These incredibly cute mountain fur balls are being driven from their homes by climate change

Possibly the world’s most wholesome creature, the pika, is under threat in one of its core habitats due to climate change.

The tiny animal, a close cousin of the rabbit, lives in mountains across the western United States just minding its own business.

Most of a pika’s day is spent being very pure – chewing on wildflowers, making hay, rubbing its cheek on things to mark its territory, and harvesting grass to dry and store for the winter.

Just look at it.

Warming temperatures have resulted in the disappearance of pikas from a 165-square-mile region in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, according to research published in the journal PLOS One.

The University of California’s Joseph Stewart and his team conducted pika surveys in the Lake Tahoe area, in the triangle area surrounding Mount Pluto, between 2011 and 2016.

Pikas are highly detectable, the team said, because of their frequent high- pitched calls and persistent faecal pellets. While looking for picas the researchers looked for the pellets and hay piles, as well as listening for pika calls, on multiple occasions in each spot over the five years.

Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers found that the pika faecal matter dated from pre-1955 up to 1991 – meaning that while some pikas disappeared from the region early on, the species’ total disappearance was a more recent thing.

Weather station data showed an increase in temperature of 1.9C between 1910 and 2015, which was described as significant, while snowpack in the area has also declined – making it harder for pikas to keep warm in winter.

“A lot of studies have documented climate change sort of nibbling away at the edges of species distribution,” Stewart told Live Science. “This is an example where you see a species disappearing from the centre of an area of distribution.”

Pikas can be found in other regions of the US but their disappearance from the Sierra Nevada region could be disruptive to the food chain – while the National Wildlife Federation said pikas “could be the first species with the distinction of going extinct due to global warming”.

A number of organisations have called for the pika to become an endangered species – maybe that’s where its survival lies.