In the first pika post I checked every pre-1950 museum pika site against the records people have made since 2000. Here in Washington, 15 of 36 old sites had a pika recorded within 3 km in the modern era. That left 21 sites where nobody has logged a pika nearby since 2000. Are the pikas gone from all of those?
Mostly, it turns out, nobody has looked. Once I pulled up the original specimen labels (the collector’s own words for where the animal was found), the 21 sorted themselves into three piles, and only one of them is a list of places worth a hike.
What this is, and isn’t
No record isn’t the same as no pikas. A site only counts as re-found if someone recorded a pika within 3 km and the record made it into GBIF. This is a list of places to go look, not a list of places pikas have vanished from. (Checking this post also turned up a units mix-up in a few museums’ data; part 1 has been corrected, and the numbers here use the fixed version.)
Pile one: the pin is in the wrong place
Five sites have pins that can’t be trusted. Most have labels that name a whole mountain, and when they were georeferenced decades later, the pin went to the mountain itself. Some of the labels are actually precise: a 1919 set from Mount Rainier says Spray Park and James Lake, and Spray Park is well-known pika country today. But the coordinates sit on the summit, so the 3 km test can’t match them to anything. The same goes for Mt. Adams and a set from Mt. Baker.
Two are fun. A 1928 specimen labelled Bagley Creek, Mt. Herman is pinned at the bottom of the creek, almost 4 km from Heather Meadows by the Mt. Baker ski area, where hikers photograph pikas all summer. And a 1924 specimen labelled Glacier Peak may not be from the big volcano at all: its pin is about 95 km to the north on Mount Spickard, which was called Glacier Peak until 1963.
Pile two: just a place name
Six more are labelled only with a place name: Tye (1939), Stehekin (1918), Loomis (1918), Keechelus (1917), Twin Lakes (1917) and Bumping River, Goose Prairie (1917). A collector in 1918 who wrote “Stehekin” might have meant the valley floor or a talus slope 1,000 m above it. The pins sit low, between about 340 and 870 m, which would be interesting if they were accurate, but there’s no way to know where to stand. The Bumping River pin shows the problem: it sits at the river’s mouth, about 17 km from Goose Prairie.
Pile three: real places you can walk to
That leaves 10 sites with labels specific enough to find on a map: a pass, a meadow, a lookout, a creek. These are the good ones. Some are well-travelled, like Naches Pass, Bird Creek Meadows on Mount Adams and Windy Peak in the Pasayten, where a pika is probably sitting on a rock right now and just hasn’t been recorded nearby. Others are genuinely quiet country.
Washington’s 36 pre-1950 pika sites. Blue: a pika recorded within 3 km since 2000. Gold: a real place, nothing recorded nearby since 2000. Grey: the label or the pin is too vague to revisit. Click a site for its label.
Three stand out:
- Milk Creek, near the Naches highway. Walter Dalquest, who went on to write the book on Washington’s mammals, collected two pikas here in 1940 at about 820 m. It’s the one genuinely low site on the list, and low, warm sites are exactly where the field studies in part 1 found pikas disappearing.
- Sherman Pass, in the Kettle River Range. Pikas were collected here in 1938 and 1947. The nearest pika record since 2000 is about 80 km away, across the border in British Columbia. That might be a real gap, or just a part of the state where few people carry a camera into the talus.
- Funk Mountain, north of Conconully in the Okanogan, where Leonard Wing collected in 1940 and wrote “4,000 ft” on the label, and the Mount Higgins lookout above the North Fork Stillaguamish (1940). Nothing within 13 to 14 km of either since.
How to help
If you’re near any of the gold sites next summer, find some talus, sit still and listen for the eep. Look for haypiles, the little stacks of drying grass tucked under the rocks. If you see or hear one, a photo on iNaturalist with the location turned on goes straight into GBIF, and it would turn a gold dot blue on the next run. The Colorado Pika Project’s Pika Patrol app collects sightings for researchers too.
A finding of no pikas is useful as well, as long as you really looked: a note of where and how long you searched is the kind of thing the resurveys in part 1 were built on. And go gently: don’t pull apart a haypile, it’s somebody’s winter. Bird Creek Meadows is on Yakama Nation land, so check the access rules before you go.
How it was done: the same GBIF download as part 1 (DOI below), re-read for the 2,454 Washington records with their label fields: locality, collector, museum and catalogue number. Historical sites are pre-1950 records with a coordinate uncertainty of 2 km or less (after reading the University of Kansas, University of Michigan and Field Museum values as miles), grouped into ~1 km cells: 36 in Washington. A site counts as re-found if any record from 2000 on, with uncertainty of 1 km or less or none stated, lies within 3 km. I sorted the 21 unfound sites by hand from their labels. Distances to the nearest modern record use records from every state and province, so a site near the Idaho, Oregon or Canadian line can be re-found across it. Code and the site list: GitHub.
Go deeper
GBIF.org (5 October 2026). GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.p7sdx7 — the same records as part 1, with their labels.
The specimens are in the Charles R. Conner Museum at Washington State University, the Burke Museum, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Slater Museum at the University of Puget Sound and the Yale Peabody Museum. Click a pin on the map for its catalogue numbers.
What’s Up With the Pikas? — part 1: the alarm, the calm, and 276 old sites across the West.
American Pika at Mount Rainier — National Park Service.
Good luck out there. Bring a jacket; the talus is always colder than you think, which is exactly why the pikas like it.