NBC Bay Area
Open Road - One Tam Wildlife
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- A field-based One Tam Conservation Management Team provides an essential and borderless support structure for various facets of conservation science, monitoring, and management, and helps foster a common and coordinated approach for all of Mt. Tam.
- A comprehensive, big-picture view of the mountain’s resources will allow managers to prioritize restoration and protection efforts and allocate resources in new ways.
- Seldom seen and poorly studied, the lives and habits of Marin County’s bats are largely a mystery. However, bats are actually tremendously important parts of our communities.
- This project will remove a portion of the rock riprap currently lining Redwood Creek's banks, allowing the creek to form natural habitat features so desperately needed for juvenile salmon survival.
- Mt. Tam is home to many native animal species, including at least 35 mammals, 184 birds, 11 fish, and 25 amphibians and reptiles. Wildlife are found in every habitat type on the mountain, where they may be grazers, predators, prey—or play some combination of these key ecosystem roles. Changes in their abundance or distribution across the landscape can indicate the effects ecological stressors like climate change, invasive species, and human disturbance.
- References by Topic: Click on one of the links below to jump to the references for a particular topic: Wildlife Birds
- Birds are recognized as indicators of ecological change (Carignan & Villard, 2002). They also provide a wide variety of important ecosystem services including devouring pests, pollinating flowers, dispersing seeds, scavenging carrion, cycling nutrients, and modifying the environment in ways that benefit other species (Whelan et al., 2015).
- As predators, prey, scavengers, and grazers, mammals play important roles in Mt. Tam’s terrestrial and aquatic food webs. The abundance, diversity, and even the behavior of mammals may reflect changes in their habitat, population dynamics of species above or below them in the food chain, or the impacts of human activities.
- Spending part of their lives in freshwater streams and part in the ocean, anadromous fish like coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), steelhead trout (O. mykiss), and threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) are good indicators of riparian habitat quality,
- Thin-skinned, long-lived, and totally dependent on aquatic habitats for part of their lives, amphibians are good indicators of stream, pond, and wetland conditions.
- Summary The overall condition of conifer forest-mixed hardwood-associated birds is Good.
- Why Was This Indicator Chosen? Iconic and charismatic Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) are good indicators of Marin County’s fo
- Summary The overall condition of climate change-vulnerable birds is Good.
- Summary The overall condition of grassland-associated birds is Unknown.