This cute little guy is an American Pika (Ochotona princeps) that I photographed last weekend on Mt. Evans. This post is a little out of order (as is evidence from my last post, I’m still working through some spring shorebirds), but what the heck. Cute pika, made even cuter by the mouthful of greens that he’s collecting for his winter haystack. I spent quite some time watching this guy run from his foraging patch, to his burrow, and back. Each time he’d pause for a split second on this rock, the only place on his route where I could photograph him in good light with a clean background. (Sometimes he’d take a detour over my foot or between my tripod legs, but that’s another story). This is among my favorite images from the trip, though I have many more pika shots to share in a later post.
The background on this image is not quite as clean as the image above, but it I really like the pose.
