Look Ma, No Hands
This is yet another picture of the pika from the Palisades Lakes Trail in Mount Rainier National Park. Here it decided to eat the plants it brought back rather than store them for the winter.
I had a number of opportunities to watch pikas eating on this trip and realized something I had never noticed before: pikas don’t use their hands when they eat. Many mammals will use their front paws to guide plant stems into their mouths, but pikas pick up the entire stem with their mouth and eat a little bit at a time until the entire stem is gone. In this case, the stem was so long that the pika chewed the middle first to break it into two parts and then ate each part separately.
This was one of those times that I really wished my camera could capture video, the still pictures don’t do justice to how fascinated I was watching the pika devour these plants without ever raising a paw.
Tags: American pika, mammals, Mount Rainier National Park, Palisades Lakes Trail, Washington