Wildlife monitoring - Service Learning

On May 26th, I went to go wildlife monitoring in Mulkiteo with a lady named Grace who took a few other people. It is an event that is held on Friday mornings from 9:30 am to noon. She can be contacted by grace.coale@email.edcc.edu.
The things that we did during this event was to change batteries and memory cards of cameras that were out in a little forest area. We learned that the cameras were set up to catch any wildlife that may be around the area and to learn more about them. We also did some tracking and learned about the different ways to identify the different footprints that you may come across.

part of the trail that we walked through.

For example, at the beginning, we discovered dog paw prints and were able to learn about what state the dog was in and how to know it was a dog instead of any other animal. How we were able to determine the first tracks we saw were dogs because they were all over the place, which one could assume is a dog out wandering like any dog would. Another thing that helped us determine it may be a dog is the depth of the pawprint. The ones that we found were pretty deep so it was assumed that the dog was running around the area. The last thing that we used to determine it was a dog's pawprint was the shape of it.

Moutain beaver footprint in the mud

The picture above is a track that is from a mountain beaver from what we thought. After seeing this grace took us to one of the dens of these mountain beavers and told us about the camera that was located around the den. She taught us some of the behaviors that these animals tend to have and how hard it is to actually try to take a picture of them in their dens because it would be like whack a mole with how fast they'd move from the different holes in their den.

 I think that by doing this event it could really help you see and learn about the wildlife from a different perspective. Usually, people don't just randomly go out into the woods if they don't know what's out there. By having the cameras out there it really helps to capture what may be lurking in the woods that are near to us without us actually being out there ourselves when we are still in doubt. By doing this it could lead to new discoveries and maybe break assumptions. For example, Grace had told us about how some of the residents around the area talked about their cats being eaten and I think that having the cameras that are able to sensor movement would be a real big help to see if it is possibly true or not and what the cause of this could be.

Questions that I have now after this event is are What would make people think that their pets may be getting eaten by a species such as a mountain beaver and if they've had any evidence for it. Another was how often can you eat nettle and what would happen if you eat too much of it. What kind of nutrients does nettle contain?