Silent Peaks: Extirpation of American Pika in the Northern Sierra

American Pika are cute, feisty, softball-sized relatives of rabbits that depend on high elevation boulder fields to live their lives. In many mountains in the Great Basin, Pika are going extinct, likely due to warming temperatures from climate change. No one has ever thoroughly surveyed the northern Sierra’s (including the Tahoe Basin) for Pika, and our results paint a stark picture of one of Tahoe’s most climate-dependent species disappearing rapidly from our own local mountains.

Chris Smith is an ecology lecturer at UNR@Tahoe, spending the last ten years obsessed with Pika in both Mongolia (where he teaches summer courses) and in the Tahoe region.

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Admission is $10, and students with a student ID are free. Tickets purchased at the door will be $15. Doors open at 5:30. The lecture will begin at 6 p.m. at the UC Davis Tahoe Science Center (TCES Rooms 139 & 141) located at 201 Country Club Drive, Incline Village, Nevada, on the UNR Lake Tahoe Campus.

For more information call 775-881-7560, ext. 7566, email [email protected], or visit http://tahoe.ucdavis.edu/events/.

Host or Publisher Heather Segale