Almost immediately after these little, high country residents emerge in the spring, they begin preparing for the next winter. They spend the entire summer gathering food and nesting materials to hold them over through the harsh, cold conditions of winter. Watching them do this work is pretty darned amusing.
Out they go to a patch of greenery on the tundra. They quickly gather a mouthful then bound back to their den to drop it off. The process repeats itself, almost continuously. It is quite predictable but quite difficult to capture with a camera as they are very small and move extraordinarily fast. Here, I got lucky with a rather small pika making a leap as it bounded back home with some grass.
