Service Learning: Beavers, Woodpeckers, and Tracking in the Big Gulch

                On February 17^th 2017, I volunteered at the Wildlife Monitoring in Mukilteo for 3 hours. This can be verified by Grace Coale. She can be contacted at grace.coale@email.edcc.edu.The goals of the event were to learn about the gulch, change the memory on the otter slide and woodpecker cameras, and get an introduction intro tracking using animal paw prints. For the most part, my own duties included trying to identify tracks, paying attention to everything Grace had to teach us, and actively participating in the group activities

After we were dropped of by the van at 92nd Street parks, we walked down a trail to the Big Gulch Trail. 

Off of the trail, we first went to the otter slide cameras. Essential it was a small stream with a camera. Grace, the coordinator, explained how the camera works. However, there was unfortunately a mix-up with logistics, and my coordinator did not have the camera to change the memory in the camera. 

 We got back onto the trial and continued to walk down. We eventually went to the woodpecker tree cameras. Again, we didn't have the key, so we couldn't change the memory. We also looked at a different tree that was marked by another woodpecker species and compared the similarities and differences between the two.

We put coyote attractant, essentially coyote urine, nearby to attract them to the camera.

 We looked at all the fallen trees, and Grace explained how different trees dig into the ground, which affects how likely they are to fall over due to strong winds.

We also looked at the salmon stream. Grace explained how, at first, the city of Mukilteo had made an extremely straight stream without many obstacles. This made the current faster, making it harder for salmon to go upstream to create offspring. As a result, salmon populations rapidly decreased. The city later added obstacles and curvature to the stream to decrease speed, and the salmon population immediately increased the next year.

 We walked back up towards the top of the trail to discuss tracking, using paw prints. First, we learned about dog tracks compared to felines: dogs have claws where as felines retract their claws when walking. Also, we learned to look at not only the tracks, but also the negative space, where there is no indent. Dog tracks usually make an X marking in the negative space. In addition, we learned how size of the animal usually correlates with size of the tracks: coyotes usually have smaller prints than larger dogs. 

Finally, we were able to explore and use this information to find some tracks of our own. Here is a picture of us measuring a track we found using a KTM ruler.

        In this trip, I learned a lot about the interactions between animals and their environment. I also learned about how humans can create huge changes for some animal populations by impacting their environment. For example, I learned how salmon fish populations were negatively affected by man-made fast streams, and I learned how the city of Mukilteo added physical structures to make the stream slower to bring back up salmon populations. I have volunteered in a hospital setting before, however this experience was different because I learned more about helping the community including all different animal populations, not just humans.

        In this quarter, we learned about speciation and how one species can diverge into two species, due to a multitude of reasons. In this project, when I looked at the different woodpecker holes, I clear differences between the two species’ holes: one was much larger, ovular, and father up than the other. This ties into the idea of species, especially behavioral isolation because it is physically evident that they make holes differently

Questions: 

What type of data is obtained from the wildlife cameras and how are they used?

How can tracking techniques, such as the ones we learned be useful in animal biology?

How else have humans impacted other animal populations, such as the salmon population that I mentioned earlier?

How do the types of trees in an ecosystem affect the animal populations present there?