Thoreau's Legacy by Richard Hayes Page A

to protect ecosystems.

    Lea Jane Parker is a professor at Northern Arizona University, where she developed and teaches in the environmental communication program. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

    An American ruby-spot damselfly alights on a reed above the Verde River in Arizona.
Photo by Lea Jane Parker.

The Last Pika
    Daniel T. Blumstein
    I STUDY MARMOTS, BUT I WORRY ABOUT PIKA.
Although they look like small rodents, pika, known in Eurasia as “mouse hares” and in the United States as “tundra bunnies,” are lagomorphs—relatives of rabbits, as close examination of their teeth reveals. Pika live only on alpine and subalpine talus slopes. If you’re walking in a western alpine boulder field and worrying about twisting your ankle, you may be in pika country. They make a wonderful raspy squeal that sounds like a small squeeze toy. When I’m trapping marmots on the talus slopes, I smile when I hear those squeals, the pika’s territorial signals and alarm calls.
    One part of my research focuses on how climatic factors influence the behavior and survival of yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado. I work with a population of marmots that has been studied continuously since 1962. Some of my colleagues’ recent work has demonstrated that marmots are now emerging from hibernation earlier in the year and that this change is correlated with higher spring temperatures. Climate change may thus influence the timing of the marmots’ emergence. I recently discovered that their social behavior also influences emergence, a factor that may enhance or suppress the climatic effect.
    Because I’m interested in how climate change may affect marmot behavior, people ask me if marmots will be influenced by global warming. My initial answer about the Colorado yellow-bellied marmots is a guarded no. No, because these marmots live in a 10,000-foot range of elevations, from the foothills of the Rockies to the top of almost every 14,000-foot peak I’ve climbed. (There they collect a “summit tariff”—your lunch—from human invaders.) No, because they live in a variety of habitats, and even with a drastic redistribution of habitats, which we anticipate global warming will generate, there will likely still be places for marmots to live.
    By contrast, I tell people that I worry about pika. As the sagebrush climbs up the mountains and as tundra is lost to forest, I worry about where they will live and how they will find others of their species. Pika are habitat specialists, and it’s the specialists that will be most negatively influenced by climate change.
    I worry that my grandchildren will not have the chance to laugh with glee when they hear their first pika, that they will not be able to smile with fond memories of wonderful experiences in high alpine ecosystems, which are as threatened as their habitat-specialist inhabitants. I worry about the last pika.

    Daniel T. Blumstein is an associate professor and vice chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives in Los Angeles and Gothic, Colorado, with his wife and son.

Where Are the Butterflies?
    Susan J. Tweit
    FOR THE PAST MONTH MY HUSBAND AND I HAVE
hosted an accidental houseguest. She (or he—we can’t tell at this stage) possesses an appetite so insatiable that we named her Gluttonous.
    Her small size and single-minded quest for food allowed Gluttonous to remain unseen among the anise flowers I cut from our kitchen garden, even as she ate them. I spotted her munching on the bouquet several days later, balanced on multiple pairs of stubby legs—clearly a caterpillar, but one I didn’t recognize, dressed as she was in wrinkled black skin speckled with white and red dots.
    The next morning, the empty black gauze of that now-shed skin swung from a branch. Nearby the insect herself—surely plumper already—chewed steadily in her dazzling new skin; the green and black stripes studded with orange dots identified her as