 president of Boreal Conservation for the National Audubon Society working out of his office in Gardner, Maine. He's had a wide-ranging career in science and bird conservation. After receiving an undergraduate degree in biology in the University of Maine at Farmington, he went on to earn a master's in PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University. He worked for the National Audubon Society first as bird conservation director for New York State and then the national director. During his first tenure with Audubon, Dr. Wells was located at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where he continues as an associate of the lab. After leaving Audubon, Jeff became a senior scientist for the International Boreal Conservation Campaign and Boreal Songbird Initiative, leading their science efforts for almost 20 years during which he published and spoke frequently about globally significant conservation values of the Boreal Forest. He's an active birder and for 12 years was a member of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's SAP Suckers birding team, which won the World Series of birding in 2001 and 2002. He's birded throughout much of North American continent from the Northwest Territories of Canada to Veracuse, Mexico and in the Caribbean. And in his spare time, he also leads trips for the L.L. Bean Outdoor Discovery School. Jeff is a very active writer. He's authored or co-authored thousands of scientific papers, reports, book chapters, blogs, columns, etc. His book Bird is Conservation Handbook, which I just happened to have a copy of. It's a 100 North American birds at risk published in fall of 2007. The first of its kind, a bird book for bird conservation. More recently, he co-authored with his wife, Allison, Maine's favorite birds in 2012. In 2020, he was part of the author team to publish the monumental new book Birds of Maine. Jeff lives in Gardner, Maine with his wife, teenage son, and two indoor cats, an appropriate place for them. Jeff, it's all yours. Thank you, John. Are you hearing me okay? Yes, I'm hoping one of those indoor cats doesn't make an appearance here. They have one of them that loves to try to interrupt Zoom meetings, but we'll see what happens. Yeah, thanks for inviting me to talk with you guys and to be here tonight. And I'm sorry for sort of doing this with the phone up to my ear, but my computer's been making some crunching sounds lately that seem to get in the way of my microphone, and I don't know what's going on with that, but I'm going to try to share my screen now. I'm hoping you have given me a way to do that. It looks like you have. So I will start with that, and I guess while we're going, if anything is not working, let me know. Somehow, and I'll try to stop, but I can also shut off my video if that, maybe I'll just do that. Well, I won't do that now, but if you're having any trouble with any of this, let me know and I'll shut off my video. Just cut in. So, yeah, you see the title here, the biggest bird conservation story you've never heard. Maybe there are some of you who have heard about it, but I'm guessing there's some aspects of it that you don't know about. But I want to start off with a little story that relates to this photo here and the photos you're about to see. And it's a story about May 28, 2018, which was a day that will go down in birding history. That's because it was the day that the largest number of warblers was ever seen in one location in one day. Even a non-birder would have been startled by the numbers. The birders there estimated over 700,000 of these brightly colored gems of the bird world passed by them on that unforgettable nine-hour day. They were in Quebec along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence at the Tadassac Dunes, which is a pretty famous birding area, but it had never seen anything quite like this. It's a three-hour drive sort of northeast from Quebec City. And these are actually photos from that event. That day they saw an estimated 144,000 of these bay breasted warblers. 29,000 black burning warblers passed by them that day. 108,000 Cape May warblers. And they talked about how some of these birds were actually, as they were streaming by, were passing right by them or even through their legs as they were sort of standing there counting them. And while these birders were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time document this kind of abundance, the fact that it was possible to even have 700,000 warblers in one place at one time is because of a special place they were migrating to, the Du Bois Forest in North America. Many of you maybe have seen some graphics like this, some maps. This is a recreation of the world's forests prior to the industrialization of the world. 80% of those original forests have been cut over and lost, fragmented. These areas here you see on this map of the the remaining areas that have never been cut over, never never been heavily impacted by industrial development. And the boreal contains about 25% of the earth's remaining primary forests, as you recall. The boreal as we define it here is the this area that you see in green in this map stretching from Alaska all the way across kind of sandwiched between the Arctic and the Prairie provinces. And then as you go eastward between the the great southern expanse of Hudson and James Bay and the Great Lakes to the south and all the way over to Newfoundland and Labrador. An area of 1.4 billion acres and much of it still intact. Because of its intactness it has still some of the most amazing globally significant ecological values still left on earth. It holds more fresh water than any other place on earth. It has literally millions of lakes including four of the ten largest lakes on planet earth. It has the largest undamped rivers left in North America. You know some of them like the Mackenzie kind of a Mississippi level of river you know that that that large but without dams on it or without dams on most of it unlike again unlike our rivers. It has some of the world's largest wetlands the Hudson Bay James Bay wetlands or lowlands is considered the second largest peatland on earth third largest wetland. Incredibly dense in carbon these this is carbon that thousands of years old it's been stored in peat and in wetlands you know post the last ice age retreat. A massive store of carbon over 200 billion tons of carbon and that's probably an underestimate as we're starting to get more better information there's some scientists feel there's maybe even double that amount of carbon there. So incredibly important for for climate and climate stabilization. A biodiversity cradle it has some of the last populations of large mammals you know wolves and bears grizzly bears black bears polar bears even in the southern reaches of the Hudson James Bay area. Still caribou that are migrating sometimes you know 500 to 1000 miles back and forth across across the boreal wolverines so many species wolves things that we've lost in the U.S. I mentioned you know the migration of of some of these animals you know we when we think about the world's great land mammal migrations many people immediately start thinking about Africa you know the African plains you know and the the great movies about that and but few people are aware that they there is still one of the last greatest migrations of large mammals that takes place across the boreal forest again these different caribou herds that move from the calving grounds in the Arctic down into the boreal in the winter and back again just incredibly long migrations that are still unfettered for the most part by various kinds of human industrial activity. We still have Atlantic salmon runs up undamped rivers in the eastern part of the boreal and in the western part other kinds of salmon and other kinds of salmonids that are moving up and down and other types of fish through these systems and of course there are the birds. There we go the boreal forest is home to somewhere between one in three billion breeding birds that's billion with a B and in the fall of the year that means there's three to five billion if you add the young of the year they come spilling out of the boreal forest and become the birds of our backyards and lakes and ponds and coasts throughout again throughout the whole Americas all the way down into even southern South America. A lot of times we birders you know we talk about boreal birds and we think of just a few particular species the the Canada Jay being being one of the the iconic ones you know blackback woodpecker spruce grouse boreal chickadees things like that but if you ever look at you know the the range of those birds you'll see of course that that they are all found in the boreal and and we do have some of them down in Maine but the number of birds that are boreal birds goes way beyond those specialty birds that people come here to Maine to see like the Canada Jay and the boreal chickadee you know they just come to the southern extent of their boreal. Hey Jeff you're breaking up a little bit and I think we're having trouble hearing you now. Okay. That sounds better now. Keep doing whatever that is. Maybe I'll how about like this is that okay? That sounds great. Okay I'm just gonna hold my phone in front of me here. Sorry if and you know what I'm gonna do I'm also gonna I'm gonna stop this for a second so I can turn off my video just to make sure that's not a problem okay and then I'm gonna go back to my share screen and go back to where we left off thanks for your patience everybody there we go sorry everybody you can still hear me okay that sounds good okay another bird we think of you know as as a quintessential bird of the winter in the along the Maine coast the redneck grebe but how many people would have you know normally think of that as a boreal bird and yet almost all of redneck grebes nest in the boreal forest so you know boreal birds encompasses a great many birds beyond what we birders sometimes classify as boreal birds you know everything from sparrows to ducks to waterfowl to warblers to woodpeckers to shorebirds a whole host of birds that rely on the boreal for many of them for most of their breeding range we did a report and study maybe oh gosh it's probably going on 20 years now ago that tried to estimate the number of birds and I mentioned the numbers people were astounded at the time 1 to 3 billion nesting birds nearly 100 species that have half or more of their entire world range just found within the boreal forest and a host of other other interesting facts about that we included in that report but there's some species and there's about 33 of them that are basically boreal breeding endemics found almost 100 in the boreal of course we here in Maine know a few of these species that that do also spill down just a little bit into Maine and become part of our apophana but most of the range of many of these species here is found in the boreal forest of Canada and Alaska and because they're found over this expansive area they reach often high abundances you can see here in this slide here you know dark-eyed juncoes estimated over 200 million of them the nest in the boreal white-throated sparrow 116 million and so on and because of that when they migrate south become parts of the winter bird communities of other places they have really important ecological roles that many of which we're just starting to understand and learn about but you know when you start thinking about that many birds coming in and spreading you know eating berries and spreading the seeds around or eating insects if it's a yellow-bellied tap sucker for example or a yellow-run borebler whatever it is just a lots of different ecological roles some of these species are important pollinators when they go south into the tropics so a lot of interesting things you know the white-throated sparrow here one of our most iconic birds of of Maine we think of in the summer but also one of the most iconic birds and sounds of the boreal forest across Canada and of course these birds spend most of their year outside of the boreal forest you know the this is the map of the white-throated sparrow an ebird map showing where they are in winter you know a few of them here along southern coastal Maine we have a couple of them we've had in Gardner over the over the winter and I'm just going to start this animation hopefully it works and you can just see how though the entire population moves north and most of it except for a little portions of it in Maine and some of the new England states ends up in in the boreal forest many of the migrations are even more astounding the black-bowl warbler which is found across the boreal forest and although we have them in high elevations here in Maine we're on the southern extent of their range and most of their range extends all the way across the boreal that's the bulk of their breeding range and so some recent work has been looking at their migration people had a sense that they did these very long over water migrations and some of the recent work has has confirmed this with a few a few caveats as far as some of the birds where they may stop but basically these these birds are making this you know sometimes multi-day stop a flight across the ocean to get to South America where they where they winter so a lot of amazing connections from the boreal forest to the rest of the world these are some banned return data mostly from waterfowl the black dots are indigenous protected area proposals areas that are being proposed for protection and showing some of the places that are connected to those places via the banded waterfowl that have been found you know far to the south and you can just see how well connected all these places across the boreal are other kinds of analyses have looked at some of the birds from particular regions like this is in Ontario looking at boreal land birds and where the largest number of the species winter and you can see for one a lot of the US has has a lot of these birds but the the brightest orange colors are the highest concentrations of species where most species overlap and you can see kind of southern Mexico through central america to northern south america and in the caribbean one of the kind of these are the hot spots where a lot of these birds winter and so I've highlighted a lot of the special ecological values by a lot biodiversity values of the boreal but along with being one of the last great conservation opportunities in human history it's also seen as one of the last places for opportunities for large-scale industrial expansion and natural resource extractive industries so currently about 12 percent of that massive area is actually protected and there's huge pressures mounting from all sorts of activities some of which are outlined here so we're really at a crossroads this is one of the most important times that will decide the fate of this place you know it's I like to say sometimes it's the last chance in human evolutionary history to protect some of these last places to do things differently than we did and the rest of the world and those decisions are being made right now day by day some of the birds that are potentially impacted by some of the industrial activities that have already taken place are birds that are found in the southern part of the boreal forest and sometimes when we're down here in the U.S. we tend to think of these birds as being you know found all the way across that whole boreal region but many of them are just found along the southern part like the evening growth speak and of course that's a bird that's had very large declines and it's interesting if you look at its boreal range which is in orange overlaid with the red part which is where all the forestry, oil and gas, road building, mining and all that stuff has taken place you see a major overlap between its occurrence in the southern boreal and and those activities similar with Canada Warbler and other rapidly declining species and a number of other species all of this work that's been taking place to think about how we could do things differently to maintain all the ecological and biodiversity values that we all want to see maintained has been kind of taken some new turns over the last two decades as people have been able to do more computer modeling as to what the different scenarios would look like if you lose certain amounts of habitat and and also how much habitat you would need to have maintained in order to keep some of the services that you'd like and what you know it's not really probably a great surprise it's sort of common sense that you need to have more of an impact to maintain more of the values that we care about but as we're sort of seeing this kind of biodiversity climate change crisis kind of loom up at us it's becoming more apparent that we got to do things differently especially in the places where we have the last chance to do it and you know the science is showing us that we need to maintain and protect restore a much higher proportion of the landscape if we want to keep those values if we want to keep species from going extinct if we want to keep clean air clean water on you know available to keep us all alive fortunately there's some really great news in the boreal forest of Canada indigenous people there who've been living there for thousands of years who have never left are leading the way in thinking about how to do conservation at a new scale a scale that the world has rarely ever seen i mean already over the last 20 years or so the scale of protection is mind boggling you know getting close to 200 million acres that have been protected over the last 20 20 years and right now there are proposals that will just boost this you know even much much higher if they are allowed to move through so you know this is conservation at a scale that we haven't imagined for a long time you know maybe teddy roosevelt years and early parts of the 1900s here in the us when we were seeing very large scale conservation but we've haven't seen anything like this certainly in the us you know for for a century and and and rarely in other parts of the world as well except in a few very few places and it's all across the boreal forest from from the ucon stretching all the way over to newfoundland and labrador just amazing areas and amazing conservation that's happening Intertwined with that has been a movement to change the way the land is stewarded and managed through what are called indigenous guardians instead of having you know sort of people from down south who are not from these areas kind of come up and be rangers and do all all those kinds of duties the people that have always been there are now taking those those things on in a really inspiring way through these indigenous guardians programs and it's also kind of a way that allows people who've always been there to have economic opportunity in australia the the federal government has a program like this they call it indigenous rangers but they they provide support for about 700 full-time jobs for people across their protected areas within australia and we're really hoping and urging the canadian government to move that way they've already started on that path and and and it's really encouraging to see i've been working in boreal conservation for 20 years or so but i just brought over my expertise and program work to autobahn about three years ago and so autobahn is now fully engaged in in this work in a new way that's really exciting and this is just kind of an outline of of how how we're working how we're organized on the in the boreal conservation program working on communication that helps raise awareness of the indigenous work that's going on in conservation the movement of for very large new indigenous protected areas and indigenous guardians programs we do science that helps support those efforts to move those forward specific collaboration with indigenous governments and communities and we're just starting to dabble into how we might be able to support more boreal ecotourism so that these parks are still providing economic opportunity sometimes the industrial interests will tell some of the indigenous peoples that if they make a park that they're making a what they call a wilderness ghetto you know a wonderful protected place but no economic opportunity and so things like indigenous guardians and ecotourism opportunities are our ways to try to to counter some of those that narrative this is our our team here that we've assembled and hopefully we're going to add add some more but you some of you may know some of these folks carry is actually a manor lives down in Cape Elizabeth so she's been in the area and just finished her PhD last year at University of Manador no so maybe some of you know her so as I said you know our main goal is to help move forward the momentum for trying to get these new indigenous protected areas that have been proposed over the over the finish line to get them protected it's it's it's hard just like it is everywhere to get places protected there's a lot of interests that oppose these things and you have to build strong public support in all the ways that we know about how to do conservation here in the US it's the same thing you got to get public support and you have to do a lot of work to communicate and educate people about why places are special and and get them on on your side and get the government on your side and so forth and so you know some of that involves communication work like various pieces that highlight areas that we're trying to support it's work with media helping provide quotes to media related to why the borough forest is so special and why we need to protect it why the government should be supporting it to actually publishing scientific papers they kind of go into the some more of the details about the state of conservation and what are some of the values that should be protected all of this work has been very successful in in recent years we were really elated last august when the federal government of canada announced three hundred and forty million dollars of new funding for indigenous led conservation for both the support of new indigenous protected areas and also for indigenous guardians programs and you can see some quotes here from some indigenous leaders that that we work with that we collaborate with on on various projects here you know this this was a massive new federal investment in in this work i want to just tell you quickly about a couple of specific projects that we're working on that we're collaborating with indigenous governments on one of them is a place called the seal river watershed in northern manitoba where you see that orange dot there just to give you some context this is a map actually that kerry actually just produced for me today put it in context down on the right is where it's located in the continent and then kind of a zoom in it you might not be able to get the the sense of this just from these maps like this but this is an area of 12 million acres in other words it's approximately half the size of the state of Maine and four indigenous communities are proposing to protect this entire watershed you know i mean this is you know just even to imagine protecting an area half the size of the entire state of Maine you know it's mind-boggling how big and of course an area of 12 million acres supports tens of millions of birds really important this is some of the biggest conservation happening in the world today one of the ways we're supporting this among among a number is in a project that involves trying to help them survey the birds of the seal river watershed and so we've contracted with cornell lab of ornithology to use their automated recording units the swift units that's what you see over here on the right little microphone sticking down it's a unit that you could put out leave out and it's as a little computer in it that'll have it turn on and off at certain times so we have ours record for a few hours in the morning before and after dawn and a few hours before and after after dusk and so they put together a little package of all the materials that's what you see on the left we shipped them up to the seal river watershed alliance and they got them up to a place called to Dooley Lake where the say say Denny First Nation is located and they got them out this May it was this was actually even in late May the ice was still on they went out on the ice and and placed them out and we got 10 of these recorders out these are the spots just to give you a sense across the to Dooley Lake and sent the sounds off to the the SD cards that all the sounds are recorded on the SD cards pulled all the SD cards at the end of the season sent them to Cornell and they're using machine learning algorithms to try to process the sounds and and this is some of the very first results we just got back a couple of weeks ago from from this and the the dots are the places where the recorders are and the size of the dots is kind of the number of species found at each one and just you know another quick little sense of the kind of results we got this is from the 10 recording units the first quick cut of the species that were found most commonly and I just put the little green arrows on the more species that were most widespread in the area this is all done using machine learning automated detection software and algorithms just some some of the results for species just to give you a sense of what you get you know the the map on the right is the blue dots or other locations in the red are the two of the 10 where fox burrows occurred and the the size of the dots related to sort of the total number of calls detected I had a little sound in there but I don't know if it's playing but Blackpool Warbler another one on the on the right some map of the 10 locations and you can see one location had a lot of songs of Blackpool Warbler and one other one a small number so you know you start putting these together and you can start building information out about what's there where they're found and so forth another place that we are working is a place called the Pumatwina Key World Heritage Site which is on the eastern side of Lake Manitoba and in Manitoba and and and in parts of Ontario Lake Winnipeg I mean sorry about that this is a map that shows kind of its location in the world you can kind of zoom in and see in in that area of Manitoba this this area huge area of millions of acres and I'm just going to again just to give you a sense of it zoom in on it through a series of images I just took out of of Google Maps you can see main here down in the right hand corner and up there the other green triangle is on Lake Winnipeg where the Pumatwina Key World Heritage Site is and I'm going to zoom in on one of the first nations there's four first nations that together put up this world heritage site to move it through the process to become designated but each of the four first nations are independent first nations and we have been doing some work with the Poplar River First Nation for for many years I'm going to zoom in to the Poplar River First Nation here you can see the eastern side of Lake Winnipeg and zooming in some more here and you see the area that says Neganand in the middle of the area that's that's Poplar River and I'm just continuing to zoom in this is a little community it has no access to the roads in the except in winter there's an ice road there so coming and going from there through much of the year is it's only by air or by boat and so they they have to be pretty self-sufficient within within the community for for much of the year because it's really hard to get out to get supplies in and things like that and they've protected an area themselves about two million acres about 10 times the size of Baxter State Park about two and a half times the size of Cumberland County this one first nation I believe it's the numbers in the community who are living in the community is kind of under a thousand or something like that and they themselves have protected in an area that large and it's just a beautiful place I've had a chance to visit once and and just you know lakes of all sizes and types and rivers and just so beautiful I got to be able to be part of some ceremonies there really moving connections to the land and just full of birds you know and and all sorts of other other beautiful things we started a project with their indigenous guardians program back in 2016 to do sound recording and started putting sound recording units up back then and actually we're just getting ready to release a report about some of that work hopefully in the next month or two now this is a little recording of it I don't know if you can hear it I don't know if you could hear some of that but that's an actual recording from Bopla River as part of our work there we're also trying to support the guardians themselves in some work we were able to and I'm going to tell you a little more about this in a second but well they were interested in participating in some community science projects like feedback at bird count and climate watch and we're trying to participate and we discovered our way through our encouragement of that that none of the guardians actually had binoculars so we were kind of asking them to count birds and things like that without even having the optics that we all take for granted down here so working to get things like binoculars for the guardians we were able to provide field guides and some simple cameras and different things like that for one of the schools there and another one of the Machina Key communities first nations the blood vein river first nations so just just some other kinds of ways that we're trying to help help with these these these efforts I mentioned the binoculars and this is an interesting way in which Audubon chapters and at least one bird club have decided to participate that they've only wanted to be able to do something kind of concrete to be part of supporting these efforts and so um Red Rock Audubon has kind of been serving as a coordinator of a program to have different chapters um put up some funds to buy new binoculars um and get them to guardians at different first nations around um around throughout the borough forest um of Canada we've focused so far in Canada with this but you can kind of see these are um some of the different Audubon chapters and one bird club the Cougar Bird Club um and where their binoculars that they've they've funded have have been have gone to the different guardians programs so I bring that up with the hope that you guys may think about doing that love to have um Mary meeting Audubon be on that map some point over the next year with some lines to either these or some other first nations supporting that this kind of work and I'll show you this this um graph again of the protection you know we try to really stay focused on the on the main objective of this is to get more acres protected and conserved for birds um you know that's the long-term goal and um and what's amazing is Canada as a federal government has committed to the new convention on biological diversity um benchmark of protecting 30 of their lands and waters by 2030 and to do that means that there'll have to be an additional um you know 100 plus million acres of new protected areas coming over the next 10 years um that's only going to be possible with a huge amount of support to both indigenous governments and the federal government has put a large amount of money I told you about the 340 million they've committed to trying to help move that process forward but also that nonprofits like Audubon and others um collaborate and come along as allies to help fill a lot of the different roles that it's going to be hard for um for some of the first nations to get up to speed on super quickly so that's why we have you know people who can work in science and communications to help get the message out provide opportunities for the indigenous leaders to speak to media to speak in various ways to to groups to let them know about what's going on and just provide support um you know it's it's interesting when you think about conservation up there if you're thinking about it from like the philanthropic investment side of it you know the the return on investment down here you know it costs a lot of money to protect land unfortunately because that's the way you know our system is currently but up there because most of this land is still in so-called crown land you know it's it's land controlled by the provinces and territories at some level um also um you know by the indigenous people um the opportunity to get it protected is much more cost effective you know you can protect land for far less than a dollar an acre you know it's it's just um sense compared to per acre compared to up here so very good philanthropic investment um in in moving this forward so I've mentioned a couple of ways people can help one of those is that binocular donation effort through the chapter another is philanthropic investment we're putting together a team of philanthropic investors to help move this this work forward and we welcome everybody from you know from those who are giving at the six and seven figure level and we have some of those to those who are giving in the single digit level love to have any of you be part of that team but we also know that there's other ways you can help that are quite easy those things like getting signed up for our updates and I hope all of you will take a snapshot of the screen or or hit your print screen to save it so you can use it to follow check up on these web websites if you're on twitter you can start following me and some of these other other um twitter handles and start retweeting things and just amplifying the message so more and more people know about all this amazing work and and we build the public support so we can get um especially provincial and territorial governments to um to come alongside and agree to these protections we have a lot of provinces that don't readily agree to protecting these areas some of and some of them are hostile to them even some of the areas have been suggested for protections and and proposed for protections by indigenous governments and almost immediately you know um in some provinces they'll do things like um give a mining permit right in the middle of the proposed protected area just to kind of thumb their nose at this effort so there's a lot of work to be done it's not an easy process um and we need as much help as we can get I will stop there and stop sharing my screen put my video back on you can see me talking into my phone and I'm not sure how we're if we're set up to do um questions or yeah folks if you have questions and want to put them down in the QQ&A box um that would be great we can read them here John I have you muted right now just so you know you can undo that um uh so fire away I will actually start if that's okay Jeff could you talk a little bit about the boreal forest in Maine and how maybe it looks different from some of the uh you know forest further north that you're talking about conserving or sort of uh what's the boreal in Maine right now the major difference in so Maine has lots of boreal habitat you know the same species of trees and many of the same species of animals as you know birds and and other and mammals some of them I mean we used to have caribou woodland caribou of course even um so we have much of the same habitat it's just in kind of smaller patches you might you might say um you know it tends to be in upper level elevations or in lowland areas in you know around bogs or around streams and things like that so we have the same habitat and of course there's even patches of boreal habitat that extend down the appellations you know there's some birds that we think of as as more um you know boreal type birds that are found pretty far south down the appellations same thing in the Rockies you know that uh some of these birds um go up and down these higher elevations so um so we have boreal habitat that goes well south of the boreal biome the the area that we are talking about is is the boreal biome and it's basically characterized by having more uniform or larger patches of this habitat but it's but it's still you know a matter of degree um the the cutoffs are based on um you know basically arbitrary decisions on what to delineate as one versus another the most recent kind of work around scientific work around mapping the boreal biome has considers the areas um like Maine and the northern fringe of states that have boreal habitat in them um as they call it hemi boreal um so it's sort of you know a mix of boreal and of course you know we have a lot of deciduous forests as we know you know beach and and maple forests um so that's that's the kind of intermix so oak as you go further south so um yeah we we have the same um same habitat um and um it's just in kind of smaller patches and in certain parts of the state um you know one one thing I find really fascinating here in Maine is how we have boreal habitat on our islands and on the tips especially of many of our peninsulas and um you know if you look at some of the work the paleological work of some of this you know they found that um some some of these places have been really important for certain species of trees for a very long time you know they've persisted there um for for thousands of years you know in some of these spots um so when you think about climate change impacts and things like that it's very interesting how some of these um kind of boreal patches that we have have been quite resistant to change because of things like you know the the ocean temperatures that keep it cooler and things like that but what you know it's it'll be interesting to see of course what's going to happen in the future but um but yeah I I've been very interested to see how our boreal habitat in Maine is in these kind of patches in certain places kind of more island like um thank you um John go ahead Jeff uh one request first uh would would you send that uh screen that had the contact information to keep track of for all the different websites etc send that to me and I will make it available and anybody who's watching can ask me for the information I'll share it with Maine Audubon Mayor Meeting Audubon Board and we have one question that's come in on the Q&A at this point that's what impact are you seeing on the boreal forest in Canada from global warming based on your collected data yeah well the of course um as most people know the further north you go the you know the the impacts are are greater you know because the the change the amount of change has been been even greater the warming is greater up as you go north so so there's just massive changes that that have been documented if from all sorts and the indigenous people are among the ones you know documenting it um you know most regularly partly because like elders and through indigenous knowledge they have a better sense of what the baseline was you know western science got started really late and and collecting the baseline data really once you think of it versus thousands of years of time that they've been there um and in some cases because it's so remote we never got around to getting data that's definitely true of the birds you know uh we haven't had good bird data and still don't for large areas that's why we're doing projects like the the automated recording unit work because there's just so little information um you know we definitely um have been seeing changes like birds showing up further north than they used to lots of that kind of thing you know we see that here too you know these birds that are more regularly coming north um staying later um all of those sorts of things showing up earlier all all of those sorts of things but also you know a lot more extreme things just massive fires i mentioned you know pommacho and a key many of the communities in pommacho and a key the last few summers they've almost always had to evacuate for at least weeks at a time like the entire community has to leave they just leave a skeleton crew there to you know in case the fire gets too close to do something about it but you know they all having to just leave and stay in hotels it's just it's a really tough situation and that's happening all across the boreal horrible flooding um in lots of places in the north you know that they never have seen in hundreds or thousands of years you know the the flooding problems and you know the ice roads that are melting so you can't get even get your supplies in or out you know i was up in moose creek community on james bay two years ago in march and um you know we were trying to get from where you land on one side of the river to the community which is on the other side of a very big river and you know they closed one of the ice roads and we had to take the other one and you know drive the truck through like three feet of water which i found quite it's quite scary over the ice myself um um they you know they did that kind of thing regularly but um you know but but just you know so they're kind of like living with all these risks all the time we can't even imagine um you know one of the guys was getting ready to he was going to start on the ice road all that's like a you know six or eight hour drive south to get to a road before they they had a they had officially closed it but he had to get his truck out beforehand or it would be stuck up there for the whole year um and so he was just going to risk going over all these you know the ice roads are going over ponds and lakes and rivers and they closed it because it's dangerous but he was just going to go and risk it anyway because he was trying to get you know it's a truck out of there so things we can't even imagine you know that people are living with um we are one of the whole goals of our our work with the automated recording units and trying to uh get guardians more involved in bird monitoring is is to actually start looking at the changes um and we even have started a new um calling it uh kind of um it's a climate watch story map that allows people to kind of document any kind of climate change impact they see with a photograph and then upload it um on with a with a point to a point on the map so people could look at all these photos and see the changes with a little caption below it and so we're sort of just working with some different communities and guardians programs and youth to start adding more and more of those and there's some already some really amazing um stories that have been added about you know everything from you know I could say you know pelicans that are showing up in northern Manitoba and Natsubei um you know I think there was a great blue heron up and way up north in the northwest territories you know um you know hundreds of miles north of where they're supposed to be polar bears that showed up in far south in a town and in on Great Bear Lake of like 500 miles from the arctic coast where they should be um just all kinds of stories that are of they would give you a sense of the reality of the change going on up there and we're hoping we're going to start get that packaged up so we can start sharing it more broadly it's been kind of more of an internal thing that we're having the letting the indigenous people add their information and we haven't quite grown it to where we're going to put it out there for the world to see um to share but what we need to because there's so many changes going on thank you uh the second question that came in was what constitutes a protected area does it mean no human interference at all or sustainable forestry or allowed what what can take place yeah it's a good question it's a good good question for the most part in what um we're calling protected areas they're more like a national park um that type of designation in the US um and so they typically would not allow any kind of commercial scale extractive activities of any type um they would allow of course you know ecotourism activities just like our parks do um some um some of them might have especially in remote communities where they have no you know they need to be able to get wood for you know building a house or whatever you know they their own small scale projects sometimes they will have you know allow that kind of thing and of course they need wood often just heat up you know heat a home or a cabin um but it's just not it's but it's you know it's just kind of very local small scale types of things um but that isn't to say that there might be places where it could involve some other kind of you know sustainable forestry things like that further south there are examples where um some of these um have had uh you know sustainable forestry kind of activities and and different kinds of things like that so um the whole idea of you know what we've been calling indigenous protected areas or sometimes they're called indigenous protected and conserved areas is still an evolving thing I mean a lot of times the indigenous nation may declare it as protected but as I said the provincial government just ignores it it doesn't mean anything you know um from their perspective and so if so you really need to have multiple layers of protection you know it can be an indigenous protected area within the indigenous government but we need to have the provincial government agree to take it off limits as well and sometimes we need the federal government to you know add resources to make it a national park or whatever so it's a very it tends to be a super complicated process a lot of different negotiations going on there's sometimes you know forestry or mineral companies or oil and gas companies that say no no we don't want that part of that in the air that's a potential place for x y and z you know so then then you got to negotiate back and forth and so it's super complicated and and it's and it says so many layers related to social issues and kind of the growing recognition of indigenous rights in Canada it's advanced pretty far in in some ways because of some recent supreme court decisions in the last three to five years that have affirmed the the right of First Nations to at least have co-management responsibility of their traditional territories I mean you know there's still more testing of that in the supreme court about like how far that goes exactly and each province views it a little bit differently and you know politics of course as it does everywhere plays into it so so it's a complicated process but we you know they just need as many allies as possible to be supporting it to make you know make make it make it happen and there's luckily there's a lot of great environmental and conservation organizations that are involved in different ways to support this there needs to be because if you're talking about conservation at the scale you just need you need a lot of allies and partners to make it happen so is it members of the First Nation that are at the table with the provincial governments or the federal government or with Audubon and others supporting the the First Nation representatives or who sits there typically yeah typically it would be you know the First Nation itself you know and and its own negotiators and they're whether you know whether it's the chief or you know chief and council or sometimes you know they have somebody specifically in the community that they've that they appoint to that job as a negotiator lead negotiator or negotiating team some communities that have more resources will also bring in you know leak lawyers to help typically there are specialized law firms that you know work in indigenous around in you know indigenous support so they're kind of experts in all the intricacies of of the process and what you know there's so many it's so it's some of it's almost you know biz and team kind of all the all the little nuances when you start doing the negotiations with government there's a lot of intricacies on the legal side and on the political side and on the social side so it's complicated but you know a lot of the First Nations don't have a lot of capacity and they sometimes will ask you know and NGOs you know environmental organizations to to be to work with them you know to come with them if it's if that's beneficial you know the way we operate in most I would say you know most of the the the best NGOs are operating in that arena is you know we do everything we follow the lead of the First Nation and we we we tell them we're we're there to support if they ask us to and if they tell us to not to be involved or to to leave we leave you know I mean it's it's their their decision and we don't ever use their name or in any of our communications or talk about what they do without them having given permission and reviewed anything we write always runs runs through them we never represent them you know we try to make a space for them to represent themselves and so you know we're really trying to be clear that we're we're trying to be an ally but we're not trying to supplant the leadership or anything like that you know and some of our work in supporting guardians or youth guardians in schools is to help build more of that capacity so there are more people eventually who can just be stepping into those roles you know we're looking into some different ways we can support some young indigenous students at the college level as well you know and just finding ways that we can help among a lot of NGOs you know to support building up that capacity you know even with our with our sound recording unit work you know we're when we if we're paying Cornell a certain amount of money to do the work that they're doing we we kind of have a rule that we are paying the guardians and the people who are putting the recorders out on the land at least an equal amount in other words we're not valuing like the academics more which is the old-fashioned way is you know you you'd pay a bunch of academics a bunch of money and have them they would fly up there they'd do the work and then they'd leave and they nobody you know nobody from the community even knew what they were doing it they might hire them to drive them out on a normal deal and that would be it you know or to make them a meal you know but it would have nothing meaningful there so we're trying to change that whole paradigm of that you know these we're collaborating at their permission you know and if they and they have a opportunity to be involved at the level that they want but you know even the data we collect you know we're saying I said to them you know the sounds we're collecting you guys own those you guys own the rights to a we're not going to do anything with that unless we have your permission you know the data analysis we're not going to release the results of that Cornell's doing all this fancy stuff you know with their automated algorithms and so forth but until the community sees that results and is happy with it and gives us permission we won't be doing anything with it you know it's they're leading it and that's that's the way this works you know and it's it's a bit of a new for some people that's a new way of thinking about how to do this work but it's but it's it's vital you know I mean and it's the way that we're going to save the most birds you know sort of a selfish way to look at it in a sense too but it's you know that's the way of the world to get it done you know good and a question I think you'll appreciate perhaps I have from one of the board members of mirror meeting Audubon is can you send information to the mirror meeting chapter about the binocular program and its details of course yes yes of course yeah we you know basically I mean to give you a quick nutshell of it is you know we've been getting now I forget the name of the company but kind of a you know giving us a very good price on new binoculars and like I say there's a person that read rock Audubon who's actually a former he's he was a former regional representative to the national Audubon board and he heard me speak about this at the national board meeting a couple years ago and just was really excited about somehow he wanted to be involved and so he's kind of helping to lead that so he kind of has worked out this thing with with you know a binocular company to get a discount so we you know basically just buy buy them a discount and and I do the of figuring out which indigenous guardian program can use them and figuring out how to you know who to get them to and that sort of thing and and then we we get them up there and you know one of the things about it is where it's it's a it's a much appreciated investment and support but it's but it but it's but it's one of you know many activities that they're involved in many kinds of support they're getting so sometimes I do try to make sure shoppers understand like we're you're not going to get like a monthly you know report back on what's happening you know it's like you know they're well you know we're if we're lucky we're going to get a few photographs here and there through through the year of people you're seeing them and you know maybe ideally you know maybe ideally there's some some connection that could grow over time where you know there could be some more that will happen that's that's my hope you know that we'd make further connections maybe maybe you know at some point some people will get to visit some of these places and and get to meet people and different things like that that's longer term hope you know but um so um but I mean it's it's so appreciated and like we were literally quite shocked when we were we had been supporting and working with the training for these guardians to do climate watch and they actually went through one of the seasons to do it and we were starting to ask some questions about it and this and that you know and doing it over zoom of course because it all happened in the middle of this and at some point you know they were talking about trying to see some of these birds that they were supposed to identify and how hard it was whatever and I started asking about the optics and they well no we none of us have any binoculars we're just doing this by by eye you know trying to tell a white third sparrow from a white crown sparrow at you know 100 yards without binoculars not going to be too easy so um I mean we just didn't it didn't occur to us because you know down here you set up a program like that and you get people to do it and everybody you know we're birders everybody so it's some of the just things the barriers you wouldn't even think of that makes such a huge difference you know it's it's not a huge a lot of money to get some binoculars but it makes such a huge difference if this is just you know where you're even going to start with some of these things so um so it's it's kind of a cool way to to help start building something and you know if you're thinking of it as that kind of investment of you know you're helping to start building something um that's going to be growing over the years it's kind of cool to be in on in on the the first you know innovative steps in that direction very good and if anybody out there wants to you know do a you know a six figure seven figure part of the philanthropic effort of course don't hesitate to call i i'm always happy to take that call okay and i i did have a request from another bird club that was represented in the audience that they want the information a copy the information when you send it to us too so okay we're spreading up to yeah i appreciate you you stepping up to be a coordinator to get all this information out i didn't you probably didn't know you were going to become a it's not an unpleasant coordinated help good good thank you and thank you all for um yes and thank you very much for the talking thank you the main Audubon for their support and zoom capabilities and we'll definitely be in touch so thanks again okay thank you very much bye everybody