SILVERTON – Amid a field of talus that resembles a frozen wave of rocks flowing from the peaks around Velocity Basin to the turquoise lake below, a volunteer’s voice carries across the slope.
“I see one! I see one!” the man exclaims at the sight of a pika.
“He’s a big russet potato,” affirms Jewell Coleman, the Community Science Program manager with Mountain Studies Institute.
Coleman is accompanied by Elin Mischler, a 17-year-old Durango High School senior, on the late-summer outing to the basin north of Silverton to train a small troupe of volunteers in pika observation.
With an infusion of energy from Mischler, the duo is relaunching San Juan PikaNet. Unlike pikas, the 19-year-old citizen science initiative had fallen into a stagnant state of hibernation over the last few years.
Formal volunteer training ceased around 2018 and in the intervening years, only the same small handful of citizen scientists have kept up on monitoring the five key sample sites scattered throughout the San Juan Mountains.
Next year, Coleman plans to set about analyzing a decade’s worth of observations.
And that’s important because pikas are a harbinger of climate change.
The mammals are relatives of rabbits and closely resemble their larger brethren, albeit with small, rounded ears. Pikas live in, and are largely contained to, islands of talus isolated throughout high-elevation mountains where they stash hay to build nests.
Pikas are prone to overheating, and the ample shade and den locations interspersed throughout the mosaic of rock help keep the small creatures cool.
Given their precarious temperature balance, pikas are susceptible to global warming – in multiple ways.
Spiking summer highs mean pikas’ environments can become too hot for survival.
Winter snowfall insulates the dens that pikas build with straw under boulders, keeping the temperature right around a tolerable 32 degrees. But a thinning snowpack means less insulation and a higher likelihood that pikas will succumb to the far colder ambient air temperatures.
“If this area gets even one degree warmer, it’s going to be a big problem for them,” Coleman told the group of 10 volunteers.
The lake at Velocity Basin sits about 11,300 feet above sea level. The peaks around it stretch toward 13,500 feet. Facing a dearth of higher ground, pikas are like canaries caged in a coal mine that is slowly filling with toxic gas.
“As the climate warms, they have no place to go,” Coleman said.
Mischler’s interest in pikas was first piqued by an issue of National Geographic.
The enterprising teenager did some research of her own and contacted the Colorado Pika Project. The partnership between Rocky Mountain Wild and the Denver Zoo engages the public, primarily across the front range, with pikas and enlists the help of citizen scientists to collect data on where pikas are – and more importantly, where they are not.
Mischler went up to Denver in 2022 and was trained on the observation process. When she proposed expanding the project to the mountains outside Durango, she was told about San Juan PikaNet and put in contact with Coleman.
“We restarted the project, basically,” Mischler said. “It was never really closed down. But we didn’t have any more trainings. We didn’t have very many … volunteers that were active still.”
Together, the pair overhauled the observation collection process to rely on a user-friendly software used across multiple states.
“Having Elin has been amazing because it’s enabled us to do more of these kinds of outreach programs where people are getting fully qualified and trained,” Coleman said. “ … It’s really wonderful to have someone who’s young and enthusiastic and passionate to bring more young folks out to do these things.”
The observation process itself – taught to the group by Mischler – is straightforward.
The five sites of focus are located at Velocity Basin, Ophir Pass, Cunningham Gulch, American Basin and La Plata Canyon.
Volunteers monitor each one twice per month. They fill out a sheet documenting the presence of pikas, hay piles and scat, as well as the weather conditions, size of the talus field and largest rocks within it and evidence of water.
“Citizen science, in my opinion, is an underutilized … way of doing things,” Coleman said.
Although data gathered by volunteers with minimal training are considered by some to lack the credibility of data gathered by credentialed professionals, citizen science has other benefits, especially for a nonprofit such as MSI.
“Not only are you gathering higher amounts of data at a lower cost, which is a big barrier for science – cost – but also you're educating the public and getting the public connected to these species,” she said.
Coleman will have volunteers out collecting observations on pika presence until snow falls. Then it will be analysis time.
Despite nearly 20 years of data collection and consistent quality observations since 2008, no one at MSI has, to Coleman’s knowledge, tried to determine what story those observations tell.
Already, she says, some volunteers are saying they have seen fewer hay piles and less evidence of pika presence at lower-elevation sites.
Despite repeated petitions, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not listed the North American pika as threatened or endangered, in part because of a lack of data, Coleman said. The Pika Project and San Juan PikaNet are both changing that.
Coleman wants to publish a paper, with Mischler, in early 2025 using a decade of San Juan PikaNet data.
“I hope we are not past the precipice of where we can’t help the pika,” she said. “I want to believe that we are going to make a difference in time.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
