Wildlife Monitoring in Upper Big Gulch

Figure 1. The author adjusting a new game camera being deployed in Upper Big Gulch. Photo taken by Jason Hall.

I participated in the wildlife monitoring service learning event at Upper Big Gulch in Mukilteo on February 14th, 2018 from 9:00am to 11:30am, for a total of 2.5 hours. This event was led by Grace Coale (grace.coale@email.edcc.edu) as part of an ongoing study conducted by Edmonds Community College on behalf of the Snohomish County Airport and  the City of Mukilteo, for the purpose of understanding the potential impact of construction and other human activities on local wildlife populations. I assisted Grace Coale in performing maintenance on an existing game camera and locating a suitable area to set up a new camera.

After returning from the wildlife monitoring site, Grace Coale allowed me and the other volunteer to view the photos taken by the game camera we performed maintenance on. While the majority of the images showed common squirrels and birds, I was surprised to see coyotes, an owl, and a mountain beaver among their ranks. Prior to this, most of my experience with animals in city parks was restricted to domestic dogs and the occasional bird. My experience with this project served to highlight the significance of these relatively small patches of greenery to urban wildlife populations. To the layman, parks seem to offer little besides the opportunity for a recreational respite from modern architecture; however, their ecological significance extends far beyond this. In addition to the direct benefits they provide to humans, parks serve as part-refuge and part-highway for the large number of animals living alongside humanity. There often seems to be a disconnect between the scientific community and the public at large, where scientific knowledge is seen as something irrelevant to day-to-day life. Where ecology is concerned, however, this is most certainly not the case. Even in urban environments, everyone is intimately connected to the web of life which unites all organisms. Research such as the EdCC wildlife monitoring projects allows us to understand the impact we have on the organisms living in our midst; perhaps if more people were aware of this aspect of science, they would be more mindful of how their choices affect their fellow living things.

The interdisciplinary nature of biology makes it nearly impossible to isolate any one part of the biosphere from another. While this project is primarily concerned with observing and recording the abundance and diversity of animals in Mukilteo, these animals can only be considered within the context of their habitat. Construction has the potential to harm animals directly, but the larger threat lies in the damage it can cause to the water, soil, and vegetation which are necessary to sustain animal populations. Loss of biodiversity of any sort, not just with respect to animals, can have devastating effects on the ecosystem as a whole. Animals, however, represent excellent indicators of ecological disturbance due to the fact that, as heterotrophs, they are highly dependent on other organisms for sustenance, and that, as many of them are large and mobile, they readily exhibit changes in health and behavior. Animals native to the Mukilteo region developed adaptations to help them survive and reproduce under a set of environmental conditions which humans are responsible for radically changing. As a result, many of these animals have experienced massive declines in fitness and can only survive in reduced quantities. This wildlife monitoring project is part of an attempt to arrest this decline by maintaining pockets of habitat where these animals can efficiently survive and reproduce.

My experience with this project raised the following questions: Have any significant changes in the abundance or diversity of wildlife been observed since this project began? Which is more effective at documenting the presence of wildlife, track identification or photography? Where do coyotes go during the day? How many animals live in the Upper Big Gulch region full-time relative to those which just pass through?