User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
The Area that I have chosen is a inner city park called Canmore park located in Calgary. The area is approximately 15 hectares in size, and is a mix of grassland rolling hills and large groups of deciduous and coniferous trees. There were some magpies noted in some of the trees, as well as some animal tracks in the snow that appeared to resemble those of a rabbit or hair. Squirrels were noticed to be in the trees.
At the time of my field outing the weather was sunny clear skies and was -2 degrees Celsius. This area is a well-used park by many people in the community for cross country skiing and walking dogs. This time of the year the ground will be consistently covered in snow and ice and the majority of the trees will not have any leaves on them.
From my observations this day I noticed that despite the number of trees in the area there were not a lot of birds. I constantly have birds in my back yard year round. I would like to investigate the effects of urbanization and housing development of bird feeding and nesting habits when comparing this city park to urban city dwelling environments?
The other thing I noticed is that this area has signs of coyotes living in the area, but there are few other signs of food sources for them. How do coyotes in inner city neighborhoods thrive with lack of readily available food source?
As well I noticed that there were human tracks throughout the park, but there was distinct lack of activity in the more densely treed area of the park. Despite there being pathways through this area. In city parks such as this do residents preferer to walk in grass land areas as oppose to treed areas?
