Effect of Human Activity on Squirrel’s Abundance

For the initial data collection, a simple random sampling strategy was used when observing squirrel behaviour in Central Park, Burnaby. Initially, I thought it would be difficult to do the sampling as there was no certainty that there would be squirrels during the collection. However, it turned out that this was not a problem, as there was an abundance of squirrels in the park. The problem I do have is how to measure the squirrels’ behaviour adaptation. At first I thought of connecting the behaviour of squirrels towards squirrels as those that run away when I get close exhibit fear, and those that approach me or did not run away as not. I thought of measuring this by saying those that I was able to approach for 2m and below exhibit, and those squirrels that approach humans on their own have less fear of humans and seeing how many squirrels did this to prove that squirrels at Central Park have reduced fear to humans. However, testing their fear of humans just by their reaction towards observers approaching them is not plausible.

Another challenge I faced was how to ensure that the first squirrel I saw was not the same as the second one. Therefore, I had to think of a way to avoid observing the same squirrel more than once. It wasn’t a perfect system, but I decided to check for any distinct differences between the squirrels, such as colour and size, and on my way back, I did not record the squirrels I saw. During the observation, I found that there are two types of squirrels in Central Park, Burnaby: the Douglas Squirrel, which has brown and gray fur, and the Eastern Gray Squirrel, which has gray and black fur. I will continue to collect the data in a similar way but with a different focus or hypothesis wherein I will measure if the level of human activity, by low or high frequency, impacts the squirrel abundance, by counting.