Our photo of the day comes from Kananaskis, Canada.
Behold the ever adorable America pika. These sweet and petite members of the rabbit family live in the mountains of the western United States and southwestern Canada. You may know the pika by its other names – rock rabbit, piping hare, hay-maker, mouse-hare, whistling hare, and cony.
In the photo above, taken by photographer Tony LePrieur, we see the pika gathering plants – the mainstay of its diet. They subsist on a variety of flowers and greens, like grasses, sedges, thistles and fireweed.
While they will eat some of their foraging on the spot, they also carry some away and store it in a pile for drying called a haystack. Amazingly, one haystack can have as much as a bushel of plant matter. And since a pika's work is never done, they will often move their haystacks to protect it from the rain. Once dry, all of it goes into storage deep in crevices between rocks to keep the supply safe through winter.
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