This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

Up in California's high Sierra, above the dense pine forests, rocky habitats rain.

And if you look carefully among the boulders, you might see a pica,

a rabbit relative the size of a hamster with round ears and big eyes.

Hikers oftentimes see them with little bouquets of wildflowers sticking out of their mouth

they run back to their homes to cash them in hay piles.

Joseph Stewart, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Maybe I'm a little biased that other people tell me they're very cute and I would agree.

I find the majestic, I feel like they're, you know, the lords of the mountains.

Stuart is also a skilled spotter of pikas.

You could say I've got a little bit of experience with that.

Which makes it all the more strange that in five years of surveys of 64

square miles of high mountain rocky habitats near Lake Tahoe he found no pikas at all in an

area littered with decades old pica droppings.

It's relatively pristine habitat in the center rather than the edge of historic pica territory.

So Stewart suspects the most likely culprit for this local extinction is rising

temperatures due to climate change and the mercury is heading higher.

By 2050 we expect there's going to be a 97% decline in the area of climatically suitable

habitat for the species in the greater Tahoe area.

The studies in the journal Plus 1.

Picus can still be seen elsewhere in Tahoe and in other parts of the Sierra Nevada,

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