The size of guinea pig, the shape of a tennis ball, and with a squeak like a dog’s chew toy .. one unlikely star of the Mammals Cold episode is a real-life Pokémon, the pika. There are around 30 species of pika across the globe and, like their close relatives rabbits and hares, none of them hibernate. Instead, they see out the harsh winter months by feeding on a cache of hay they stocked the previous summer. Our mission was to film one particularly special species of pika gathering together their precious larders of twigs, grasses and flowers in the most unlikely of places.
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Image by Tom Parry. Camera operator Kieran O’Donovan focusses in on a collared pika.
We gathered at a tiny airfield on the outskirts of the mighty Kluane National Park. In the heart of Yukon’s imposing St. Elias mountains, Kluane contains Canada’s tallest peaks and the world's largest non-polar icefields. It offers a snapshot into life during the Ice Age and is home to a tiny relic of those times – the collared pika.
This species is hardier than its more common cousin the American pika and restricted to the remotest regions of North America. Our filming site was a gigantic, rocky outcrop known as a ‘nunatak’. Nunataks are mountain summits that protrude from underneath an ice sheet. Essentially the tip of an iceberg in reverse, they are the peaks of vast mountains buried under millions of tonnes of ice. We knew of one that was home to a small population of pika, discovered by camera operator and pika-expert Kieran O’Donovan - but reaching it meant travelling 50km across, and 3km up, into the enormous mountain range. In the very heart of the ice fields, we would set up a camp and live on a glacier in complete isolation for nearly a month.
With all our supplies laid out on the runway, cramming it all in to just three helicopter journeys seemed an impossible feat. Tents, stoves, fuel, generators, camping supplies, food – and that’s before you get to the filming equipment! It was a game of Tetris getting everything in, but we managed it. Mountain Guide James Minifie ed Kieran on the first flight, and the rest of the crew followed second.
The journey into the icefields was simply spectacular. The further in we flew the more I lost any sense of scale - as vast glaciers snaked their way up valleys kilometres wide, sprinkled with spiralling crevasses and deep turquoise pools, eventually spreading into an ocean of pristine, white snow and ice, through which jagged shards of rock rose into the sky – in was just unbelievable. Despite snapping away madly throughout I never managed to capture any photos that did it justice.
