A pika weighs about six ounces and doesn’t hibernate. To get through winter under the snowpack it spends all summer cutting and curing vegetation, making as many as a hundred foraging runs a day. The haypile it stacks in the talus can hit 60 pounds — roughly 150 times the animal that built it.
The story behind Fat Pika Week.
Photographer Deidre Denali Rosenberg feels most at home in the high alpine, among deep talus fields, mountain meadows, and the places where treeline transitions to rock and scrub.
Coincidentally, talus and mountain meadows are also prime real estate for one very cute, sometimes loud, and occasionally plump high-alpine mammal: the American pika.
Rosenberg knows all about the American pika, which is the alpinist cousin of the rabbit; she’s been pointing her camera at them for over a decade, often spending enough time in certain areas that she’s gotten to know individual pikas over the years. In 2020, after many seasons traipsing through the mountains of the Four Corners region looking for and at pikas, Rosenberg began to notice more—we’ll say sturdy—pikas in the wild. And thus, an idea was born: Fat Pika Week.
A riff on the ever-viral Fat Bear Week, Rosenberg has used the annual campaign to amplify how cute fat pikas are and increase awareness of threats to their
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