Balanced on a rock
Orange sneezeweed in your mouth;
You drop in the heat.
A pika will collect piles of wildflowers, laying them out in the sun’s heat to dry them so that they don’t get mouldy when later stored in their den (Photo Credit: Colombia Land Trust).
This is a Haiku, inspired by recent research which has found climate change responsible for the local extinction of the American pika from  California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.
The American pika is a small mammal adapted to high altitudes and cold temperatures, and which lives throughout the mountains of western North America. They closely resemble smaller versions of