Rama
For my service learning project, I chose to volunteer in one of the wildlife monitoring events that took place in the Japanese big Gulch Park in the city of Mukilteo at February 17th. I chose this particular event because of its relation to what I am learning in class. The project focuses on monitoring animals in the wilderness by setting up camera traps in the places where certain animals can be found. The cameras that they set also have motion sensors that detect animal movement and takes about 1 picture each time the motion sensor is activated. In total, the camera takes about 10 then it stops taking pictures. Furthermore, the pictures of those animals are then used to study their behavior, figure out what species they belong to, and whether they are in danger of becoming extinct. Nonetheless, the project that I was part of focused on discovering what kinds of animal live in the Big Gulch trail. During this event, our role as a group was to go look at the photos of two cameras that were previously set approximately 2 weeks before.
One camera was set up to monitor a large woodpecker and the other was set up to take pictures of a small cute animal. Sadly, we couldn’t look at the pictures from both cameras because our group leader forgot to bring the keys to the metal boxes that the cameras were in. Therefore, we moved on to the other task which was writing down the GPS coordinates of each camera so that other team would come and find those cameras. Also, we sprayed some scents that would attract a fox and another animal in areas we believe that a fox and animals might have passed through. In addition, the group leader explained to us about secondary forests trees and how their shallow roots in comparison to primary forests trees made them unsuited for the environment.
She talked to us about the streams and how the design of those streams could really affect whether these streams gets inhabited by salmon fishes. For instance, one stream that originally had natural barriers was humanly engineered so it can be direct and straight with no barriers. Once human interfered with its design, salmon fishes stopped inhabiting that stream. The stream was then engineered back to what is originally was and in a few days, they started seeing Salmon passing through the stream after years of not seeing any salmon. Lastly, we went with our group leader and looked for tracks of animals and we learned when trying to identify a track one must consider many factors. Some of those factors were the size of the track, the depth of it, number of toes, and whether claws marks are apparent. We were able to find a track that we identified it to be a coyote track (picture of it is shown below). Furthermore, we saw big holes in trees which we believed to be the tracks of a large woodpecker (picture shown below).
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| A picture of the beautiful forest of the Big Gulch trail |
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| This picture shows a stream with natural barriers (broken trees). |
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| This photo shows the track of coyote that we found in the Big Gulch trail. |
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| This photo shows the holes that we believe were made by a large woodpecker. The holes are located in the upper part of the tree in the Big Gulch trail. |
The wildlife monitoring event at the Japenese big Gulch lasted for about 3 hours and there weren’t any individual duties so we worked as a group and did what I just previously explained. Our event organizer and leader name/email were Grace Coale/ grace.coale@edmail.edcc.edu.
By taking part in this project that aims to discover the kinds of animals that live in the Japanese and big Gulch trails in the Mukilteo city I was given a chance to learn more about the animal biology through experience. Since this project is all about tracking and monitoring those animals and later on classifying them in species. It really adds to what we learned in class about the different animal phylum and how animals are categorized in phylums. Moreover, just being able to observe how small changes in the environment can really impact animals like that case of Salmon fish helps us appreciate the beautiful complexity of nature. It teaches us a lesson that nature doesn’t need to be fixed sometimes and as processes like natural selection act on the populations of animals, they will lead to adaptation exhibited by those animals.
Finally, going through the experience of looking for tracks and identifying them helped us acknowledge that a certain animal can be classified by the shape of a track left by its appendage. As we monitor and track animals, we will stumble upon new animals that will add to the great diversity of the 9 animal phylum. I think such projects can really help the community of Snohomish in protecting its environment. The significance of this project will grow with time as more data is obtained of what kinds of animals and plants the Snohomish County have. This data can be used in maintaining the diversity of our animals by looking at what species are facing the danger of extinction or going through the bottleneck effects and figure out ways to prevent that from happening. Let alone that with time we will be able to see how the processes of evolution acted on those animal populations like changes in their morphological traits. In short, I have gained a lot by getting involved in this project because I didn’t just learn about animals but also I realized the importance of such environmental projects in preserving nature for our community.
Some of the questions that have occurred to me were:
How did they obtain those scents that we sprayed to attract animals?
Do those scents have anything to do with pheromones? Do they play the same role?
Do they perform a live observation of animals in this project?
How animal tracks are used other in classifying animals?
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