Ili Pika

Fascinating facts about the Ili Pika

• A mammal smaller than a human hand — weighing just 200 grams — lives on the vertical cliff faces of the Tianshan Mountains and has never been photographed alive in the wild by most scientists who study it. The Ili pika was discovered by accident in 1983 when a zoologist spotted it among rocks at 3,600 metres, and since then its population has crashed by 50% in four decades. It survives on a diet of alpine grasses it harvests during the brief 3-month growing season, stockpiling them in rock crevices like a tiny grey hoarder preparing for an 8-month winter.
• Its ears are so small they look like punctuation marks on its head, yet they can swivel independently to catch the ultrasonic calls of other pikas echoing off rock — a warning system for predators that hunt in a landscape with nowhere to hide. These calls are so high-pitched that humans cannot hear them without equipment, but to a pika they read like a detailed neighbourhood map of danger.
• Climate change is erasing the Ili pika's world vertically: as mountain temperatures rise by 1°C per decade, the alpine meadows where it feeds are shrinking upslope, literally squeezing the animal into an ever-smaller zone near the summit. Scientists estimate only 1,000 individuals remain across the Tianshan range, making it rarer than the giant panda, yet it receives a fraction of the conservation funding.
• Unlike most rodents, Ili pikas live in monogamous pairs that stay together for life, and both parents tend to their single litter born each year in hidden rock crevices. They defend their territory fiercely — a patch of alpine rock no larger than a tennis court — and a pair's survival depends on synchronising their food-gathering during summer to build enough reserves for their shared winter survival.
• Its closest living relatives are not mice or rabbits but other pikas across Asia and North America — a lineage that split from hares 30 million years ago. The Ili pika is the highest-altitude specialist among them, hunting for food on rocks where the air has half the oxygen of sea level, a evolutionary adaptation so extreme that it cannot survive if relocated to lower elevations, trapping its entire species in shrinking mountain refuges.

At a glance

About the Ili Pika

In the towering mountain ranges of China's Xinjiang province, a diminutive, fluffy creature darts across the rocky terrain with an air of quiet resilience, the Ili Pika's gentle nature and soft, woolly coat belied by its remarkable adaptability to the harsh, high-altitude landscape. As it moves through its habitat, the Ili Pika's large, round ears twitch with every sound, while its powerful hind legs propel it upward with surprising agility, allowing it to exploit the sparse vegetation and limited resources of its lofty domain. With fewer than 2,500 individuals remaining in the wild, this enigmatic, endangered species clings to existence, its very survival a testament to the enduring power of life in the most inhospitable of environments.

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