A shrill call was followed by a flash of movement through a pile of boulders on a high country slope in Yosemite national park. “Hello, Sophie!” Beth Pratt responded to the round, feisty pika who had briefly emerged to pose defiantly in the sun.
Pratt, a conservation leader and wildlife advocate, has spent more than a decade observing the tiny mammals and the other inhabitants of these serene granite domes and the alpine meadows they overlook, which gleamed gold on a crisp afternoon in mid-October.
