I just shared this in Nextdoor.

I live in Heritage Oaks. I have a trail cam and I like to see what animals show up on it. I keep track for fun on a spreadsheet. I had a feeling I was seeing fewer animals than I used to so I took a very ROUGH look at the trend.

The animals I tally are basically anything besides rabbits and deer. So examples are raccoon, coyote, etc. If there's more than one of an animal on a given day, I just count it as one sighting. The data begins in December 2020.

So the first year I tallied 278 animals.
The second year I tallied 155 animals.
The third year I tallied 119 animals.

I don't have the fourth year's worth of data complete yet but you can see where this is going :(

Heritage Oaks itself appears to me mostly the same over the last few years, but of course everywhere around us has been developed more. And we're right by 290. So I assume the surrounding development is the main cause. I guess that speaks to how animals can't do well in an "island" situation. So even if a given raccoon, say, lives its whole life in Heritage Oaks, I guess the ecosystem as a whole suffers because it's totally cutoff. Or maybe I have that wrong. Anyway, just sharing.