City Critters
Video Transcript
Note: All WP Saskatchewan video transcripts are edited for flow and readability.
(Ryan) “The Regina Urban Wildlife Research Program is a study that we developed in 2021 to understand how wildlife is making use of the city of Regina.”
(Jordan) “Kind of a collaborative effort between a bunch of different organizations to better understand how the wildlife in and around Regina uses green spaces within the city, how they move through and where they like to hang out in our city.”
(Narrator) Whether we realize it or not, we share a city with wildlife. Humans have built cities to dwell in, and the regional wildlife has adapted throughout the years. Exactly how they’ve adapted is the catalyst for the formation of the Urban Wildlife Research Program. And as Jordan says, our geographical location offers something special.
(Jordan) “No one’s really done projects like this here in Regina, and it’s kind of lacking a lot in like northern cities and especially in cities like Regina that are in the northern Great Plains and completely surrounded by heavy agriculture. So it kind of creates like a really cool and unique opportunity to study urban wildlife.
A lot of the agriculture around Regina is really heavy monoculture. Like it’s the same plant all over the same quarter, if not multiple quarters. So animals don’t really like to use those types of habitats because it doesn’t provide them the resources they need in order to live. The green spaces within the city are more varied. They provide better shelter, better food for the animals.”
(Ryan) “We’re really lucky here in Regina that we have a lot of green space, but the biodiversity here is pretty amazing. There’s tons of birds singing behind us. We’re really lucky to have the creek going through and Wascana Park and these just huge green spaces that are really, really important for wildlife moving through the city. So we’ve seen everything from moose to whitetail and mule deer to coyotes, American martens and beavers.
We even have some animals that stick around all winter and kind of brave -30 and -40 temperatures, and so we’re seeing coyotes all throughout the year, lots of jackrabbits, as everyone knows, but it’s pretty amazing how much wildlife we actually have in our backyard that lots of people don’t know about.”
(Narration) So how do you even start a project like this? It’s not every day that you’ll see a fox, or an American marten in your local park. The research team devised a plan using technology and patience.
(Ryan) “We have stations set up all around the city that are composed of trail cameras so they take pictures when anything or any wildlife walks by, and then we also have audio recorders that are at the exact same sites and they record sounds of birds, frogs, and everything else that we can hear at each of those sites.
Urban ecosystems are one of the fastest growing ecosystems on the planet. And generally we think that, you know, things like asphalt and roads and buildings are typically bad for wildlife, but if you plan cities appropriately and there’s lots of green space, that green space is connected, cities can be really, really important for management of wildlife habitats and management of the wildlife themselves.
And so we’re just trying to provide that information to decision makers that are doing city planning and other things in the city.”
(Jordan) “With my graduate research, I’m hoping to look at that urban to rural gradient and kind of really figure out where animals like to hang out.”
So after we collect the data, we deploy the cameras, we deploy the audio recorders and we collect them back, we upload all of our data to an online database to kind of help us sort through and tag all the images and audio recordings and after that will be running some different analysis, kind of looking at number of animals per site, to see if they prefer urban to suburban to rural sites and will also be comparing how well citizen scientists are able to detect species versus the trail cameras.”
(Narration) Even with the cameras and audio recorders, the researchers need help from the community to realize the true impact of humans on animals, and vice versa. The City Critter Challenge was created to incentivize the public to aid in the science of urban wildlife.
(Jordan) “The City Critter Challenge is a collaborative effort between the University of Regina and Saskatchewan Science Center. At the U of R, we created the routes, and we came up with the protocol and the Saskatchewan Science Center has kind of helped us a lot with the marketing and kind of advertising to kind of help recruit volunteers for this project.
For every route that you complete, you are able to collect a critter card and they’re basically little Pokémon cards almost, and they have a picture of the animal and a fun fact about them. There’s ten critter cards right now that you can collect so for every route you do you’re entered to win Adam & Geek merchandise as well as tickets to the new IMAX.”
(Ryan) “As biologists, we have limited funds, we have limited time, we can’t survey and we can’t go look for wildlife in absolutely every corner of the city and so that’s when it’s great that you can go out in your neighborhood, you can do a survey for us and because that’s all sort of done in a standardized way, it contributes to science that way.
So it’s really a win-win for us. People get a little, you know, more interested in wildlife, but we also get some amazing information that we just couldn’t get with the one or two people that we have on the project right now.”
(Narration) Within all this captured data, there’s no shortage of jackrabbits and red winged blackbirds, ducks and geese, with the occasional fox here and there. But every once in a while, a surprising picture or recording will bring a smile to the faces of the research team.
(Ryan) “We’ve had our trail cameras out for about 50,000 hours or so. So they’re running 24 hours a day, collecting a ton of images. And our recorders run for about 20 minutes every day for 30 days, four months of the year. So that all adds up to a huge amount of data that we have to deal with.”
(Jordan) “There’s been like some cool developments, like on one of our sites, we actually got a turkey vulture, which was super cool because it was on a trail camera and it was flying really low, so it was really unexpected.”
(Ryan) “But then it’s kind of really up to the researchers to go in and tag each image with ‘Is it empty or is it just grass blowing in the wind?’ Which we have lots of pictures of. Or is it something cool like a coyote walking through the image, or a moose?”
(Jordan) “Something else really cool that we got was a sharp tailed grouse moving through Regina in the winter and that’s not a species that you would typically expect to find in a city park at all. So it was really cool. And I think the coolest thing I got on the audio recorder so far was an American bittern. A marsh bird and they’re really weird looking, honestly. They’ve got like kind of a long, slender brown body and a long yellow beak, and they actually camouflage in marshes like a cattail so they stick their beak right up in the air and they look just like a dried out cattail. The best way to detect them really is their sound, and it sounds like a drop in a bucket, almost like it sounds like “glug”, kind of.”
(Narration) With collectible cards, strange sounding birds, and unexpected furry creatures all around us, in the end, Jordan and Ryan just want to see more people outside enjoying the green spaces within their cities.
(Ryan) “You know, encourage people to get out in Regina, enjoy the green space that we have. You know, it’s an amazing place to come out to a place like this. You almost feel like you’re not in the city, and a lot of people don’t have that opportunity in different parts of the world.”
(Jordan) “I just want to encourage people to get outside. The City Critter Challenge is a great way – a great excuse, really, to explore city parks and kind of familiarize yourself with the animals in your backyard.”
Credits:
Filmed at AE Wilson Park, Lewvan Fields, Victoria Park & Wascana Park in Regina, Saskatchewan and Condie Nature Refuge in Lumsden, SK.
Jordan Rustad, Regina Urban Wildlife Research/City Critter Challenge Project Lead
MSc. Graduate (University of Regina)
Nature Saskatchewan
-Dr. Ryan Fisher, Regina Urban Wildlife Research Project Liaison
Curator of Vertebrate Zoology (Royal Saskatchewan Museum)