This past spring, Professor Laura Prugh took her first turn teaching ESRM 351: Wildlife Research Techniques, a field-intensive course that involves several weekend trips to sites around the state.
Through a combination of classroom time and field excursions, the course introduces students to common techniques used to assess wildlife populations and their habitat, and also how to communicate observations through field journals. Students gain hands-on experience with species identification, non-lethal methods of capturing and handling a variety of wildlife species, and non-invasive methods of wildlife research that do not involve capturing animals. By the end of the quarter, they should be able to identify a host of regional birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and plants, and they should be proficient at keeping detailed field notes and have a basic understanding of the scientific writing and the publication process.
The four primary field trips included overnights at Friday Harbor Labs on San Juan Island and the Olympic Natural Resource Center in Forks, Wash., as well as camping at Teanaway and Mount Rainier. While at these field sites, students get to experiment with all sorts of skills and techniques, including radiotelemetry, learning regional birds by sight and sound (call/song), conducting rabbit burrow counts and small mammal trapping, field identification and capture methods for birds, amphibian surveys in terrestrial and aquatic habitats, and much more.
It’s an incredibly popular and memorable course, and one of the students in this year’s class, Kacy Hardin, set up a public Facebook group to capture scenes from their trips. The page offers a fun photo journal of their various research endeavors, with loads of great shots and clips, so check it out!
Photo of Laura Prugh with snake © Laura Prugh; photo of Laurel Peelle handling a Keen’s mouse (below) © Andrew Wang.
