maybe that’s why shoveling the snow-covered driveway makes me so hungry! Many animals rely on leaves, fruits and flowers as a primary food source, providing necessary energy. The sun is essential to the lives of those plants, and thus to the survival of plant eating wildlife.

Pika by Danny Nestor

Take Shelter

There are many species that live in trees or use plant material to build homes (such as nests or lodges). Trees and plants derive energy from the sun. Photosynthesis, boom. Therefore, the sun indirectly helps house a number of wildlife species!

Prothonotary Warbler by William Mangun

Follow the Big Yellow Thing

Modern GPS systems haven’t quite caught on with birds. Instead, researchers have found that some birds use their internal clocks in conjunction with the sun in order to navigate migration.

Starlings in Flight by Brad Smith

You Can Be Solar Powered, Too

The sun could be useful to humans as well. In addition to vitamin D that the sun provides, the sun can also be used to provide energy for everything we need in our homes and businesses. The sun provides a clean, renewable energy source that is much healthier for the planet than other fossil fuels.  Learn about NWF’s solar energy partner for the home at www.sungevity.com/nwf.

Snowpack comparison of Gaylor Lakes (Photo by Beth Pratt)

I also counted myself lucky with wildlife sightings, although I am still adjusting to being forced to downgrade my expectations in the Sierra after having just returned from three years of living in Yellowstone where I encountered charismatic mega-fauna on a daily basis. I miss the wolves, but I’ve had no better wildlife encounter than on this hike when a pika—an animal I cherish seeing in the high country—ran over my foot. My friend, the naturalist Jack Laws, who I have often scrambled up boulders with in the high country searching for these remarkable creatures, claimed when I related the story to him that it was the pika’s way of welcoming me back to the Sierra.

Discovering a well-populated frog pond, however, certainly qualifies as the highlight of the day (along with observing some “misguided” frog mating—see photos below), as I am a well know frog-o-phile. For most of the day, running water and the boisterous call of the Clark’s nutcracker dominated the soundscape, but as I descended down the basin to lower Gaylor Lake, suddenly I heard the distinct and very loud call of the Pacific chorus frog. Music to my ears! And did I hit the frog jackpot. I spent a couple of hours taking photos and filming these little guys as they swam and sang. A couple hiking Roper’s Sierra High Route stopped to listen when they passed, along with another couple, one who taught biology and who was delighted at the sight of all the frogs.  To paraphrase Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that people just love frogs.

I’ve shared some photos and video from my bully day below. For more photos, visit the National Wildlife Federation’s California Facebook page.

The pika who ran over my foot poses for a photo. (Photo by Beth Pratt)

Pacific chorus frog swimming (Photo by Beth Pratt)

Pacific chorus frog trying to mate with a plant (Photo by Beth Pratt)

Still partially frozen Gaylor Lake (Photo by Beth Pratt)

A misguided mating attempt by two male frogs (Photo by Beth Pratt)

A marmot surveys the scene (Photo by Beth Pratt)

Pacific chorus frog calling (Photo by Beth Pratt)

Video of Pacific chorus frogs at Gaylor Lakes

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video of Gaylor and Granite Lakes

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s high atop the world’s mountains, where it accounts for less than 5 percent of the Earth’s surface.

It’s battered by winds, it’s frigidly cold most of the year, and it is treeless.

Ecologists call it the alpine zone.

Most of the U.S. alpine acreage is in the West, where you find most of the nation’s high-mountain habitat. And this zone just may be zoning out. In recent years its average annual temperature has heated up, thanks to global warming, about 1 degree F. Computer models show the region going up an additional 4.5 to 14.4 degrees F during the next century.

As the alpine zone warms, scientists expect the snowpack up there to shrink, something that’s already been seen in the Pacific Northwest, the Southern Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. That snow loss means less moisture in the warmer alpine zones, with the result that alpine soils will dry out and evergreens and grasses from lower altitudes will move up mountainsides, crowding out native species.

Changes in alpine plant life already are happening. A paper published in the July 2005 Western North American Naturalist shows that Engelmann spruce have moved 575 to 650 feet upward in three of four areas studied in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park between 1992 and 2001.

Tell Me about Pikas and Global Warming

Okay. With round bodies, prominent ears, no visible tail and weighing just 5 ounces, the potato-sized pikas are the smallest members of the rabbit family. Frantic workers, they live high atop western mountains, collecting large piles of wildflowers and grasses during summer—a process called haying—to eat in winter.

Although pikas are among the toughest animals in the lower 48 states—spending their entire lives in alpine terrain—biologists fear that these unmercifully cute creatures may not survive global warming. Unlike many wildlife species that, in response to changing climate, are shifting their ranges north or to higher altitudes, pikas and other alpine animals have nowhere else to go.

In some locations entire pika populations already have disappeared. Scientists say the decline may be a warning about problems for other species, from butterflies and birds to large mammals.

Please, donate today to protect the pika and other wildlife struggling to survive against climate change, habitat loss and other threats>>

Learn More About Pikas

• Pikas, which in the cold ice age lived across North America, have been retreating upward on mountains for the past 12,000 years.
• American pikas are found in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, California and New Mexico as well as western Canada. Their thick fur and round bodies conserve heat, and furry paws provide traction on snow. Though most pikas in the Lower 48 live only in alpine zones, some survive at lower altitudes where deep, cool caves are available, such as the ice tubes in California’s Lava Beds National Monument.
• Telltale signs of pika territory are the hay piles the animals build up in summer to eat during winter. The piles, which can each contain a bushel of plants, resemble dried flower arrangements.
• Like their rabbit relatives, pikas breed fast: Females can deliver two or three litters of as many as five pups per season, and the pups reach adult size in just three months—if a predator, usually a weasel, doesn’t eat them first.
• To protect their offspring, adults climb up to lookout rocks and emit distinctive “weasel calls” when they spot the little killers. Pikas also produce alarm calls for coyotes and for bird predators such as ravens.
• Initially, juveniles attempt to set up homes close to their parents but are soon chased away. Fiercely territorial, pikas squeak at invaders. “They will come out and yell at you if you get too close,” says Montana pika researcher Chris Ray.

Hello Heat, Goodbye Pikas

Trapped on mountaintops, alpine wildlife is easily damaged by several of global warming’s effects, including changes in plant life, invasion by new predators and pests, reduced winter snowpack and increases in extreme weather events. For pikas, one serious problem is heat itself. To survive in summer, they have to spend hot afternoons in cool, moist rock piles at the base of mountain slopes.

Researchers say that as temperatures rise, pikas will abandon lower-level slopes and migrate higher into the mountains until they can go no farther—much like living on the highest point of a sinking island. “All other mammal species in continental North America have greater heat tolerances,” says Colorado College alpine mammalogist Barry Rosenbaum, who is studying pikas on Colorado’s Niwot Ridge.

Haven’t Pikas Already Started Dying Off?

Yes they have. In the Great Basin—the dry region between the Rocky Mountains and California’s Sierra Nevada—pikas already are disappearing. According to National Park Service biologist Erik Beever, the little haymakers have recently vanished from 8 of 25 mountainous locations where they used to live in the early 1900s. Beever says the die-off happened because pika habitat is shrinking. Notably, the most-recent pika losses occurred at the warmer, southern end of the animals’ range. “This is what you would expect from rising temperatures—a loss at the margins of their distribution,” Beever says. The finding represents “one of the first contemporary examples of a North American mammal exhibiting a rapid shift in distribution due to climate.”

According to Chris Ray, who has studied pikas in rugged mountains near Bozeman, Montana, for 16 years, the animals also have disappeared from some rocky slopes in Montana’s Bridger Range during the past 30 to 40 years. While fossils show that pikas have been lost from several western mountain ranges over the past 10,000 years “the speed at which they are disappearing now is more rapid than ever before,” she says.

The content of this blog was adapted from a National Wildlife magazine story by Paul Tolmé, December/January 2006.

Please, donate today to protect the pika and other wildlife struggling to survive against climate change, habitat loss and other threats>>

Pika, via Jon Noad/NWF

While I’m not one to despoil the fantasies of children by pointing out this weekend’s spokesbunny doesn’t exist, there is a very real threat that the American pika, the mountain bunny of the Rockies, could soon become a figment of our memory.

Global warming is pushing the mountain-dwelling pika to higher and higher altitudes as their habitat disappears right out from underneath their furry paws. The pika is adapted to cold temperatures and can die from overheating. Rising summer temperatures reduce their ability to gather food and have already led to dramatic losses of lower-elevation populations as they are pushed upslope.

via Flickr, wildxplorer

One year ago, however, the Obama administration denied Endangered Species Act protection to the American pika, and other climate change-imperiled species, such as the spotted seal off Alaska and emperor penguins.

But this morning Think Progress pointed to a new study to be published in Global Change Biology, that finds local populations of pikas are disappearing faster than ever.

Local extinction rates of American pikas  increased nearly five-fold in the last 10 years, and the rate at which the climate-sensitive species is moving up mountain slopes has increased 11-fold since the 20th century, according to the American West scientists.

Today, even as the pika and other species dependent on mountaintop ecosystems watch their habitat melt away, some of our most important basic wildlife conservation laws are under attack. You can speak up here.

As climate changes, some environments are becoming hostile to the flora and fauna that long nurtured them. Species that can migrate have begun to move into regions where temperatures and humidity are more hospitable. And that can prove a conundrum for officials charged with halting the invasion of non-native species

In some ways, this resembles the discussion about what makes a plant a ‘weed’ in an urban environment, where actual native plants are usually nowhere to be found.

One problem: What’s native? Species move at will as conditions change. What’s native in one century may be gone five generations later. Newly arrived species, meanwhile, may be environmental refugees.

Questions like this have taken on heightened importance with the dawning realization that some of the consequences of climate change are here now, and changing the idea of what makes a species suitable for a given environment.

National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis:

“Policies that are currently in place view those [immigrants] as exotics,” Jarvis says — invading homesteaders that should, at all costs, be evicted. But such species may be on the move simply “because this is their last refuge,” he points out. “So we have to rethink that policy and how we respond to new species that are coming into our parks.”

Of course, it is not advisable to simply ‘welcome’ all wild climate refugee. An influx of new, non-native species can be expected to send ripples through an environment in countless ways, many impossible to foresee. Science News points out just a few possible consequences of this under-discussed global warming effect: new species in a habitat could bring “new predators and parasites, altering soil nutrients and porosity, even changing the amount of moisture and sunlight that reaches ground dwellers. And most of these changes can’t be fully anticipated in advance.”

Jarvis was driving down the southern rim of Grand Canyon National Park, a few months ago, when a group of piglike peccaries — also known as javelinas — crossed the road  in front of him. The park’s superintendent volunteered to Jarvis that “javelinas didn’t used to be here.” Although an American native, these animals are moving into novel, more northerly locations, Jarvis observes. “And I think this is going to be true for a lot of species.”

Scientists will have to figure out how to deal with these new species, many of which will have no other place to go. Will they go so far as to move or resettle some species to more appropriate habitats, sort of a M.A.S.H. operation for climate-victimized wildlife and plants? If they do, what about species like the giant sequoias, which, as Jarvis says, are “feeling the heat and not liking it” yet obviously not able to be relocated?

Even those species not expelled from their habitats may find their homestead moving beneath their feet (or roots): A study from Carnegie Institution for Science late last year found global warming is causing climate belts to shift toward the poles and to higher elevations, forcing ecosystems to move by as much as a quarter mile each year to stay in an acceptable temperature area. Sometimes this puts less adaptable plant and animal species in jeopardy.

“Expressed as velocities, climate-change projections connect directly to survival prospects for plants and animals.  These are the conditions that will set the stage, whether species move or cope in place,” says study co-author Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

…

Can the planet’s ecosystems keep up? Plants and animals that can tolerate a wide range of temperatures may not need to move.  But for the others, survival becomes a race. After the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated, forests may have spread northward as quickly as a kilometer a year.  But current ecosystems are unlikely to match that feat, the researchers say. Nearly a third of the habitats in the study have velocities higher than even the most optimistic plant migration estimates. Even more problematic is the extensive fragmentation of natural habitats by human development, which will leave many species with “nowhere to go,” regardless of their migration rates.

We’re already pretty familiar with the projected impacts of climate change on human communities—some estimate that so-called ‘climate refugees’ could number more than 150 million over the next 40 years, and many populations are now actively preparing for the moves they may need to make.

Javelina ( flickr | SearchNetMedia )

Wildlife are a part of this too. Studies earlier this decade found that some animals may lose the ability to adapt quickly to the effects of climate change because those same effects could cause unexpected shifts in their genetic diversity–-”climate change can isolate different groups of animals by affecting the habitats in which they live, in much the same way that the direct destruction of natural land can create ecosystem islands.” In Alaska, shifting climate and loss of tundra could decimate the marmot population and let reed canary grass overwhelm the state in the near future. The pika, furry poster-child for the consequences of worsening climate change, is famously threatened by diminished snowpack and other effects in the American West.

In September, the Fish and Wildlife Service released a new strategic plan (PDF) that calls for federal agencies, states and conservation groups to work together to  ramp up research and response to global warming as part of efforts to conserve threatened species and habitat. This is now priority number one–well, close to it, anyway–and it’s been a long time coming.

I’m a bit biased, of course, and chose for my searches to go toward the National Wildlife Federation’s Facebook Cause.

So now, 1 cent is donated to support NWF’s work to protect wildlife every time I wonder just what is up with a star-nosed mole…

…or just how come the axolotl is always so happy…

Now you’re wondering, right? Well before you google axolotl, set up the new search bar, and give a penny to NWF.

Here’s how:

1. If you haven’t already, download the Facebook Causes Application.
2. Find a cause to support, such as National Wildlife Federation or Protect Wildlife
3. Download the new Facebook Cause search bar, and set it to donate to your favorite wildlife group.
4. Get to searching!

Everytime you use the search bar to look up something new, Causes will donate one cent to the cause of your choice (NWF, right?). This app is brand new, and will only work in Firefox and Internet Explorer at the moment.

Does that mean it’s buggy? Yeah, it’s got a few kinks to be worked out, but the developers are quick to get back to you if you’ve got a question, and they’re looking to make the toolbar better. Become an early adopter–two good deeds for the price of one.

Leave a comment below if you try out the toolbar, and want to let us know what you think. And leave a comment if your searches lead you to find any other interesting creatures.

Please make sure your representative will help pass this groundbreaking legislation today.

Here are the top 3 reasons this bill is good for our nation’s wildlife, wild places, and you.

1. The American Clean Energy and Security Act Will Prevent Deforestation in Developing Nations.The American Clean Energy and Security Act includes a large-scale program to secure agreements from developing nations to prevent tropical deforestation. This program will not only protect beautiful tropical rainforests from destruction, but also reduce global emissions by an amount equivalent to 10% of U.S. emissions (720 million tons CO2) annually as of the year 2020.
2. The American Clean Energy and Security Act Increases Our Energy Security and Reduces Our Dependency on Oil.When we invest in America’s clean energy economy, we’ll be able to safeguard the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling. Arctic caribou and other wildlife will be thanking you.
3. The Act Protects Natural Resources and Wildlife from Global Warming.The American Clean Energy and Security Act establishes the national policy framework and initial funding stream necessary to begin tackling the impacts of climate change on our natural resources. That means help will soon be on the way for moose, the American pika, and the whooping crane–wildlife that are already feeling the heat from rising global temperatures.

Excited? Today our country has a critical opportunity to take decisive action to safeguard wildlife for our children’s future. It’s going to be a close vote! So, please take just a few seconds to speak up for wildlife right now.

The American pika is a small rabbit relative that lives on mountain peaks in the western United States. Because these small mammals have adapted to cold alpine conditions, pikas are intolerant of high temperatures and can die from overheating when exposed for just a few hours.

The lawsuit seeks a court order to designate the pika as endangered or threatened, due to global warming, and demand protection of the mammal under the California Endangered Species Act and federally under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“Climate change is likely to drive a third of the world’s species to extinction. Worse, it’s the species living on mountaintops, which until now have been free from human impact, that will be hardest hit,” said Dr. Stuart Pimm, professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University.

“The American pika is an obvious example of such a species at considerable risk from climate change,” said Pimm, who has spent decades studying the global loss of biological diversity.