Wildlife Monitoring in Mukilteo By Bishoy Galil

Wildlife Monitoring in Mukilteo By Bishoy Galil

                   

                                                                                                               Taken by Carson
Title of the project: Wildlife Monitoring in Mukilteo

Number of hours volunteered: 9:00 – 11:30 (approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes)

Location: Lower Japanese Gulch - Mukilteo

Contacts of the event organizer: Grace Coal, Dept. of Anthropology at EdCC, Grace.Coal@edcc.edu and 425-530-7895

Sponsors: City of Mukilteo, EdCC Anthropology Dept., Snohomish County Airport, and Learn and Serve Environmental Anthropology Field (LEAF) School.

Goals of the event: The goals of the event are to help the City of Mukilteo and Snohomish County balance human and wildlife needs by using cameras and traditional tracking techniques to monitor wildlife in the Japanese Gulch. This is important because the city of Mukilteo is constructing an airport near the area of Mukilteo, so they want to know how it will affect the wildlife.

Summary of duties: My duties at the event were to change batteries of the cameras, to set camera traps to photograph the animals, to change the cameras’ SD cards, and to use GPS devices to save locations of cameras. Moreover, I carried the backpack for short period of time.

Science & Society Reflection:

My service is very important as it helps Mukilteo city to be better by keeping track of the wildlife in Mukilteo and making sure that the ecosystem is protected. This event is important as we were using our knowledge of science to track animals, so we can help keep the ecosystem in good conditions and better harmony. The city of Mukilteo uses science to collect data, so we can know how the new airport construction is affecting the local wildlife.  There were also GPS devices, which we used to locate important things that my group found, so scientists might come after and check what we found. Therefore, the role of science in our society is extremely important, like in my event it enabled us to monitor the wildlife in Mukilteo, so we can ensure that the animals living in Mukilteo are not negatively affected by the external interference of humans. This event helped me to think how we can use our knowledge in science, like our knowledge about wildlife and ecosystems, to help keep the environment in better conditions. Thus, we can help animals to find their food and to reproduce. Moreover, the event enabled me to think about how the interference of humans can make the ecosystem fragile, as animals might lose their normal preferred environment by our interactions. Wildlife science learning is beneficial, as it helps to understand how organisms interact with each other. The role of science in our lives is to help us to live better and to think correctly, so applying science to our thinking is really important. Finally, our service to the community helps us to know the organisms’ needs and to be able to offer that needs, so we can build a population that can interact in a constructive way.

Potential Impact Reflection:

We talked about different kinds of animals that live in Mukilteo, as we talked about American robin, Coyote, Eastern cottontail, and squirrels. This event is very related to what we learned in class. Throughout the event, we talked about ecosystems and animals, so I think this event strengthened my knowledge about animal biology. The event affected my thoughts about evolution and how organisms can evolve and stay in harmony with the surroundings. Moreover, my thoughts were affected after this service learning as we talked about how living organisms can leave with each other in harmony and feed on each other, and that reminded me with the animal phyla and their characteristics. Wildlife monitoring helped me to make live relations between what I learned in Bio 212 and real life, including levels of organization and animal diversity, as I noticed how the animals are different from each other in characteristics and physical shapes. The importance of human in our bioregion is to make sure that the environment is in its best condition and to learn about the environment that he is living in to be able to interact with the environment. Biology is interdisciplinary because it has multiple aspects that can be studied in different ways by different people. In my event, there were many things related to chemistry, as the pH of the watercourses. Biology makes relation with many other fields including chemistry and physics. Science is very important in our lives, as it enables us to understand what is going around us. During the event, we talked about coyotes a lot. After the event, I did a little research on coyotes and I found that they are carnivorous canines that are closely related to the gray wolves and they have an average weight of 25 pounds and can reach a speed of 43 mph. Consequently, they are predators. We also talked about the birds and how we can identify the birds from their songs. Overall, we talked about how animals are dependent on each other, and how humans can affect the ecosystem.  

Questions:

1. When we looked at the pictures from the SD cards, we found animals that we didn’t see through our event, so my question is why we didn’t see the animals we found in the SD cards during the event?
2. Can coyotes, as they are carnivorously related to wolves, attack humans?
3. Where and when we can find the highest concentration of wildlife?
4. What are the exact effects of the new airport on the wildlife in Mukilteo?