 Seven years, we've organized a group called the Shoesville Hill Wildlife Partnership and from that has generated the Shoesville Hill Wildlife Lecture Series. We've talked about birds, and frogs, and snakes, and climate change, and forests, and connectivity and how wildlife can move from A to B and connect with other family numbers or other species and kind of connect to the resources and water barriers that really need place because we can effectively connect to the Northeast Kingdom over the Worcester Range and into the Northeast Kingdom for us, or we can cross through 100, we're on the east-west side of the 100. We can almost get to Canada through the Green Mountain National Forest if we go south and jump across the Interstate 89, we can access a lot of forest down there. We have a long list of Vermont's wildlife species requiring the forests that are in and around water-brained stove and the Shoesville Hill Wildlife Corridor has been a high priority wildlife crossing recognized by state and regional biologists as being a really important place for one of the five most important corridors in the state. We're in it now. We're in that corridor now. We've got masks up behind us. For the last couple of years, we've been engaged in some conservation products and had some very recent success with conserving some land that we're really proud of. Community members bringing together money, those landowners being generous enough to donate some of their resources, which has been just fantastic. So we've got a lot to be proud of. The partnership does. And we want to continue these lecture series to keep awareness going. And something that we have really done very well is engaging with the academic community and bringing in new ideas and new research. I spent a lot of time this summer in the Northeast Kingdom doing other wildlife work, but the thing that has been really hot recently is the Moose Project and Moose in the Northeast Kingdom and Moose populations and habitat issues and their population issues. And so I don't know a lot about this, which is really kind of usually I bring in people who I've heard before. I know the topic. I think this would be really great, but I don't know a lot about this. I'm very excited to have some research from UVM and Elias share some of his work. Elias is a UVM PhD student working on Moose. I don't even have a great introduction for you, Elias. Moose. Elias. Moose. Help me welcome Elias so we can learn a little about Moose. Thanks for your question. Once again, my name is Elias Woznblad. I am a PhD student at UVM, part of Rubenstein School there. And yeah, I'm here tonight to talk to you about Moose, the history of them in the state, what their current status is, and what they're facing. So before I get into that, I just want to acknowledge all of the moving pieces and all the organizations that are involved in this research. I'm a PhD student, so I have a little chunk of the pie that I'm trying to figure out, but there are a whole bunch of other people who are working really hard figuring out how Vermont Moose are dealing with some uncertain times here. I want to highlight the work done by Vermont Fish and Wildlife, the Rubenstein School at the University of Vermont, the Geological Survey and Wildlife Management Institute. And some of these four organizations work together in something called the Vermont Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, which is based at UVM. There's a whole bunch of wildlife and fisheries research. So I'm an affiliate of that organization. So just a tip to have to everyone who's working on this. So you're all here tonight because Moose are charismatic, they're awesome, they're beautiful, and they're really emblematic of the Northern Oriole Forest in North America. You may have heard, however, that in neighboring states, they're starting to be signs that some of these populations are suffering from something. You may have heard that in Vermont, we are also seeing some population declines, there's something about ticks, there's something going on here. What is all this? And so my goal tonight is to overview the history of Moose in North America as well as in Vermont and discuss the current challenges that Moose are facing here. I'm also going to go over current research efforts and then some concluding thoughts to bring it home and relevant to the wildlife corridor that we're sitting in right now. And I'll just show you, just so you know this talk will be about 40, 45 minutes and hopefully there'll be plenty of time at the end for all your questions. So I'm going to start back in the beginning of how Moose got here because actually it's not that long ago. I think within the past 15,000 years of Moose arrived on the continent and they came in two movements across the Bering land bridge from Asia to North America and it was stuck in Alaska for a couple thousands of years until glaciers began to recede at the end of the last Ice Age and Moose were able to move across North America raiding eastwards hitting the east coast where we are lastly. And as they moved across North America all these little populations were established as the glaciers receded there was a bunch of great habitat for Moose so this was a great time to be a Moose. So this resulted in four subspecies of Moose in North America and all these subspecies vary in their size what their antlers look like as well as their reproductive behavior. The subspecies that we are interested in for Vermont and the Northeast is all these all these Americana which is the Eastern Moose or Taiga Moose the Moose we have here. So moving from geologic history time scale to written history time scale I want to start off thinking about our history in the Eastern North American region and I love using old maps to think about how we used to view from the European perspective how this area was viewed. There are two things about this map that I love well three. First is I love the shape of Lake Champlain that interesting shape there but all the detail in this map which was created by Dutch cartographers in the 16th century I believe all the details around waterways because that was how people moved around that was how trade and transport happened and the last thing I love is that areas that are far away from water are just filled with illustrations of wildlife and forest a pure definition of wilderness and over the following hundreds a couple hundred years European colonists expanded their impacts in those areas and unfortunately because of really little well little to no regulation we had a problem in the prior to the 1900s of over-harvest of wildlife species as well as conversion of forests to areas for agriculture and livestock and so as a result most wildlife species took a really really hard hit especially in this part of North America in periods leading up to the 18 and into the 1800s and so we need to think when we look at a landscape like this when we think about forests we need to think back about what the human impacts were on this landscape and think about something like this this was what at the turn of the century I believe this photo was from the early 1900s really fragmented a lot of agriculture little patches of forest and if we're thinking about moose it's not particularly great for them this is another picture this is from Essex Vermont looking back at Mount Mansfield I love this photo this is from 1899 this photo just illustrates almost a barren landscape as a result of all the agricultural activity so I want to move on and think about specifically moose here in the timeline of how moose have been doing in this state so starting off already in 1850 with over harvest and unregulated harvest and habitat conversion for agriculture moose were really restricted to Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom and by the 1870s over two thirds of the state was in agricultural use and this proportion would increase finally in 1896 there was an effort to actually solidify in the state however this was mainly based around trying to enforce anti-poaching laws and prevent moose from being harvested given that there were so few and over the next several decades moose were really seen sporadically throughout the state there wasn't an established population here usually animals would be seen as transient individuals moving through the state and so things changed by the 1970s though for a couple of reasons first of all a lot of the agricultural lands had been abandoned earlier in the century and a lot of that agricultural land was returning to its forest state combined with more expansive timber harvest that were happening at the time this created a whole bunch of good habitat with good food for moose moose like what we call early successional habitat they love the scrubby messy forest because there's a lot to eat and there's a lot of cover also beavers were doing really really well and if you're familiar with beavers you may know that they are what we call ecosystem engineers just their presence on the landscapes introduces wetlands and beavers were knocked out in the 1800s as well due to the same pressures that moose were and in the 1940s beavers were reintroduced from Maine into Vermont and by the 70s their role on the landscape was such that it was creating a lot of good habitat for wildlife fourth and lastly white-tailed deer were adjusting to the forest the changing landscape in the forest and in general moose and white-tailed deer aren't necessarily direct competitors with each other but white-tailed deer carry a lot of parasites that are bad for moose so in general when white-tailed deer aren't doing as well on a landscape the moose can do better because they're not being exposed to these parasites as much so by 1980 it was estimated that there were 200 moose in the state and 13 years later in 1993 that number shot up to 1,500 animals so pretty rapid growth there was a whole bunch of food and the animals were doing well and in 1993 that's when the first legal hunt for moose took place in Essex County and so thinking this is the first legal harvest since the establishment of moose management practices in 1896 so long time a long recovery period here so let's fast forward a couple more years in the early 2000s and remember that by 93 there were 1,500 moose in the state by the mid-2000s they were estimated almost 5,000 animals in the state so this is an extremely rapid rate of population increase we don't see this very often and so moose were getting to the point where Vermont Fish and Wildlife and had conducted studies and had identified that a mark of around 3,000 moose in the state would be most appropriate given moose's impact on the forest moose are just browsing machines that can impact forests as well as unfortunately they get in collisions with vehicles so there are several both ecological and societal factors that weighed into this 3,000 mark as kind of the target of where the number of moose in the state and so what Vermont Fish and Wildlife did was temporarily increased the number of moose harvested and that helped bring the population down however the population has not bounded above that 3,000 mark even with the ceasing of hunting up to this point so hunting was used to bring down the population but then was pulled back as the population was below this mark but the population has not rebounded so in coordination with other states in the region it was pretty clear that we had a new player on the landscape that was limiting the number of moose that could exist in the state as well as in the region and that is the winner tick of course it has to be a tick this is a different tick than anything that carries Lyme disease or any other disease that we are concerned about this is a pretty wildlife specific tick and we've known about it for a long time but the conditions have changed so that a winner tick have become a problem for moose so how can a tiny little tick impact an entire moose population well unfortunately ticks will attach to moose in such quantities that they actually cause anemia in the moose there are so many attached to the animal that it causes they consume so much blood from that organism that they suffer from anemia and they have to burn a lot more nutrients to replace that blood and survive this happens in the winter when these animals are already having a tough go of it so when you go out and find evidence of moose in say late February into April in the snow you'll find their bed like here on this image and unfortunately you're going to see blood around and that's from the ticks and from just their loss of blood during this process and this is compounded by the fact that moose are really irritated by these ticks and so they'll be rubbing trying to relieve that irritation from the ticks and they'll actually break their hair which makes them look like this and this is referred to as a ghost moose and some references and this is just broken hair when they break they expose the white color if they're under fur and this is not just aesthetically a problem but it is actually a problem for how they regulate their body temperature in the winter so unfortunately for these smaller animals usually the younger animals they're the smallest they can succumb to this extra toll and can perish in the winter due to these excessive loads of winter ticks and so this is a picture from this is from New Hampshire but I've seen moose hides exactly like this those are all engorged winter ticks and unfortunately this animal did perish from this so it's a terrible problem and unfortunately it's really difficult because these are really small organisms that are causing the problem animals can carry upwards we've counted over 60,000 ticks on an individual, New Hampshire I believe registered over 90,000 on one individual so it's a pure numbers game clearly about blood loss there's no disease nothing like that so why are moose susceptible to these ticks it actually comes to some behaviors which are important here because winter tick will attach to white-tailed deer and other wildlife but it's not a problem for them and that's because white-tailed deer and other animals would be black bearer and turkey are what are called programmed groomers and so what they do is they are just grooming preventative behavior where there's picking things off and tossing them to the side and this is an evolved behavior because these animals have been on this continent for such a long time in contrast moose are what we call stimulus groomers meaning that they don't groom until they're bitten and when a tick bites a moose is trying to remove it through about 8 to 10 inches of hair and trying to remove something at that stage the size of a sesame seed so it's really really difficult for them to deal with this and this is what we call a reactive behavior and so since moose have been on the continent for relatively short period of time they have not evolved the grooming behavior to deal with this so I want to walk you through what the ticks life cycle is and this is important because of this dictates why ticks are becoming a problem and so winter ticks are they live for one year they attach to one animal spend their life on that animal drop off and die so in late summer or early fall eggs hatch from the forest floor these winter ticks larvae assemble and form these clusters called tick bombs in the forest if you're out in the fall you may have hit some of these tick bombs looks like a lot of little poppy seeds on your jacket they wait for moose to walk by they can detect moose by their movement by oxide from their exhaling pretty amazing stuff they'll glob onto the moose that one moose and they'll go through a couple life stages and with every transition to an additional life stage they feed and so as they get bigger they need more blood for their feeding at the stage when they are adults is when it's winter and it's a challenging time for moose and so these adults will meet on the moose and pregnant females will take one last meal and drop off the moose and hopefully for them for the winter ticks they'll drop off hit leaf litter and lay their eggs and die so that's the tick life cycle pretty simple the real critical time for winter tick and this is one of the take home messages I want you to know is the critical timing for ticks are these periods of time they're not on the animal they're not safe underneath the leaf litter they're exposed so when the larvae send vegetation away for the moose to come by if it's really snowy, if it's really cold that will hurt the ticks and a lot fewer of them will make it onto the moose same thing with the engorged females that have eggs and are dropping off to lay their eggs if they lay on snow then their chances of survival are next to zero if they fall and hit leaf litter then they're probably going to be okay and so snowfall in these fall and spring periods is really important for ticks and as we've had some milder springs and falls over the past well, past number of years winter ticks have been doing a lot better to the detriment of moose thinking about the wintertime when these adult ticks are feeding repeatedly on these moose so the main topics from all this the history I know I just threw a whole bunch of information at you the main topics I want you to remember here high moose densities which we had in the early 2000s plus milder springs and falls means that there are more winter ticks that are successfully living out there and doing their thing winter ticks take a great toll on their hosts and for juveniles smaller body animals that can unfortunately cause them to die this can happen at such a rate that this leads to population decline and that's why we're seeing the patterns that we're seeing so how do we deal with winter ticks? I get asked this all the time and it's really hard because when they're out in the forest they're the size of a sesame seed even smaller and if they're not on the forest floor they're on a moose that's trying to stay away from you so we can't eradicate winter ticks yet though as a sidebar and as a pitch for another researcher at UVM PhD student and you may have seen this headline in October she's working to look at active methods of biocontrol using naturally occurring fungus that can actually hurt and kill winter tick in the summer when they're on the forest floor so there's some cool research there however the application is still a bit of a ways this is all laboratory based but there's some inspiring news there however as far as from my research I'm concerned I'm a wildlife biologist so I'm looking at from the moose perspective how we can better help the moose and so what we can do is we can identify and maintain suitable habitat and corridors for moose across the state and the idea here is that we ensure that moose are not all concentrated in one area where the winter tick can do really well again high moose density means that winter ticks can do really well it's like any disease so we need to make sure that moose are not concentrated in one area so here is a breakdown of the major broad strokes major research topics that are happening at UVM right now to better understand the state of moose in Vermont right now as well as what options we have and the resources available to the moose so I'm going to talk about how well moose are in Vermont are surviving and reproducing despite the winter tick how moose are using Vermont's forest today and how does today's environment impact moose health and how well our moose populations connected in Vermont and the region are they able to move to areas you might be available so there are two scales of research of this research here one we're talking about a regional perspective that range from the Adirondacks and Massachusetts all the way up into Quebec and then the more specific at home studies that happen in the northeast kingdom this gray area here is the study area of an intensive research project that I'll talk about very very shortly that area is historically a strong hold for moose in Vermont that's the last place that they were in the 1850s when they were extirpated and that was one of the first places they came back to so this is really and it's always had the highest density of moose in the state so it's an important area so in 2017 Vermont Fish and Wildlife started a radio caller study to figure out how the moose are faring in this area and so what the state did was capture and radio caller 126 individuals in Essex County and the whole point of this is to track survival and reproduction these animals were caught via helicopter equipped with a radio caller and all that a radio caller is doing is sending a radio signal much like your vehicle that you pick up on the car in your car radio and that caller sends information that a signal that we can track them and we I mean field technicians like myself who are following these animals these radio callers also have GPS units mounted on them that actually transmit locations to us the researchers and so we get information not only what the animal is doing and where they are at this time too when you have a wild animal in front of you at any point you collect a whole bunch of information from that animal so this is a great sampling opportunity to learn about the general health of animals here in Vermont and so these animals with their radio callers became the the sample that we would be studying and we know from capture onwards we know everything about these animals so we can learn a lot about how they're dealing with the environment and I will say that the whole all the radio callering operation and the sampling and all the field work was approved by UVM's Institute of Animal Care and Use Committee and that's a third party group just to make sure that these animals are treated with respect and minimally minimally invasive so first the first study I want to talk about is the survival reproduction study and this is not my work this is by a master's student at UVM named Jake de Beau he's just about to finish up with his thesis after a lot of many years in the woods and his real goal was to look at survival and reproduction in these animals and what he can do is then compare that to other studies where winter tick aren't a problem so this is the identification of how bad is the problem, how badly are moose suffering in this current era of winter tick so what Jake and the rest of us who are working in the field would do is we'd go out and radio track these animals and we'd find these radio collared animals and confirm at certain times of year whether or not they had a calf and we could estimate reproductive rates from that and then also anytime an animal dies that had a radio collar on it those radio collars have what's called a mortality switch and so it sends us if the collar has not moved in five hours we get sent an email saying that you should check on this animal it's amazing how technology has advanced so we go in very quickly to find that animal and determine the cause of death and take a whole bunch of samples and figure out what happened to that animal and so what Jake's work has found is evidence of lower calf survival and lower birth rates and this is compared again to other places that don't have winter tick and so this is consistent to the impacts that we predict with winter tick infestation again the animals are losing a whole bunch of blood so for calves that can be fatal for larger-bodied adult females that may not be fatal but it's taking a whole lot of their energy and nutrition to deal with that so they enter the summer in worse condition and so they really have to spend a lot of the summer browsing a lot more and redeeming that condition and so reproduction is something that is sacrificed when the individual is struggling with something new so this is consistent with what we would expect Jake also found that winter severity and other parasites do play important roles but this is usually this is compounded by the impact of winter tick winter tick are the primary driver of the population dynamics that we are seeing so moving on to the second topic how are moose using Vermont's forests this work is done by another master's student, Josh Bluin and what he does is he takes the GPS location data that comes from that radio collar that gets transmitted to a satellite he can then turn that into well where are the moose spending their time each one of those little green dots on that map are locations of individuals and what Josh can do is describe across the entire landscape where are animals using what areas of land are animals using a lot versus not that much so he can figure out areas of high activity and low activity Josh can then use a lot of cool imagery from satellites and I bet you didn't think I was going to say this lasers from aircraft to describe what these areas look like both the areas of high moose use and low moose use so he uses imagery from satellites not only to describe whether a forest is a deciduous forest, a coniferous forest, a mixed forest, a woodland but he can use something called LiDAR which stands for light detection and ranging to describe the structure of forests and briefly this is a 3D map of the forest patch this is one of our high density moose areas in our study area you can kind of see there's blue and some reds and yellows but if you look at it long enough those blues are the ground and lower vegetation and working your way up the color gradient the very very you can see the spikes on the top there are the top of the canopy and so this is very new technology that you can actually that can be used to describe the structure and this hasn't been available to us in the past this is a very strong piece of technology that we can work with and so what Josh is going to do he's a second year master student he uses the color locations to find out where the moose are going and what they're doing he pairs that with the forest characteristics of the places that they're choosing and he can generate what's called a habitat suitability model and all that is is make a map and that map is colored to describe areas of high and moose to describe good and poor moose habitat and so that can be expanded beyond the study area and so what this will describe is this will describe optimal habitat for moose in the state using new technology that we haven't had available to us and this will provide maps to identify important areas that would be good to conserve so this is really cool the next two topics the final two topics are part of my dissertation research so I look at one aspect of my work and look at environmental impacts on moose health so if we think about the environment and things that are problematic for moose I've already talked about the winter tick but there are a whole bunch of other things on the landscape that could influence on moose's health that could be roads or human activity human development predators in a different place I have predators on the slide we don't really have moose predators in Vermont other than humans and food availability and climate and so all of these factors influence a moose's decision about what it's going to do as well as where it's going to spend it's time and that factors into what it's eating all these things and so what I can do is monitor moose health in particular monitor stress and monitor nutrition stress is really important because it's a great thing to monitor because when a moose is stressed out by the environment we can actually identify what is stressing it out and we monitor stress and moose very similar to how we measure it in humans we share a hormone with them called cortisol and when that elevates that means that they are not liking the situation and for nutrition we can look at some information in the animals urine so where I was going with this is that we can get these two measures from called non-invasive ways so we can go out, find where moose have been and collect their poop and their pee the greatest thing about being a wildlife biologist work always revolves around somehow it always comes back to feces and urine so we can extract stress hormones from the feces and various proteins in the urine to figure out their nutrition and then we can relate that back to the environment what are the environmental factors that that particular moose was what factors was it facing when it defecated and urinated so what we do is very similar to the radio telemetry work I mentioned before this is all done in winter so we get on our snowmobiles in the middle of nowhere and we radio track and we slog through waste deep concrete snow this is March April if any of you were in the woods that time this past spring it was very terrible that's Josh valiantly trying to get to a moose you cut a moose track you find using the GPS locations sent by the caller and radio telemetry you know that this is from the moose that you're after and you wander along until you find feces and urine and usually you don't even see the moose so this is very non-invasive we can do this really easily and so what this work will do will using statistical modeling will identify aspects of the environment that impact moose health as well as develop potential monitoring tools that we could use elsewhere we could use here to monitor moose health and how they're dealing with the forests and climate conditions that they're facing alright finally last study that I want to talk about is thinking about connectivity between moose populations now I've mentioned a radio caller study in a very small well relatively small place in Vermont unfortunately radio caller is really expensive and hiring helicopter crews to go out and train moose and put a radio caller on them is extremely expensive so we can't just go out and radio caller a bunch of animals and watch how they move from population to population it's just way too expensive so instead what we can use is the genetic information that the animals have and so part of my dissertation work is collecting genetic material from moose from moose populations all over the northeast and this map has actually expanded into northern Quebec as well and what I'm particularly interested in is again pulling the genetic material what I'm interested in is how unique are these populations compared to each other are there special populations that are really distinct genetically that's important we need to conserve those populations also how are these populations connected with one another and we can use the genetic information to test models of how we think genes flow across the landscape so this is a huge hypothesis alert this is one of the many hypotheses that I have is that we have an exchange of genetic material and when we think about genetic material moving across the landscape it's just animals it's just animals moving and carrying their genes to another population so we have a genetic exchange in northern Maine and Quebec say in this hypothesis and that pool of individuals sends individuals south to these southern populations that also exchange individuals we can use this genetic material to identify how genes and thus individuals flow across the region we can also and we do this by collecting samples from a whole array of moose we can do it from samples that are collected during animal capture during radio callering operations there are radio callers studies in well in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and some that are starting in Quebec we can also use hunter harvested moose we can collect in most states they're required to hunters are required to report their animals and so that's an opportunity to gather genetic samples from those animals as well and then unfortunately moose bolt across roads and so in certain states we're working with wildlife agencies to collect biological information whenever a moose is hit by a car and so we can gather information from that animal and so so far we've collected samples from over 400 moose across four states, no five states and two provinces in Canada so really cool effort and very excited to see how that goes I've done some preliminary stuff though it's not just what we're going to do this is a subset of samples from Vermont that were sampled either from the radio callers study or from hunter harvested animals in past years and so what I demonstrate here is we can actually link related individuals we can say okay we know that you two individuals are closely related by looking at your genetic data and so when we compare animals from our radio callers study this is that's the area of our radio callers study to hunter harvested moose we can identify these relationships so these weird blobs those are towns in Vermont and the darker the green the more of the greater number of moose that were harvested from those locations and so when we compare their genetic information we actually can link and identify related pairs not just in the northeast kingdom where we have a lot of radio callered animals but also extending as far west and south as Starksboro and Lincoln so this is really cool as a rudimentary way of identifying well these related animals were together at some point and now they're apart so this confirms that we have animals moving across much of the northern half of the state which is great but it prompts the question well how did these related animals move across the landscape and so this is a good transition thinking about here okay I'm using these little emoji clip art things to identify the four areas of study that I just covered but you might be thinking how does this research relate to moose in the rest of the state why does this matter for the shootsville hill wildlife corridor well I'm going to let the moose do the talking this is GPS data from one of our radio callered moose and I apologize for the resolution but this yellow blob here is the shootsville hill wildlife corridor this is our study area and that blue dot is animal 52 a moose that was born in May 2016 was radio callered in January 2017 and we can track it we tracked it for a number of years it was there with its mother using about 10 square miles of some of our prime moose habitat having a grand old time and on its second birthday and this is typical of moose calves eventually get booted out by their mothers usually because they have a calf or because they're trying to because they're breeding with a male with a bull male and so this individual got booted up on its second birthday and it cut down to warren and went to Lincoln gap area and Mount River Glen area so it crewed and it did this movement in about eight days so it cruised right out of there and then set up shop in the warren area for about two months it cruised very very close and in this section of forest here so very very close to the wildlife corridor that we're in right now it after two months it worked its way back to the kingdom and then ended up settling down in northern New Hampshire so this animal moved over 800 mile 800 that's a long ways 80 miles as the crow flies but for a moose they're meandering they're eating they're doing a bunch of things so it's likely much longer over this period of time and it was using areas created by this corridor unfortunately we don't get locations every two hours we don't know exactly what this moose was doing and where exactly it went when we look at the map there's a time there's a window about three days where we don't know what that moose was doing and it passed somewhere near here it could have used the corridor it could have gone over to Mount Mansfield state forest we don't know exactly what it was doing but the point is that it did benefit from the network of habitat suitable habitat that's around here and that's really really critical so thinking about where we're at in the era of winter tick connectivity and quality habitat are really important we can't do anything about the ticks right now that's just where we're at hopefully that will change however what we can do is make sure that these moose have places to go good food and can spread out so they're not all localized so the winter ticks can have their field day and so networks of suitable habitat are likely better than just protecting one area and this is common for wildlife species and just a pitch for research research is really critical for figuring out not only what the problem is but planning for the future and making sure that what we're doing is actually working and so in closing I just want to say that the Shoesville hill wildlife quarter and the concept of that especially thinking about Vermont's future as far as development and human population growth and the prospects of losing some habitat it's a really important and really really remarkable thing that has happened here with all the with all the collaborating organizations the landowners it's really remarkable and we certainly need more of that in the state to ensure that as the climate becomes less hospitable for moose they are still able to access areas that they can use for food for cover for reproduction that's how we keep them here and so with that I'd like to acknowledge all like this is a snapshot of some of the people who love this huge effort but Dr. Terry Donovan and Dr. Jed Murdock at UVM are my co-advisors they advise me on my research Dr. Katie Geter from Vermont Fish and Wildlife who's their biometrician Dr. Stephanie McKay who's also UVM geneticist Cedric Alexander who's the state's moose biologist at Vermont Fish and Wildlife my fellow graduate students Jake DeBoe and Josh Bluin they were courteous enough to allow me to present some of their work and our field technicians Chris Lampert, Liam Rossier and Dylan Hodgkis they were out in the woods every day after moose for a number of months Native Range capture services they're the ones who did the radio collaring they did a great job the US Fish and Wildlife and the Silvio Conte National Wildlife Refuge if you haven't been up there check it out it's the best place in Vermont to see moose I think they were great we were based out of there Vermont Fish and Wildlife the Vermont Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit all of the agencies in New England and in Quebec everyone's been amazing and really collaborative and of course my home school the Rubinstein School and as well as Velco they helped us with the radio collaring operation and we get funding for all this work through a number of sources but primarily the PIM and Robertson program through the US federal government big funding of a lot of this research I'm supported by the Steven Rubinstein Graduate Fellowship as well as support from USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the USGS as a whole so with that time for questions yes hopefully assuming we're able to come up with some kind of a line of control for the text which would be a big break for the moose we've still got climate change at play here and from what I understand that even without the ticks that's going to potentially have an impact on these animals over the short long term because they're not warm weather you know kind of animals yeah you're right again habitat climate is really important to make sure what they can move unfortunately we can't change their natural history as being a really boreal subarctic species that's adapted for deep snow however we can ensure they have a fortunately they are not specifically that they eat so we're less than that they eat a lot of different things and so suitable habitat for moose looks a certain way but it's made up of several different species so fortunately they're not relying on other species that may also be because of climate change so we do have some time really as a matter of we're dealing with winter ticks now because that's where the fire is in that map that you showed with the tracking of the individual moose those points were how many days apart very because I realized later you implied that they may travel directly but in between they might not there could have been a few days and the path is very unknown so it didn't necessarily go down it was x more time no it probably was it stopped somewhere and launched on something it came over here the closest time interval for those points is 13 hours we very rarely get that and usually something more like 48 hours or longer that cluster of points that was about a year and a half set up year and a half set up in a matter of about 20 seconds this is doing all this crazy stuff because it was 18 months in 20 seconds but the path coming when it came down was deranged in a war and it could have I don't know where it went very pretty live that's evident we knew where it was exactly we don't have that's the first data for an animal with a tracker on it moving from the kingdom down here we don't we call our animals very often so that's really unique information what do we know about winter tip population density is it uniform hot spots? that's a great question there are hot spots and it depends on their hosts and so there's some work out at the University of New Hampshire that has identified that moose moose use similar habitats when the ticks are falling off as well as when the larvae are ascending so normally we don't have any studies looking at ticks themselves we have to go up on a white sheet for ticks and you just brush transects and you walk through the woods and brush along vegetation and count the number of ticks on the sheet but we're starting to get some of the jockeys actually back to the slide so that cool 3D map that I showed this map so we know enough about where winter ticks are we can actually identify when moose are in when moose are having ticks drop off we can identify where they were and the structures and vegetation where they were when the ticks were dropping off so we can actually make a hot test we should be able to Josh is going to do this but theoretically we should be able to also map where the ticks are but if you componentize these densities and how that changes and that's this is a naive question but I'm going to ask it oh I love it so do these ticks respond at all to insecticides has that been studied at all they do so I'm not too familiar with this but there's a study that's starting up in Quebec that it's actually using basically the equivalent of tick tolerance for animals just to isolate this is not as a treatment of purely to test what is the impact of ticks on it some they have some moose that they're going to look at with radio collars without these tick collars and with these tick collars so they can actually identify the rule of ticks insecticides are really hard we have to hand them and any application is going to be really really hard either you dose the animal which is really expensive because you have to handle the animal the I think that's what it is the dose only lasts for so long so we have to re-uphit and then dosing the environment that's the only history of that so the insecticide option is not a very challenging one can you talk a little bit more about density and how that affects like moose density and how it affects ticks because I remember in one of those early graphs you showed that there were so many moose in 2005 and then the first law of the environment issued more permits to try to bring that density down and I think sometimes the assumption is oh if they hadn't just done that there'd be so many more moose in the state and they'd be so healthy and everything would be fine but I think it's often times kind of the opposite of that that they're finding that at those higher densities that's when the ticks are at the greatest problem and one of the solutions is lower in density and so with habitat management making sure that moose can spread out that's the only way to get out of lower densities however the point of bring up is a really good one to make there is a lag like ticks were likely causing problems in this time and it didn't amplify two population levels yet so it's not like winter ticks weren't a problem then it's just that there's a lag for a parasite to have an impact on the population and so the idea of using legal harvests to bring a population down so that there are fewer moose on the landscape so that basically what this would do is it's like getting your flu vaccine and so reducing the number of susceptible hosts on the landscape and that means that the ticks don't do as well and so this, the management decision of reducing the moose population was for the sustainability of the forest but in retrospect it resulted in getting the moose population down quickly whereas if that hunt hadn't happened if that increase in quotas hadn't happened this would have been likely a longer drawn out process and a longer drawn out decline so in terms of moose density right, so it looks like the population grew extremely precipitously like you talked about, you know, 1,500 to 5,000 in a very close period of time now we're saying the state, you know, from a management perspective face that 3,000 is perfect but in terms of the environment we have, you know what is the right moose density for Vermont based on the environment we have? I don't know that's a great question I would defer to the state station so it could be a little bit of right sizing as well, in addition to harvesting in addition to ticks, in addition to clientage there could be some right sizing yes, absolutely and you alluded to this we don't know what normal it's for moose in New England because they were gone in the 1800s they don't have records of how many were there and so if you use some of this gravity backwards we go from nothing to like that and then it's leveling off and this is actually usually what wildlife populations do when they get back, when they re-establish they'll have a great time, everyone's great and having a good time then they hit some sort of limiting factor and they will modulate, their population will fluctuate and level off and so we're absolutely in that time and I don't know what that I don't know where the modulation ends yeah, great question have you looked at the variation between how ticks affect moose population and the four different types of moose across the US? yeah, so it's mainly a problem here in New England, there are winter tick issues in the Midwest and winter ticks occur all across the lower 48 in the lower distribution of moose so yeah, winter tick are there existing and mainly issues in Eastern North America that exist elsewhere the variation that we see in the Northeast I can speak to because we're working closely with New Hampshire and Maine and what we see is that New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine's southern areas are all facing the same issue where Maine's northern area has not been dramatically impacted by winter tick yet this is likely due to snow cover extending both in the fall and the spring so the winter ticks don't do as well but Maine has some of the highest moose densities in the region and on the continent so winter tick has not been able to persist there so we have a climate gradient that just happens to be because we're looking in the right place but yeah, great question yes and considering the weakening of the moose in the winter time from the ticks what about coyote predation? yeah, so I can only speak to what I've seen from the mortalities in our studies we have had no of the oh man, I shouldn't know how many animals have perished but it's I don't know if you know this but we call it a lot of calves and those are the ones that usually perish from winter tick so it's an obvious direct predation from coyotes and bears we did have a couple scavenging instances where the animals were there but when you get to a carcass like that it's really hard to do the CSI to figure out why this animal died and what we can do is we take samples and send them to the lab and we can tell from the pathology of the animal what causes it to die we had very few instances where of the few instances where a carcass had been scavenged and it was in poor condition and likely it was a condition that led to that so during low levels of predation they ended up great question for the radio collar data where you showed the moose coming up through the shoesville corridor how typical is that number one and number two is there a way to capture the data so that lay people can see just how often the moose are actually coming through the area here that's a great question as far as data availability that gets in the fun stuff with funders as far as how data are distributed that movement was notable for our radio collar moose we did have a couple that moved out of the study area we had one that went to Green, Maine and sat inside the E5 and unfortunately of course the moose that was named it slipped its collar and so we picked up an empty collar and it was gone and these animals and both of you over here call our information from New Hampshire and Maine to show that when an animal disperses over life's distances this is pretty typical but that movement is typical of what they're doing they make these big moves so it's a bit surprising given how many calves in color but then again thinking about it allow those calves to perish from their tip or that made us an age where they were dispersed it became a thinner and thinner number a couple questions about the population of these winter ticks they've been around for a long time and why all of a sudden are they impacting the population so much is that because climate change and all the other things you talked about the forest fragmentation and development and the moose habitat but it seems sort of interesting to me that they're all of a sudden like this is such a huge issue yeah so we've known about these ticks were documented exactly 150 years ago so we've known about them for a while records of them causing issues for moose extended back to the early 1900s in other states so this isn't the fact that moose having problems with winter ticks on them is not new the reason it's reared its head is because flushes is this this combination we do have a changing climate especially those shoulder seasons around the winter and again we went from no moose to a lot of moose in the matter of 25 30 years that's really fast and so we likely weren't seeing the tick die-offs the tick cause and mortality has contributed because all the moose are doing really well as a population the population is growing and we're seeing more and more moose it's really easy to miss the individuals who are suffering from maybe the winter ticks that eventually were causing problems so this explosion in the population of moose allowed the explosion in the population of ticks combined with the spring and fall conditions and now with the much lower moose population there's more ticks current moose that the population graph that I showed prior it looks like the population may be leveling off but no guarantees with that because we don't have limited data and another thing is what was I going to say this the reason why winter tick are these conditions are not unique to the moose this is really one story in general and the only reason nor the name my understanding is the only reason nor the name has had to deal with this or hasn't had an impact on it as much by this is because they still have some of these springs and falls the previous slide on the life cycle you said the ticks sense the moose and then attach themselves what action do they take can you fill in more details in that process? that's a great question and it is a terrifying process they all have a couple hundred ticks a piece of vegetation and they just say so and they pick up on movement heat and the breathing of the moose and those hundred ticks link arms and they send out so they make a little chain and the last part all of them are limbs that are not involved with holding onto each other all their limbs are just flailing around trying to grab the thing that's going to be coming by all it takes is one or two ticks at the very end of that chain to grab onto the moose and everyone else has brought them along so it's not that they pick up one or two ticks and it's not that they pick up a couple hundred with each tick long yeah it's very alien you have to I'm just amazed and impressed by one hundred ticks but I'm also obviously playing no problem with them but those types of all behaviors are really cool but as soon as you step back and you go back to hanging do you retrieve all the collars that when the moose dies or are you able to retrieve them and use them over? yeah that's a great question so when we recover the radio collars you may need to seize moose and we can set it back and then refurbish which is much cheaper than buying new radio collars and we can seal it up and it's going to go so that's a great money saving opportunity for us and just a good use of the investment yeah yes I hope you're wondering why I never see moose here so I like in the end rodax I'm always stepping on scat you may not see him the whites badster I'm always stepping in scat on moose scat in Le Mans that I remember why is that? why don't we have moose around here? it's a great question this is purely my opinion in areas in the kingdom where I work it's the same deal where people used to see him from the sides of the road and don't anymore I step off of any maintained trail and I run into moose you do see scat on the trails you see him a lot more it's probably a factor of lower densities of moose here probably more elevated human activities and moose they don't use the same place again and again they will adjust where they're spending their time based on the environmental pressures that they're facing so moose densities have certainly declined however there's an issue of what we call detection our ability to pick up these animals on the landscape because they make up their own mind so I would encourage you if you can spend some time off trail and away from people and who knows you might be able to find some land management for moose looking specifically is there thinking going on about trying to convert open land into forest land or land owners going in and trying to make an existing forest better for moose yeah so there are resources for land owners to do that one of the issues we have here in Vermont is that most land is privately owned in places like New Hampshire and Maine there's still giant timber operations that operate in these these areas and so it's a lot easier for huge swaths of good moose habitat to be created there I don't know of specific initiatives to try to maintain an open habitat here I just know it is difficult yes we have a couple of initiatives with the state and the federal government to introduce yourself I'm Andrew Shortz, I'm a biologist with Vermont Fish and Wildlife I'm a habitat biologist and I work with private land owners and so we do do a lot of habitat we're creating the young forest that he was talking about that really benefit moose populations and so there is funding available from the farm level to create that private property for more details contact me in throughout the Q&A session if you have any more questions please stick around ask any one of us and but I'll take a left yeah what's next for the moose project are there still collared animals out there? yeah so we have I can't give an exact number but we have a number of animals still on the landscape we're monitoring them at a much lower intensity but pretty much still tracking mortality and reproduction into the future we are still collecting genetic data and tracking where those animals are used what spacial animals are using on the landscape will be able to detect future dispersals down here or across in New Hampshire so it's evolving rapidly this started out just as how are the moose doing with winter tick too now we do genetics, I use stress hormones we're looking at all these all these aspects that will feed back the tools that can be used in monitoring when we don't have radio collars out there so that's a big picture that's a great question thanks for coming to the live