 Good afternoon and welcome to the House Environment and Energy Committee. We're going to shift gears this afternoon and talk about danger, threat and danger species in age 8-1-12 with starting with the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Welcome. Afternoon. Thank you very much for having us for record. My name is John Austin. I am the Director of Wildlife with the Fish and Wildlife Department. With me today is Dr. Rosalind Renfrew. She is the Program Manager for the Species Diversity Program in the Wildlife Division who oversees all things, threat and endangered species related. Also with me today is General Counsel Catherine Gessing. Counsel Gessing joined us today just in the event that if there's a discussion regarding in particular bill 587, the deals with enforcement issues, she would be best to respond to issues real quick. Can you remind me that we as bill introductions related to wildlife, threat and endangered species, with Representative Brennan the end of last week that may also be considered under this topic today. Thank you for that remind. Good. Thank you. We're here today to talk about in particular bill H-8-1-2, but also to the extent the committee is interested, we can talk about 587, 588, and 597, they all have bearing on one another. I thought what we would do is turn it over to Dr. Renfrew in just a moment and she's going to go through the 101 on biodiversity conservation and how the endangered species law works today. Then we can use that as an opportunity to have a conversation after her presentation about the department's view of bill 8-1-2 and the other bills that are associated with it and how we can work together to move things forward because we're delighted that the committee is interested in this topic. It's very much a shared interest. We're all concerned about biodiversity conservation and in particular, we're concerned about making sure we're doing everything we can for our most vulnerable species. I think with Dr. Renfrew's presentation, that will provide hopefully some helpful context for all of you to understand the scope, the lay of the land of how things work now, the endangered species law, and permitting the endangered species committee to the species advisory groups and covering planning and all of that. With that context, we can then talk about the bill and how we might move forward together. With that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Renfrew and then talk about the bill. Thanks, John. For the record, my name is Rosalind Renfrew, Wildlife Diversity Program Manager of Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. Thank you very much for inviting us here today. I want to echo John's appreciation. I've been really looking forward to this and digging into this topic. We think about threatened and endangered species all the time in my program, and it's really great to be able to extend our passion and interest to this group and see what we can do together. So I really appreciate your invite, committee members, chairwoman, Sheldon. It's greatly appreciated. So I have, John introduced me a little bit. I'm a PhD in wildlife ecology, and I've been spending most of my career doing bird research and conservation work, but I joined the Fish and Wildlife Department two and a half years ago and have greatly broadened my scope where I'm trying to, to all kinds of different taxonomic groups, many species and plants, and learning all the time. We have an amazing group of talented, knowledgeable people on our staff, and it's really a joy and a learning experience every day to work with them. I wanted to advance, but I don't want to advance. The arrows aren't the arrows. Oh, there we go. Well, it didn't work. The arrow or something else. There's a menu. Maybe it was just me standing over that. So to carry on. So the people in this department are very dedicated to this mission. Their passion is incredibly strong. They go above and beyond every day. I love our mission because it's about the wildlife and it's about the people. But one thing to add to it is it's for the people of Vermont, but it's also for the future of Vermont. It's for the future of species and the people and the survival of all of the above. And I like to emphasize that. These pieces of legislation on the table are kind of, I think, they're forward-looking and a part of that solution. So just like John said, I'm going to talk a bit about some basic ecology 101 concepts forgive me if it's something you've already been well versed in. I thought it might help set the groundwork and then talk about the law, the major species law and how it is implemented by Fish and Wildlife and all the partners around the state without whom we would never accomplish the work that we all do together. It's really truly a team effort and I know that sounds corny, but it's quite true that we can't all do all this important work in isolation. So this group's all been around the block on biodiversity. So what I wanted to say though, was that it is in the eye of the holder in terms of what does biodiversity mean to you? It can be landscape diversity. It can be about natural community diversity across those landscapes. A lot of people I think of biodiversity in terms of the number of species that are around. I think that's probably the most common perception. There's also genetic diversity, which is really important to our work which I'll talk about in a little bit. So I just wanted to recognize these different scales at which biodiversity can be described by the word biodiversity and it's really all encompassing and a uniting word that kind of fits everything but it's also in the eye of the beholder. So in Vermont, if you just talk about species biodiversity, this is sort of the roundup of what we have and you'll notice, I hope it's large enough, you'll notice that most of our species in Vermont are fungi and invertebrates and we don't even know how many we have and they're also, we know the least about and the fewest species are the vertebrates and we probably know the most about those. So there's a lot we don't know about our biological diversity and a lot of it is literally under the ground. It's sort of like the iceberg where the top of the iceberg is above the waterline, right? A lot of people like to use that analogy. Just in case you were doubting whether biodiversity was important to the rest of the world, there's this World Economic Forum that does reports every year and figures out from all these experts, business, government, academia, international community, what are the important global risks and they laid out 34 of them. I only show the top 10 here, but biodiversity falls in third place as the major threat to reckon with in the next 10 years and the only things above it are associated with climate change. I'm not going to get into the impacts of climate change today. I feel like that needs a lot more than a slide or two. Obviously there's gonna be a massive sort of rearrangement of species on the landscape and it's very hard to predict a lot about what that's going to look like and how species assemblages will break up and reform and how they'll move. And as you know, we are just trying to conserve the landscape in a way that they can move, which efforts like Act 59 strive to do. So I'm gonna talk about some of the other threats, just briefly another threat you're certainly aware of is the habitat loss and fragmentation from our human use of the landscape in certain ways, how that reduces the quality of the habitat by creating these edge effects which change the interior portions, the more interior portions of ecosystems and the disturbance and the displacement it causes for many species. I just have a bat here. There's a lot of bat species. These are woods for roosting and all of them are endangered or threatened. Is your animation a real development in Vermont? Yeah, I got it from somebody else, but that's a real time to use this one for some time. BNRC helped put that part together. I'm really glad it worked because it doesn't really work when you hook it up. Yeah, it doesn't work in the PDF, but it looks like a nice intact forest except when there's a large road going up on our screen. Other threats, I'm not going to cover them all. I'm just kind of freezing through a few of them. For birds, cats are a huge threat. One of the biggest threats to bird populations for bats. Obviously the white nose syndrome is caused by a disease, a fungal disease. And that was, they believe transferred from Europe. So globalization is transporting stuff all over the world, transporting viruses and diseases as we know from COVID. Well, wildlife are experiencing that as well and that's a real threat. Right now we have avian influenza that's going around. Wildlife trafficking is a threat for some species. There's in Vermont, wood turtles are subject to wildlife trafficking and also invasive species, both invertebrate and plants. They are a threat in terms of taking over native species. Representative Bongar. Just since you just happened to mention it, I think I have heard that the bat population, the cave dwellers with white nose syndrome as the birds that have survived are beginning to come back a little bit. Is that true? Yeah, it seems like one or two of the species have sort of stabilized and maybe coming back. It's a little early to say, but some are more resilient that are showing to be more resilient than others. And it's early to tell how that's gonna play out. But it gives us a lot of hope that maybe we've, maybe we're past the bottom point. But you also have to just say some of. Right, others are still quite low in their populations that haven't come back up yet. Inside recovery. We could do a whole talk with you about that. Another fundamentally ecological concept that I know you've probably all talked about and learned about our natural communities. This is important to mention because they are what holds these species that we're concerned about that are rare, threatening or endangered. And a lot of times the natural communities are rare and that's why the species are rare. But it's the physical environment and the assemblages species and the processes that affect them that make up a natural community. So one example here is the timber rattlesnake. Kind of a popular species in a certain way and a species that other people don't want to hear about sometimes associated with dry chestnut oak woodland natural community, which is in the Taconic mountains and some in the Southern Champlain Valley. Another one would be the West Virginia white butterfly that feeds on nectar from the toothwort which is a small plant in rich northern hardwoods. So there's these species associations that with their plants that also attach them to their natural communities. So it's all part of that web of life that make up biodiversity. Let me have a question from Representative Smith. Thank you very much for this. And you brought up a picture of a timber rattlesnake. Can you tell me why on earth anybody wants to protect a poisonous rattlesnake? Because the same as you want to protect those black flies and mosquitoes. Well, I didn't say I wanted to protect them. But it just seems odd. There's plenty of rattlesnakes and taxes and the border down that way. What is the urgency of saving a rattlesnake? Well, that's in the eye of the holder. They are part of the natural community that occurs in the Taconic mountains and that's a pretty unique community. There's a lot. In the Rutland area, down that way? Down that way, south of there. And it's a pretty unique community. It has a lot of unique natural communities within it because of the underlying rock. And so there's a lot of other rare species there. And the timber rattlesnake, I mean, it's limited in its range here. It's not spreading out across Vermont and terrorizing people. It kind of sticks to where its habitat is. And it hasn't so far, not kind of would, caused any problems for people. I was just curious about it. It's because the late St. Patrick wouldn't agree with you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. And we actually have one of our programs is, one of the things we do for the public is if they have a rattlesnake that's anywhere where they wanna be walking or they encounter one somehow, we free of service go and move it and move it to some other place away from humans. So. There was a rattlesnake in Derby in 1959 or 60. And it's a short story. So I actually wanna, I'm gonna interrupt you and say that we have a lot of great witnesses and not enough time for them. This was a great story though, but I won't go on. You'll have to hold on your story. I'm really sorry. I am. All right. I wanna give everyone their fair chance. A lot of people have come to testify for the short amount of time we have. Okay, thank you. So habitat. I'll know what habitat is, right? Food, water, shelter. The important thing I wanna emphasize is it's space as well. So if animals, if we infringe on the habitat, if we wanna put up solar panels or development or a mall or whatever, they can't squish into a smaller space. It just doesn't work that way. They need their space. They have their territories. They need their food. They need their place to nest, to be produced. And so whenever we do, whenever we do remove habitat, it is removing part of that species population. It's really a way, no trick around that really. It is what it is for the most part. I wanted to share the idea of niche, another concept in ecology, which is kind of like the role of the species, where it lives. And it is meant to explain what the species, it might be specialized in what it eats or what it does or how it interacts with its food resources, how it exploits its food resources, as well as how it uses the habitat. So all of those things can be considered the niche. And one of the sort of cardinal roles is that no two species can occupy the same niche. So what I'm trying to say with that is that every species has its own unique way of contributing, and maybe this gets at your question, of contributing to the ecosystem that it's in, that no other species duplicates. And so you lose that species and you lose the function that that species has in the ecosystem. And maybe that's okay. Maybe nobody will notice, maybe other species won't be affected. Probably they're affected in some way that we don't even realize. But the point is, is how many of those can you lose before it's really a problem? Like how far do we let, do we go with that? Do we let that go before we start seeing more of a impact on the entire system? And we don't know the answer to that because you can't really know until it's gone, until it's too late. Oh, these are just examples of one of the points I wanted to make is that a lot of endangered and threatened species are specialists, and that's why they're sort of rare because they use a particular kind of habitat. They're not generalists that can just live anywhere. So the bobcat is pretty generalists. They live in a lot of different kinds of habitats across their range, deserts and swamps and obviously forests. Easter metal arcs are in the middle there. They're tied to grasslands. And particular grasslands with a particular kind of grass structure at that, they can't just move on to a different kind of habitat if they don't have grasslands to nest in. The left picture is a small world Pagonia we discovered after not having been seen in Vermont for over a hundred years by our former botanist. And that's an interesting species because it's a generalist, but it's extremely rare. And that's, I wouldn't call it generalist, but it's definitely not a specialist. It occurs in a variety of habitats that are pretty plentiful in the landscape. And it's probably due to over decades and decades destruction of that habitat as well as collectors who love orchids. And so orchids are sort of sensitive species that tend to fall under those species needing extra protection with things like location confidential, one of the bills that we're talking about today. Okay, so how do we protect endangered and threatened species? Like the way that biodiversity is organized in terms of its various scales, I see our protections organized the same way. And I think that makes sense. You're all quite familiar with Vermont Conservation Design, I assume, Act 59 also tackles conservation at the broad landscape scale. That encompasses, that brings with it natural communities for the most part. And that what we're focusing on today is that lower level of the species level. What species aren't captured by those efforts or what species may be captured spatially by those efforts but need extra attention for some reason or another because of the threats they face because habitat's not the threat they're facing, it's some other threat. I wanted to make a point about needing robust populations. Our work is generally at the population level. We're looking to conserve populations of species and we need them to be large enough. And ideally we need to have multiple populations if we want to keep a species around. You have all your eggs in one basket and a disaster strikes and you've lost the species. So ideally we try to conserve in such a way and manage in such a way that we're not leaving ourselves in that vulnerable or leaving the species in that vulnerable position. Genetic diversity is important. So it makes the population more resilient, more able to adapt to changes. If you have immigration and emigration between the different populations, you get a genetic mixing that makes the populations more resilient. So some, like I was saying, some of the species fall through the cracks for one reason or another. Cobblestone tiger beetle is a really cool species but it just, it lives on this cobblestone shores of fast moving water rivers. And it actually relies on flooding to scour the rivers and keep creating that new cobblestone habitat that it needs. But if you have rivers that are flooding a lot frequently or for long periods of time that's actually a negative for the species that harms the species. Ram said later, slipper is beautiful. It's very limited in its habitat and it's rare for a bunch of reasons but I'll skip through just to not take too much time here. So how do we protect these? So title 10, chapter 123, protection of endangered species. It kind of lays out all the elements of our endangered and threatened species protection in Vermont. It requires that the agency, the secretary of the agency of natural resources maintains a list of threatened endangered species. It requires a permit if you're going to take a permit, take a species meaning farming, killing, harassing species, establish the non-game fund which raises some money through a license plate and through tax donation to help conserve species that are threatened and endangered. It established the Endangered Species Committee to advise the ANR secretary on all of these matters and I'll get to that in a minute. And it also in 2016 established critical habitat where there was critical habitat established the first three were for three species. Bats, a bat cave, spiny, spiny saw shelf turtle, nesting beaches and common turn nesting islands. So just in case you're not familiar with the terms of endangered and threatened and the difference between them, essentially endangered is when the continued existence is in jeopardy for a species in the state. This is for state endangered. And then threatened is if the species is essentially probably going to become endangered. It's sort of on the verge of that. There's a lot of other species we watch. We keep an eye on and monitor aside from these two categories which I'll talk about. This is the list of species that are threatened or endangered in Vermont, not a list summary of them. You can see about three quarters of them are plants. Oops, self-served. And you can also see that a few of them are federally listed as well. Critical habitat. I thought it'd be helpful to just remind everyone of what is critical habitat, the definition. It's a specifically delineated location that has physical or biological features that are identifiable, concentrated, decisive to the survival of the species necessary for their conservation and recovery. And that may require some sort of special management considerations or protections, those things that our large landscape efforts don't cover. So part of the law is also us for Fish and Wildlife to establish a plan for the management of non-game wildlife. And this is sort of our guiding principles because we do have a non-game wildlife plan and we do all these things in the bullets you see in the Wildlife Diversity Program. So this is sort of our directive that we follow. The Wildlife Action Plan comes out every 10 years. You have a new one every 10 years. This is required by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and it incorporates all those different scales I've been talking to you about today. And it focuses on species of greatest conservation need and there are several criteria that differ depending on what sort of species you're talking about to establish which species should be species of greatest conservation need. It's a mouthful. We call them SGCN for short and nobody knows what we're talking about. But they include our endangered and threatened species but they also include a host of other species for a lot of other reasons. For example, they're sort of watch lists, we're looking and we're seeing declining population trends or they're of regional concern, they might be okay here but all around us, they're declining. There's a whole bunch of reasons that species may end up on SGCN list. And the plan lays out, how are these species doing? What are the problems they're facing? What can we do about it? You didn't happen to bring it, John. It's massive. It's about this thick because it has accounts of all the species. So it's a big document but there's a short version, don't worry if you wanna check it out online. And there's almost, there's 970 something species that are species of greatest conservation needs. So there's species that everyone is keeping an eye on for one reason or another or is concerned about. It could even be a lack of knowledge that makes it SGCN. It's just that we don't understand it well enough and we're concerned that we need to, that we're missing something. Okay, so I'll talk really quickly about the Wildlife Diversity Program that I'm managing. Again, we carry out those duties that I mentioned earlier. Those duties that the law lays out through research and monitoring and conserving and protecting these species and of course, engaging the public. We do, I can't talk to you about all the research and monitoring we're doing today, not over the time. It's amazing and almost overwhelming how much is getting done. But what I do wanna say is that this is only because of again, that team of partners that we work with across the state. We work with, I mean, there's people speaking here today who we work with who are carrying out programs that get the work done and we're simply assisting them in some way. So this is, I'm really talking about our program and what our program encompasses, but just understand that this is a huge group of people who are all coming together and carrying out their different roles and have their niches. Whole bunch of things we do to conserve and protect these species. This is just a quick list of some of the things we do. Guidance for homeowners is a big one for the bats. Guiding foresters is also a big one for the bats but we work with all kinds of landowners for all kinds of reasons. I'll talk about regulation in a bit. A lot of habitat protection and enhancement. On the bottom picture there, that is spiny soft shell turtle nesting beach and it has that netting over it because if it wasn't there, it's placed there as strategic times. If it wasn't there, almost all the nests would be eaten by raccoons and other predators. So it's the way to keep the species going. I'm pretty sure they would be gone if we weren't doing that work. Same with the common turn up top, Audubon Vermont is monitoring the turn for decades. They nest on rock islands in Lake Champlain and they require ongoing management in order for them to successfully fledged nestlings each year. And in the middle there is Jessup's milk vetch which is a federally endangered species as well as in Vermont. And we've actually been augmenting populations to make them more resilient because there's so few left. And that actually worked out really well in the July floods because there was one or two populations that survived and the others did not. And so it's a good thing we had more than one basket for the eggs, so to speak. Of course, outreach and education is a huge part of what we do constantly and everything we do whether it's engaging volunteers and having them help on the projects, working with our partners and engaged volunteers. You'll probably hear about some of that today and putting out information publications and social media, et cetera. One thing I do wanna make sure to touch on because it tends to get hidden. It's the tidying behind the curtain all the time but it's incredibly important. Powerhouse is our natural heritage database. This database underpins all our work. It contains all the data that's been collected over the decades and it's a deep dive in that. It's not just, oh, we found the species in this one location. It has a lot of other information that surrounds it. For example, it's not just what's there and how many populations are there, what's the condition of the population, repeat visits to the same site, and whether we think that these populations will persist whether we think they're not going to persist. So it's not just a data point, it's an assessment for each of those data points. So it's really different in that way from a lot of other data sets. It has a lot of information, a lot of context that's helpful and hopefully will be helpful to future biologists and it also of course guides our management decisions and conservation decisions. And that data, those data are provided online available to the public. They're used by the regulatory community. So here we have in purple, natural community, a significant natural community and then green are plants, endangered plants and red are endangered animals. You can go online and look this up and this is really useful for consultants, developers, conservation planners from the municipal to the state level. It's used quite a bit and it's live updated every time we upload new data to it. So it's always current and that's really important for the users. There's another product called BioFinder which hosts also Vermont Conservation Design as well as these data. Just be aware that these data aren't updated because often that platform. So a lot of people kind of use both. And the last thing I want to say about the natural heritage data is that it is standardized across all the states and actually all the provinces too. So that they can be served up with information at a regional and continental scale. So we can be looking at the larger patterns and how Vermont fits into them. This is done by NatureServe. It's called the NatureServe network. All the states participate and contribute their data. And NatureServe is like the umbrella organization that hosts all those data and they're starting to pump out really great maps and doing some great modeling with that that I think will be really useful to at least our regional conservation efforts. We're involved in regulatory review. Like I said, our data are used for regulatory review but also we are engaged in under Act 250, 208 to have no undue adverse effect on necessary wildlife habitat or any endangered species. And then section 248 for utilities and energy projects. So the name of the game there is if there's potential impact to avoid minimize or mitigate that impact. And so we bring in our biologists of the relevant expertise depending on what the potential impacts of any development project are. And we do hundreds of these every year. This is just a list of necessary wildlife habitat types that I think have some overlap with endangered and threatened species. And we provide guidance on all of these as well to the communities that use it to explain how we define them, what sort of protocols to use to survey them and what we're looking for when it comes to avoidance and minimizing and mitigating their impacts. Okay, last but not least. Actually, far from least is the Endangered Species Committee. This, along with our partners, this is one of the most important parts of the work we do is we get the benefit of input and expert insight into a lot of the work we do. The Endangered Species Committee advises the inner secretary and the Fish and Wildlife Commissioner on all kinds of things. I just have a short list here, but a lot of these pieces that we're talking about today and they are made up of three agency leadership, Fish and Wildlife, Agriculture and FPR, Forest Parks Rec, and then also six appointees from the public at large to engaged in agricultural or civil cultural activities and to knowledgeable in flora and to knowledgeable in fauna. A lot of times those appointees are suggested by Fish and Wildlife and or the Endangered Species Committee itself and usually they're accepted. We usually have a good case to re-select. So another sort of powerhouse that's behind the curtain a bit is what underlies the Endangered Species Committee. Those nine people aren't making all the decisions without a ton of input from scientific advisory groups. There's a couple of people here who serve on those groups today. You'll be hearing from these are essential to spreading the sorts of decisions that Fish and Wildlife is making and also to providing recommendations not only to the commissioner and to the secretary through the Endangered Species Committee. So they make their recommendations to the Endangered Species Committee, Endangered Species Committee, then decides votes on that and makes their recommendation. But they're really informed by these groups and these groups are chock full of some of the, a lot of the best experts in Vermont on their specific taxonomic group. So we have, we now have seven of them. We just added Brighter Fights and Fun Guy and there's experts on those taxonomic groups. And I don't know, it would be horrible if they were all in the same room and all that COVID or something because nothing would happen with Endangered Species for a few weeks. It's just, it's all the best of the state and we rely heavily on their input on all kinds of everything, almost everything having to do with Endangered and Threatened Species, very, very important part of our work. And I'm not sure what we do without them. We'd be making decisions without full information. So I can't stress that enough. Oops, let's see, yeah. So I can stop there. I was gonna briefly mention what the listing and recovery process looks like, but if I'm on a check on time, yeah. That works. We do have a lot of folks in here if I can prioritize also people who are not regularly in the building. Representatives, Pat. Thanks, this came to mind from my one experience dealing with Endangered Species in the regulatory world. In land use regulatory proceedings or energy related land use proceedings at the PUC website, if there is an issue around an Endangered Species, who, and there's an attempt at part of the proposal, there's a proposal to how to mitigate that, who reviews that and how does that get reviewed to say whether that would work, that would be acceptable or not? Well, it's really, it's so that we have guidelines that suggest mitigation options and those differ depending on what sorts of species or habitat is being impacted. And it becomes a process of figuring out what makes sense. I mean, John, do you wanna speak too? Well, it kind of looks on average. As you're alluding to, Rosette, it depends on the circumstances of the species. So if the circumstances of the plant are my case, but I would. Right, so likely there was a need for an incidental take permit to deal with the presence of the rare plant. That would suit, that process would run parallel to the Public Utility Commission process. So both would be dealing with the same issue simultaneously, but the issuance of the incidental take permit would be the main sort of force of law for the protection of the species and would lay out all of the terms and conditions for the protection and mitigation of impacts. And that permit would work its way through the Endangered Species Committee with input from the Species Advisory Group, in that case, the Species Advisory Group that Dr. Wendt will refer to and then ultimately up to the Secretary of the Agency for decision in the issuance of the project. Thank you. Adam Chair, I know you're pressed for time. So I yield to you in terms of how you'd like to approach receiving comments from the Agency and the Department on Bill H812. I'm happy to stick around for the duration and we can talk about it at the end. I don't want to short change the other distinguished guests that are here or and or I can offer a very brief readers digest version of where we're at with that. I think the brief readers digest version would be great. We can get oriented and then we'll want to hear it again. So that'll help us in our learning curve. So here's where we're at. The Agency and the Department very much support the intent of H812 and would like to work with this committee to come up with language in a bill that would be realistic for us. The language in H812 right now is problematic from a number of angles, most of them related to capacity challenges. As one example, the designation of critical habitat for every list of species is largely unworkable and in some instances unnecessary. So that would be something to talk about. The frequency of updating the list would be another thing. On the other hand, there's things that you have in H812 that are agreeable and I have a suggestion that you could pull some of that out and incorporate it into Bill H588, which deals with confidentiality for the protection of species locations and move that forward now. And then step back for the bigger picture because we all want to, we really want to work with this committee and other partners to take up a new look, fresh look at the endangered species law and see what sort of changes can be made to improve our ability reasonably to do better protections for these vulnerable species. I worry about trying to, with limited time now in the session, and this is a very complicated and important topic. Try and pull something together in short order rather than let's take a couple of pieces of learning fruit from what you have, put them in the other bill, move that forward and then work over this next year with you and partners to come up with a bill that we can all get behind. Great, thank you. And thank you so much, Roslyn, for that orientation to the department's work. Really helpful, quick background. Thank you both. Let's quickly say that was really interesting. That was very impressive. Thank you. The presentation was great, too. The work was really nice. All right, Jim Andrews. So, a free interview. Come around to the table. This gets me over here. Technology. Yeah, welcome. Jim and I know each other from way back. He's a friend and a neighbor in Salisbury, just south of where I live. Good to see you here. Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So, I'm one of those partners that John and Ros has mentioned. I've been working with these guys for years in their current position and then before they were in these positions. I've been working with Fish and Wildlife and working with their predecessors. My background really, I think probably Amy invited me because I chair a group, I don't chair, excuse me, a coordinated group called the Vermont Reptown and Fibian Atlas. Can you just, for the record? Yep. Yes. My name is Jim Andrews and I'm from Salisbury, Vermont. And I coordinate a group called the Vermont Reptown and Fibian Atlas. I gather information on the distribution, conservation, natural history of all of the Reptowns and Fibians in Vermont from around the state. Do that by working with Fish and Wildlife but also working with VNRC, working with Bonneville Environmental Conservation Commission and a lot of citizen science. So I try to get people to report what they run into in their yard, the under the wood pile, et cetera. So we can get an idea of what we have met. The reason that that organization came about is that I chair one of the groups that Ros was referring to, the Reptown and Fibian Scientific Advisory Group to the Endangered Species Committee. You know, I've chaired that committee now for about 30 years. It's been a while. And we very quickly realized that we needed more information on the distribution and abundance of the Reptowns and Fibians in Vermont. And so we started gathering information and this Reptown and Fibian Atlas that I coordinate is a spin-off from the Reptown and Fibian Scientific Advisory Group that I decided would become kind of my life's work and have worked on this for years. As part of that, I've also done research out of Middlebury College as a research scholar and I've taught at UVM. I'm no longer associated with either of those. I'm not giving them my research dollars. My research dollars have come directly to me, which makes that a little bit easier. The way I approach these bills is not really providing any background, these guys have provided also great background, but just to look specifically at the bill and specific lines. And I can do that with just one bill or I can go through all four of them. However, you can decide as we go along depending on how much time I'm taking. Yeah, let's, if you can keep it specific to each topic and sync to it, I mean, I don't know how much time you need to do them all, but definitely start with A-12 and then take other thoughts. And then I'll let you judge. Okay. So age 12, in the beginning it makes a statement about require the secretary of ANR to revise the state list of TNA species every three years. Personally, I don't think this is necessary. I think we have a system that already works better than that. I think we have a system through the endangered, the reptile amphibian through this, through the scientific advisor groups. Most of these groups meet twice a year, if not more, and they are always reviewing the status of their taxonomic group. So it's ongoing. There's a lot of communication that's involved between those meetings. Right now, for instance, we've prepared a couple of documents in my group to look at the status of Eastern Ribbon Snake and whether or not we ought to recommend that one. For listing, probably we won't. We've reviewed that one before. If we decide a species really should be listed, needs more protection, then we do the paperwork on that and we take it to the Endangered Species Committee, which meets two or three times a year. They usually can turn that around in one meeting. So we take that information up, present them with the information that's reviewed before we get there. If they agree this really ought to be proposed for listing, then they turn that around in that meeting and then that recommendation goes to the secretary, but it's just a recommendation. We don't tell the secretary what to do, but we make these recommendations. And I would say the Endangered Species Committee is very receptive to what these scientific advisory groups bring forward. By the way, the scientific advisory groups are almost entirely volunteer. So this is a huge group of volunteers out there. 80, maybe I'm just coming up with a rough idea, that represents the most knowledgeable group of experts on each of these taxonomic groups that is regularly going through the species and trying to figure out, okay, this one needs more protection, this one we need more data on, et cetera. Goes to ESC. ESC, in my experience, very supportive of what the scientific advisory groups bring forward and they turn that around, like I said, usually in one meeting, that would then go to the secretary of the ANR and then the secretary then starts the process, the public and legal process, the hearings that need to take place, the paperwork that needs to take place, the legal work that needs to take place, and then once and interacting with Fisher Wildlife, I mean, it will go to her and then she'll say, okay, you guys, what do you think of it? Her staff. So that'll go back and forth. That piece of the project takes a little bit longer. In some cases, that piece of the project takes a couple years to get through all the hearings and to get through Elkar. We know Elkar. We know Elkar. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay, it has to go through. And so that last step takes a little while. But the point I'm trying to make is that there is continual review of these species and whether or not they should be listed. So this first piece here, H112, require the secretary of the ANR to revise the state list of teenage species every three years. Really, that's an ongoing process now that I think takes place more often than that. It takes place in real time, all the time. Now, whether or not, I mean, there is a standing list, and the standing list either gets added to or subtracted to, but that standing list, it's not like we would start over and want to review that thing every three years. That would be a huge job. And I will say that in my entire history of working with these people, although they can't say it, they don't have the personnel or staff to keep up with this without help. They can't do it. They, the predecessor of Roz once told me being in this job is like trying to drink out of a fire hose. There's just stuff coming at you all the time. You know, that feels too long. So what I'm saying is I think we have a good system in place here and that requiring the secretary to revise the list every three years would probably slow the job down and it doesn't seem to take into consideration the process that already exists. Further down, require the secretary to list critical habitat for each TNE species. Well, like Roz showed you, there's roughly 53 animals and 163 plants that are listed. So over 200 species. To list critical habitat for over 200 species would take an entire department, I think, rather than perhaps an entire new department to do that, to get all the information that you really need. We did start, as you know, listing critical habitat. We were very, very cautious when we did that to pick species that really needed it, but pieces of habitat that were easy enough to protect without really turning a landowner against it. We wouldn't just show up. Let's say the entire population of some plant was on somebody's piece of property, someone person's piece of property and say, hey, this is an unlisted critical habitat and there's very limited what you can do with this piece of property. So we were very cautious in the approach and picking just these islands for the terns, a bat cave, a bat hybronacular, some beaches that were in part publicly owned already by the state to protect nesting habit for the spiny soft shell species, spiny soft shell turtle. So I don't think that it would be realistic to list critical habitat for each TNE species. Would it help those species? Probably, but is it realistic to do that for all 200 and some odd species? Maybe if you picked habitat groups, grassland birds, something like that, pick a group and work by group different habitat community types and work through it that way or pick a couple species and move forward or pick public lands. What species do we have on public lands where we're not really requiring landowner permission? We required landowner permission on that critical habitat designation. They had to say upfront, this was okay. You would not be able to do that if you tried to list critical habitat for all species. Is that a question or is it? Okay. So I don't think that's realistic. You could try to spread it out over time in some way or prioritize or group in some way. But I don't think that's really doable. Prohibit the sale, offer for sale, transport or import of TNE species within the state. I would have thought that that was already covered but perhaps it isn't if it's in here. To prohibit the sale, offer for sale, transport or import of a threatened or endangered species. So you would need a permit for that. You just further record speak. You can introduce yourself. My name is Katherine Gessing and I'm general counsel for my department. You would need a permit for that simply because the definition of taking is so broad. On the other hand, I do think it's useful to list those factors out explicitly because we are seeing more and more commercial collection of certain animals. And so there's no harm in putting that explicit in with it. So my statement here is, yeah, that makes sense. It sounds good. I had nothing to guess that it sounds kind of like an extension of the Lacey Act in terms of international, I'm not international but across state boundary trade of those species. Great idea. The bill would also allow the authorized taking of TNE species only to enhance the propagation or survival of a TNE species. When we get a permit request now that comes through Fishin' While I've come through John. John. Hi, the permit fella brings it to the Endangered Species Committee. They have to check off one of the boxes as to what is the reason that they should be able to take an endangered species. And ordinarily the box that is checked is economic hardship. And so that will be somebody who wants to build a couple more dwellings on their property or somebody who wants to develop further housing in the funeral home or in the old people's home or whatever. And so economic hardship is generally what they do there. Though I will say, and I'll just point this out as kind of an aside, that one of the categories is to enhance the propagation of a threatened or endangered species. We do see that on occasion. And we did get one bill from US Fishin' While I've recently, one permit request from US Fishin' While I've, that said, that's what they were trying to do to enhance the propagation of an endangered species. And my response was, say what? This is for sea lamprey control. How are you calling this the enhancement of endangered species? And they check off that box and they said, well, because if we can control sea lamprey there'll be less predation on sturgeon. And I said, well, okay, that's true, but that's not your primary purpose for this permit request. And I would wanna be clear that really, I think what we're looking for is somebody to check off a box which is their primary reason for asking for a permit. But if you went down to only the propagation or survival of a T&E species, really the endangered species committee would have very few permits to look at. And what I mean by that is, I mean, it sounds good ideally, but I really think you would piss off a lot of landowners in one fell swoop with that one. There would be lots of people who did not have the opportunity to talk with the Endangered Species Committee about what they would like to do on their land. Cause I don't see how they could possibly say that they're trying to enhance an endangered species. So politically speaking, I would think that would be a real hard sell. You know, I would think if the development community hears about that or becomes aware of that, that you would stop yourself from your tracks with this bill. I don't see how you could get past that. That is the primary source, the primary category that shows up when permits come past us is economic hardship. Let's see. Require the secretary of ANR to adopt by rule practices that a person engaged in farming, forestry, or silviculture practices may implement to avoid or minimize the taking of a threatened endangered species or that encourage critical habitat for TNE species. The department is really trying to do that all the time. It's trying to work with people out there, farmers, foresters, whatever, to figure out how they can best manage their land and still allow the endangered species to persist there. So that sounds very, very helpful. But once again, I think it's a huge job. And to do that for all 200 plus species is unrealistic. You could group species. You could look at grassland species. You could look at vernal pool species, that kind of stuff, and come up with best management practices, which I think is essentially what we're talking about here, BMPs, best management practices. But once again, I don't think they have the people to do that. And again, they can't say that, but they would need additional people in additional funds to do that for all the threatened and endangered species to come up with best management practices and all those different habitat types. I was going to talk about some of the background information, but Roz already covered it. And I was glad she put up there, but I'll say briefly once again, primary threats to all species, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, habitat degradation. It's not the loss of an individual, it's the loss of the habitat or the degradation of the habitat. That is what we've got to get a handle on. So that was all I had to say on that bill. We're going to have to leave it there for now. Okay. Thank you. Oh, you're going to invite me back sometime? I'll invite you back and just let you know that Zoom is also a very effective way in knowing how far you have to drive to get here. So I have comments on three more bills for you. That's great. And I guess we're happily overbooked sometimes. We're a little bit like an airline. Invite people to come in and often not everyone shows up, but sometimes they all show up and your seat's taken. And so with that little bit of philosophy, I'm actually going to invite Dr. Jason Hill up because he's from out of town and the Center for Eco Studies and others on the list are more regular in our building. Welcome. Thank you, Matt, sir. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to be here. I appreciate it. I try to be the same. And my name is Dr. Jason Hill. And it's a joke that my father was Dr. Hill. Please just call my doctor. Jason would be great. But I'm a quantitative ecologist with the Vermont Center for Eco Studies, which is a nonprofit in White River Junction. I believe you heard from our Director of Conservation Science, Dr. Ryan Robozo recently. And a quantitative ecologist, someone that uses mathematical models to describe natural processes, why populations go up and down and why they're not increasing, what's limiting species from being recovered. So that's my area of mathematical expertise. I'm also a proud member of the Vermont Scientific Advisory Group for birds, the bird seg. And I'm proud resident Vermont of White River Junction. And so in my past, I've worked with a number of state and federal threatened endangered species. I worked with California sea otters out of college, which is a federally threatened species. And I worked with red-caucated woodpeckers, which is a federally endangered species. And then for a year, I worked with Hawaiian honey creepers, which are mostly federally endangered and some threatened. I have an unfortunate distinction of being one of the few people you'll ever meet that has, I witnessed, watched the species go extinct. 20 years ago, as part of a small group of people, we was asked to go into the jungles of Maui on the north side, there was an endemic species of bird that only occurs on the north side of Maui called the pauli. That species had been rapidly declining when they sent us in in 2002. There were only three known individuals left. We spent a year trying to capture at the direction of Fish and Wildlife Service, trying to capture those three remaining individuals and bring them into a captive breeding program. And we failed. We saw the three remaining birds multiple times from this distance, just couldn't get them into our net and then into the helicopter and out. And I think I was the last person to see a female pauli in the wild from just this distance without a net, unfortunately. But I know what it feels like to watch the species go extinct and to carry that feeling of being responsible for failure and how that affects all of Hawaii and everyone. I feel that as a personal and professional failure, even though I did everything I could in dedicated year of my life to that effort. I now conduct research with grassland birds and montane bird species. So those are species that have bleak future projection outlooks. So I work up in the mountains, I work in the spruce fur zone. And those are species like big Nelsrush and yellow-bellied fly catchers and black-pulled warblers are cross-bills and bro-speaks. Research and mathematical modeling by people like myself suggests that by the end of the century, none of those species will exist in Vermont. Although those species will exist only in Canada and to the North. We are expected to lose all those species and half of our spruce fur forest over the next 200 years due to the upslope movement of maple and beach forest communities. I also did my PhD work with grassland birds and for the birds I still do research with for those species that are on Vermont's T&E list. Hensel's sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, Easter metal arcs, and upland sandpipers. So I should say, I just point out maybe it's obvious, but species don't go extinct anymore because of asteroids. Yes, geologically time-speaking they do. Species go extinct or become extirpated lost from a local area because of complacency, because of slow, steady decline, not because of some catastrophic event you go out one day and they're all gone. It's from watching and accepting that decline and not intervening and creating action management at a point where there's still enough of left to them to change that directory around. So extinction happens and extirpation happens through complacency. I personally, referencing the poll early, I would say that I know that I can do better. That I can come up with better research questions, develop better mathematical models. I think everybody, including legislators, state agencies and researchers can do more to protect and preserve our Vermont's future floor and fauna for future generations. Regarding House Bill 812, I echo Jim's concern about state capacity and also point out again that members like me who are essentially volunteers for the state on the scientific advisory groups, we do a lot of that lifting for those species assessments and for the state wildlife action plans that occur every 10 years. I'm a volunteer. I mean, I already work 80, how many hours a week I work with my two kids and I do this to help out on the side, but I'm a volunteer and I really struggle to think how we would, the SEGs would fulfill that obligation meaningfully. We sure we could do a shoddy job, but I worry we've not been able to do an adequate job on a three-year idea. I would humbly suggest that a 10-year timeframe could be more appropriate because it coincides with the requirements to complete the state wildlife action plans that allow Vermont to gain access to federal monies. So the state wildlife action plans that happen every 10 years, a much of that assessment would be duplicating the TNE species updating list. So those efforts could be combined. It would be administratively and personally less taxing on the volunteers and agency biologists instead of having to duplicate those efforts that could coincide. So 2025 is the next state wildlife action plan and we're already working on that right now. So yes, reduce the human administrative costs. I also think critical habitat is definitely an underutilized tool and desperately needed for some species, other species. We don't know where that habitat should be or what are the limiting factors for those species. We don't have enough basic data. But with critical habitat designation and threatened endangered species management in general comes the need for greater transparency. Not only to serve the needs of the public but also to allow outside experts like myself to help inform the process to make that process more likely to succeed and to make that process and the outcomes become more scientifically defensible. So transparency is key in allowing and welcoming the public's input and outside experts like myself who are effectively volunteers. I have a lot of examples that I could point to that very specific, maybe two in the weeds about how management may occur and sometimes it's not directly in the best interest in my opinion of our TNA species. And probably the easiest and most concise thing I can think to point to is what is happening with Grasshopper Sparrows at Franklin County Airport. This is the most single important parcel of property in the state that houses maybe 40% of our state's entire Grasshopper Sparrow population at this single airport. And grasshopper sparrows are a state threatened species. It's possible they may be upgraded to endangered in the next assessment. But last spring V-trans without a permit began bulldozing and paving over that grassland habitat to widen their airfield runways into that Grasshopper Sparrows habitat much to the shock and demise of everyone in the conservation community in Vermont including me who spent 20 years researching Grasshopper or 15 years researching Grasshopper Sparrows. So V-trans was subsequently given a permit for their retroactive actions of destroying permanently that habitat paving it under. That caused a lot of backlash and mistrust between researchers like myself and the state. There was a lot written about it and published about it online. We're still dealing with that lack of trust and the fallout from that. To me that the lack of action and that process was allowed to happen says a lot to me as a researcher about where we collectively value TNE species compared to future economic growth and development. I have a question. I was only gonna ask that they knows. It is the most famous spot for grassland birds in the entire state and yes, yes. It is a destination for birders and biologists conduct surveys there annually. No surprise, yeah. And I should say another half of the population, maybe another 40% occurs at Camp Johnson, a National Guard training facility. So two parcels of property, maybe Harbor, 80% or more of the state's population for one threatened species. Representative, can I tell the question? Yes, if you could. You sound like you're very expertise in this field. I'm not asking you something about the cormorant population in the state. That's quite an overabundance of cormorants. How would, what's your take on possibly eliminating some of the population, is they're destroying property, they're killing all the fish, they're destroying goose and duck eggs? What's your answer to the cormorant population? I've seen that out West for endangered salmon runs. This is a big issue of controlling cormorant populations that are feeding on salmon as it comes through fish ladders where they're easy targets. When cormorants hang out on the dams, the management actions they've attempted to do in parts of Washington have fortunately backfired where it's concentrated, the cormorants encouraged them to move upwards, further up the river. I don't know that there's an easy solution there, but I am definitely not an expert on cormorants and controlling, but recognize that cormorants do exert predation pressure on shorebird nesting and in terms... Is that something that would be in your vision, your field of vision down the road if something was to happen where eradication might? Yeah, I don't know, but there may already be some eradication for cormorants as they come to turn colonies. I'm not sure, but that would be a tool. For me, as a mathematical person, I would want to crunch the numbers. How many cormorants would you need to control and is that physically possible to move the needle? Or is it just spinning your wheels and looking like you're doing something? Thank you. Yes, I'm sorry, I don't have a better answer. That's fine. I appreciate your response. At some point when it works for you, we can talk about our cormorant program. Great, I'd like to hear about it. Thank you. Just quickly, lastly, I'd like to say, so definitely transparency to allow outside experts to help drive and inform the process through free advice, but also enforcement and adherence to existing rules and regulations is an obvious first step. But additional economic tools could be useful for the state for a T&E species management as well. For example, I know right now that this is a real life example, but if a solar development firm was developing a field that had breeding grasshoppers sparrows in it, they would have to pay mitigation for taking away that breeding habitat and covering it in solar fields. But that money is not required to be spent on the management and conservation of the states dwindling and remaining grasshoppers sparrows. That money could be spent on other species of grassland birds, which is an odd situation for me. I think my personal opinion would be if an individual species is inflicted harm by development, that does money is recovered from that should go towards the management or remaining species, especially grasshoppers sparrows. We have a few dozen individuals left in the state. Mitigation happens through the PUC process. Is that correct, danger? I don't know, I'm asking. Maybe someone else in the room knows, yeah. Actually, the Abbister Act 250 entered the public utility company process, both. The dollars for habitat lost for an endangered species. Is that correct? It's happening. One is that Smith, Mr. Hill is reporting on the solar project in Danville, where there was potentially a grasshopper sparrow involved in the habitat that was going to be developed for solar energy. I know that that's entirely settled. But in any event, we hadn't, or we came up with the mitigation fee approach for dealing with the loss of grass and habitat largely due to the proliferation of solar energy development. Keep in mind, prior to the department working with partners on developing that approach, there were no protections for the loss of grassland burnesting habitat to develop within Vermont. It was only through vision of the department working with partners to come up with that process because we saw the growing threats to that habitat and those species that we came up with this process. But it's not as straightforward as dealing with some other types of habitat and how you deal with the ongoing loss of the habitat as you're dealing with most instance of agricultural activities. There's the need for active management. Say nothing has been passed, we challenge you to think of that in the talk. So in the time we were not dealing with listed threatened endangered species, most of the areas that were subjected to growth of solar energy were supporting bottlenecks and investor sparrows and other species that are not listed. We're concerned about them and that's why we decided to protect their habitat. And we're open to ideas for how to do this differently. At that time, however, the most straightforward approach was to come up with avoid and minimize first and foremost. We don't want them developing there where the birds are nesting in the first place. But when you get to the point where you're willing to allow the project and there's still an avoidable impact, we came up with this process where the developer would pay a fee to the bothering project and those funds would then be used to enhance grassland habitat in the state of Vermont to benefit grassland birds. But one possible I propose would be an economic or financial tool to potentially facilitate direct management of the species being inflicted harm upon by development would be mitigation banks. Conservation banks are successfully used in lots of other states. You may have heard of them for wetlands where they're very popular wetland development banks. That's where a development happens that removes threatened endangered species or destroys their habitat. That money can be set aside into that financial instrument and then doled out at a future time when appropriate, when there's an opportunity to directly inform conservation or management actions for that species. When you're talking about a species as critically, when there's as few as upland sandpipers or grasshopper sparrows, there might not be an opportunity every year to actually spend money in a meaningful way to enhance that species. But three or four years down the road, a parcel property might become available. Those mitigation funds could be withdrawn from the bank and then used to purchase that property or pay for the management of that property in such a way that promotes that species. So a mitigation bank would be something that is successfully used in other ecosystems and other states and would be a great, I think economic tool at the disposal of the Fish and Wildlife and ANR. That's all I have prepared. If there are times I'm most happy to answer questions or operate. That's great. I think we'll have some follow-up questions for you. The members have questions right now. Senator Stevens. Thanks, Senator. You know, I have your note transparency is key and yet I've also heard the statement that we don't want to put on maps exactly where these really critical critters are. So how are you, where's that? That's a great question. Yeah, so I'm not advocating that individual locations be exposed to the public. And what I'm advocating is for that people like me are helped and be involved in the creation of policies that protect and promote those species. Yeah, so I would happily, I would happily, so my PhD work was on Grasshopper and Hensel Speros, two listed species here and on the statistical side, it was also in sampling design, theoretical statistical analysis of populations. I'm like, I'm a terrific, knowledgeable person of both the species and the mathematics to help design appropriate survey protocols to put in place for those species. And I would happily do so. So to clarify, in terms of being brought into the policy, you mean like our state team to be able to reach out and ask you for additional volunteer time? Yes, that would probably happen through the SAG, but there are a number of other people who are not knowledgeable with those species on the SAG already. Yeah. And we are eager to do that. Does that mean legislation? I think it probably means shifting in philosophy and a value of how people like me are seen and in just cultural norms, perhaps, in our relations, probably not legislation. Thanks for coming in and for your testimony. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Want to just add something on that, Jim? Well, just specifically to that question. The record say again, who you are. Jimi Andrews. Specifically to that question, absolutely I think there's a need to keep specific locations for some of these species. Out of the public eye and that's particularly for collectibles. I went online to prepare for this and an adult wood turtle right now, I could sell for 800 bucks. And if I went out there, I could probably get five or six in a day. And if they're going for 800 bucks and those people who would collect and then sell those turtles are also knowledgeable about that particular group. And so it's really best to keep these private, specific locations for the collectible species. And that's not all species, but to keep that from going public. Spotted turtle, there's a lot of turtles in here. I mean, spotted turtle and wood turtle. And which also speaks to the level, one of these bills is increasing penalties. I mean, if I can make $5,000 in a day, a penalty of $1,000 and a one in 20 chance that I might get caught, it's not much of a deterrent. With that, we'll go with Alan Strong, who's joining us via Zoom. Welcome. Welcome. Can you hear me okay? Ken. Great. Well, thanks so much for the invitation to come and talk about Bill H-12. My name is Alan Strong. I am the current chair of the Endangered Species Committee. I also serve as the co-chair of the, or vice chair, I guess, of the Scientific Advisory Group for Birds. And I think I've been on the Endangered Species Committee maybe for six or seven years. I've been the chair for about three years now. So thanks and yeah, I appreciate your invitation to comment. I think I would start out by saying, to some extent, mirroring what John Austin and Dr. Renfrew said is that, I'm just really excited that this committee is looking at ways to strengthen protection for Vermont's threatened and endangered species. And I think there's just a lot of opportunities here to think about ways that however I can help, but ways to think that we can strengthen the protection for these species. And I probably what I'll do here is just run through some of the sections of the bill and give you some comments that I have. And then, if there's a few minutes for questions, happy to take those as well. So, section three, Jim Andrews mentioned this already with respect to limiting the transport export of threatened and endangered species within the state. It would be great to strengthen this. I think that's a really nice part of this proposed legislation. And I think as Jim mentioned, with some of the endangered turtle species, which would be the ones who would probably be most vulnerable for the pet trade, I think this would be really great in terms of being able to strengthen their protection. I was gonna come in a little bit on section four, A, which Jim mentioned about authorized takings and authorized takings only being allowed for the enhancing or Prop 8 propagation of survival of threatened and endangered species. You know, one of the things that often happens, you know, Jason Hill who you just heard from is doing some research on Eastern metal arts, which is a threatened species in the state. And one of the things he's been doing is putting transmitters on these birds to better understand their movements, where they're overwintering, and you know, what are some ways so that we might be able to improve habitat quality for these species and understand a little bit more about their life history. It doesn't necessarily fall under enhancing propagation or survival. I think it is something that definitely is important with respect to helping us to better understand their natural history so we can protect them. But it really does fall under that category of scientific research. And so just maybe thinking about some of the nuances that might come up in terms of what we would allow for an authorized take since this proposed legislation I think eliminates the research component. I'll talk maybe a little bit more about a couple sections that I think may be challenging. And you've, you know, I think you've heard from John Austin and Jim Andrews a little bit about the designation of critical habitat for every species. And I think I did pass along the form that the Endangered Species Committee uses to designate critical habitat. And the way that form was developed was actually to take into all the components that are needed to satisfy the current legislation. So we wanna check all those boxes to make sure that this critical habitat does in fact live up to the billing, that it is really something that's necessary and decisive for the survival of the species. And I think there really could be some challenges in terms of listing or designating a lot of critical habitat on private land. And so sort of thinking about being careful of that if there are issues with potentially landowners thinking their property is being taken or the loss of development rights, there could be some challenges there. One of the things that I was kind of thinking about and Dr. Renfrew mentioned the Wildlife Action Plan, there's a section in the Wildlife Action Plan which is called Habitat and Community Conservation Summaries. And in that section of the Wildlife Action Plan it actually lists all the species of greatest conservation need as well as threatened and endangered species that are found in a particular natural community. And this might actually be a way to think about sort of a different scale which we could protect habitat for endangered and threatened species in the state. And so if you have a chance to look at that and I'd be happy to send the link along, that might be a way to think maybe a broader scale where we don't have to go through species by species by species to list critical habitat but we could take those natural communities that actually support lots of endangered and threatened species and think about ways that we could protect those habitats. And it might be a more efficient way than just looking at critical habitat in and of itself. I won't say too much about the proposal to list the, to reassess the listing of threatened and endangered species every three years. I think Jason and Jim have spoken to this. But one of the things I will say is that a thing that we're missing with listing of species is recovery plans. And I think there's a lot of opportunities there to create recovery plans that go along with the listing of species. And one of the things I think is sort of slowed the process down is that we are, we tend to be writing like 40, 50 page recovery plans for every single species. And I think if we really looked at the recovery goals what we need to delist or downlist the species, kind of the resources or funding that's available and then also a timeline for recovery, an estimated timeline. I think we could really condense those plans and make them something that we could that we could actually put forward on a much more timely basis. And then obviously the idea is to get species off the list. We don't want species just hanging around on the endangered species list forever. We want to recover them. So getting those recovery plans out I think could be really helpful. Let's see, the last, I guess the last thing I'll mention had to do with section 4E, which was the secretary after consultation with secretary of ag food and markets shall develop by rule practices for a person engaged in farming forestry operations or accepted civil cultural practices that may implement to avoid minimize the taking of endangered or threatened species that encourage critical habitat. You've got the language in front of you I didn't need to read that all. I think there's some possibilities here. I mean, I think that as written if you really wanted to get into essentially best practices for avoiding or minorizing takes that could take a long time. But there's some really good information out there right now. And for grassland birds in particular rather than create a recovery plan for all the listed grassland species there's something called the Vermont grassland bird management and recovery plan. And so a lot of that information is out there in terms of best management practices for agricultural habitats that would help conserve these species and help create better habitat. But I think there's definitely some potentially unintended consequences. For example, a farmer who has eastern metal arcs on their field and would like to avoid a taking could potentially convert that grassland to corn which would basically avoid a taking but would actually destroy habitat. So I think there could be some challenges there but I like this idea and I think there's some opportunities there. Last thing I'll say is a piece that perhaps is maybe missing in terms of this overall bill is something that sort of vexes the endangered species committee. And that is the fact that we end up kind of having to have a say on a takings permit at the last minute. And a lot of this is because I think developers don't sort of jump into consultation with Vermont Fish and Wildlife early enough in the process. So the Fish and Wildlife are kind of left with a plan that's just like sort of iffy in terms of being able to provide advice from the beginning and then the Endangered Species Committee and the Scientific Advisory Groups are left with something that it's just like, if this is the best we can do, it's the best we can do with endangered and threatened plants. So many of these are transplanting them. So the development is gonna go in and we're just gonna take the plants that would have been destroyed and move them somewhere else. And I know there are better ways to do business. So I think something in here that talks about earlier consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service when there's a potential taking could be really helpful in terms of avoiding and minimizing takes of endangered and threatened species. So that was all I had to say and I appreciate your time. And if you've got a minute for questions I'd be happy to address any of them. Great, thank you for your testimony. Do members have any questions? Not seeing any, thanks for joining us and thanks for your work. Oh yeah, I'll mention real really quick. I did put a comment in the chat that somebody on the committee wanted me to read the New York Department of Environmental Conservation does oil eggs of cormorants on the four brothers islands which is the largest cormorant colony on Lake Champlain. So the oiling actually suffocates the embryo and so they have very low nest success there but populations seem to be stabilizing or slightly decreasing on the four brothers islands but it also potentially leads I think as Jason alluded to, to colonies breaking up and then using other places especially on private land. So it's an ongoing issue that New York and Vermont are working together on. Thanks for that. With that, we'll welcome Bob Galvin. Hello, Chair Sheldon and esteemed members of the committee. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to testify today. My name is Bob Galvin. I am the Vermont State Director for the Nonprofits Animal Wellness Action and the Center for Humane Economy and I live in Richmond, Vermont. I have a master's degree in biology and several years conducting wildlife research including stints conducting bird and bat mortality surveys on wind farms, assessing the effects of climate change and sea level rise on coastal communities and relevant to this discussion, researching two species that were listed on the Federal Endangered Species Act. So on behalf of the AWA and CHEs members I want to express my support for H812 and thank Representative Sackowitz for introducing this bill and thank all of the members of this committee for co-sponsoring. So in the interest of time, I will just hit some of the key points about H12 and then I will move into some thoughts about H597. The first part of H812 that I would like to mention is the requirement for the Secretary of Natural Resources to update the list every three years. There currently is not a timeframe that is statutorily required for these updates to happen. We heard from several members of the groups testifying today that the process does work. I do want to kind of highlight written testimony that was submitted to this committee yesterday. The former botanist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department stated, quote, in the past some species have languished in a legal gray area after a positive recommendation by the Endangered Species Committee for listing or delisting but lacking rulemaking by Fish and Wildlife Department, quote. So I'm not sure if there may be differences between plants being listed and the working groups associated with that. And the reptile and amphibian groups, but did just want to mention that there is some evidence that some of this work is not going as fast as folks might like. Next, I would like to talk a little bit about the critical habitat requirements of the bill. So I just want to give a little bit of background from a 2019 paper published in the Journal of Conservation, Science and Practice titled Temporal Analysis of Threats Causing Species Endangerment in the United States. The authors underscore the connection between habitat loss and species being listed on the Endangered Species Act in this paper, saying, quote, we found that habitat loss continues to be a top threat through time, causing species to require federal protection. An extensive body of research also found habitat loss or modification to be a leading threat causing species to require Endangered Species Act protection. And several analyses have documented extensive land cover conversions in the United States as well as globally. It appears current federal and state regulations are not adequate enough to prevent habitat loss, which may result in species requiring listing under the Endangered Species Act, end quote. So as mentioned by some of the previous speakers, there are very valid concerns regarding agency, staff and resources that would accomplish the goal of designated critical habitat for every listed species. I would like to say that the scale of the current ecological crises that we are facing be a climate crisis, biodiversity crisis makes it so should be considering this to a greater degree than we may otherwise have if the threats facing our wildlife and biodiversity were not so great. I thought that the recommendation by Mr. Andrews to potentially have groupings of critical habitat, that seems like a way to not overburden some of these agencies who are doing good work and are already overburdened in many other ways, but still highlighting and underscoring the importance of this critical habitat. Moving on to the authorized taking of Endangered Species section on page six and seven, I support narrowing the list of reasons that somebody can be authorized to take a threatened or endangered species. There was some conversation about economic hardship being a limiting factor and being a reason why this schematic may not work. Reading the incidental taking portion of the rules that follow the authorized taking section, it seems to me like there may be some room there for folks experiencing economic hardship to have the burden not be put so directly on them I'm not totally sure how to navigate that issue and I don't want to discount folks experiencing economic hardship to any degree whatsoever. That is to say, I do think that this is a good idea to narrow the reasons that folks can be authorized to take threatened or endangered species. The last piece of the bill as written that I would like to mention is the section on page eight on agricultural and civil cultural practices. I support the secretary of ANR working with the secretary of AG to create some sort of rules or best practices that would guide loggers and landowners and silviculturists in knowing exactly when they are or are not negatively impacting endangered species. So yeah, again, in the interest of time I will skip ahead to H597. So I would like to just bring this committee's attention back to testimony that was heard within the last week from representative Patrick Brennan on the topics of reptiles, amphibians and black bears in Bill H597. So as we heard last week, the sale of black bear gallbladders, bile and paws are a topic of concern not only for wildlife advocates but for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department as well. And they have supported language that would indeed prohibit the sale of black bear internal organs and paws from bears killed in the state. And so to give a little background as to why this is an important issue, bear bile, according to a nonprofit called Animals Asia is marketed as a cure for cancer, common cold, hangovers and lots of other ailments with little evidence that these treatments actually have any positive effects. In 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Health announced that bear bile was an acceptable palliative treatment for COVID-19. And so that announcement could have significant impacts on bears throughout the world, including in the United States to that end on July 29, 2021 in testimony submitted to the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, a senior official from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expressed for support for legislation that would prohibit the interstate or foreign commerce in black bear gallbladders and bile, noting, quote, black bear gallbladder trafficking is big business, end quote, and quote, the price for an illegal bear gallbladder can exceed $1,000 depending on the market, end quote. He added, quote, the bear species, the bear parts trade has caused rapid declines in Asian bear populations and other species such as the American bear, black bear, are now being targeted to fill that demand, end quote. It is worth noting that 34 other states from Alaska to Florida to Maine ban the trade and bear gallbladders. Only six states allow the sale of black bear gallbladders and other viscera from bears killed legally within the state and Vermont is one of those six states. If we are interested in ensuring that black bears do not eventually become a threatened or endangered species in connection with our conversations relating to 812, it is worthwhile to consider whether the black bear portion of Representative Brennan's bill might be taken and put into another bill that is being considered. There are also considerations to reptile and amphibian conservation in H597 that I think are valuable and I think we should be considering again when contemplating how to make sure that species that are currently existing on the Vermont landscape do not go the way of threatened or endangered species and their populations don't plummet as a result of all of the issues and threats facing our wildlife. For example, prohibiting the taking collection of specified reptiles and amphibians as mentioned in H597 would be one of those good provisions that would meaningfully help to protect reptiles and amphibians in the state. I also would like to second Dr. Strong's emphasis on recovery plans and I think that there may be room in this bill or in other endangered species conversations to really drill down on those recovery plans and how we can make sure that they are functioning as we need them to. We heard some evidence that some may be too long, that it may be a bit clunky of a process to timely act on when there is an urgent need to protect these species. So taking time to consider how we can figure out the best recovery plans seems very valuable and germane to this committee's work. I will stop there for now. Thank you very much for giving me the time to testify. Any questions? Thanks for your testimony. Members have questions? We have the last witness, Jamie, we probably have max 10 minutes. Do you, would you like to? Okay, great. Please join us. So good afternoon. Jamie Fidel with Vermont Natural Resources Council, General Counsel and Forest and all the program director and appreciate the opportunity to be here today to talk about, I'll talk primarily about H812812 and are focused on some other bills. And just want to start by saying that it's really great, I think for the committee to be having a discussion on this law and the status of threatened endangered species in Vermont, I appreciate Representative Sackowitz's interest in the issue. When I went to Vermont Law School a couple of decades who actually focused on biodiversity policy and the law around biodiversity conservation and wrote a white paper on how to strengthen Vermont's threatened endangered species law. And so it's just, it's personally refreshing to see this conversation happening and there have been improvements to the law since I wrote that paper. But I think it is a timely topic. And it was, one of the recommendations in that paper was to allow for the designation of critical habitat which subsequently happened when commissioner Porter helped to move that through the legislature about maybe five years ago, which is something that VNRC supported. But building off that paper, I actually interned at VNRC. And one of the first things I did when I started working at VNRC was I came to the state house and lobbied for about a doubling of the staff for the non-game and natural heritage program which was the name of Roz's program subsequently. And there was, there were some committee discussions about the fact that there were resources that were needed in the program that there was good work happening there. But we did not have adequate funding and resources for the recovery planning that was needed for species conservation efforts that certainly could benefit from some more resources. Sadly, I was a bit naive thinking that that would magically happen. So it didn't come to fruition, but I do want to say that I greatly respect the work that folks are doing in the department. VNRC has worked closely with a number of the professionals or a lot of the professionals in the department, especially when it comes to species recovery, not only the folks in the department, but these partners that are here today and others. There's a lot of really talented people putting a lot of effort into this. So with that as background, I do think that, so I am sympathetic to the idea of how do we accelerate species recovery and whether that's looking at how do we accelerate the rate of a critical habitat designation versus putting efforts into the recovery planning. It's all really important. And I really do like the idea that Mr. Austin presented of, let's take a comprehensive look under the hood at the law, because I think that there's actually a number of other provisions that would be really beneficial to examine at the same time. And so I just want to quickly list some of those that we think could be helpful. There was going to be the sort of a comprehensive look at the law and the kinds of questions that would be helpful to examine. And so, and I am sympathetic to sort of like how functionally would it work to just require automatic critical habitat designation for all species. I do think it's worth looking at how can we prioritize within that? Like has already been said, there's been some good ideas that have been presented here. Can we focus with some assemblages of species, Swedish species, grass on habitat that's been mentioned. So we could, so I think by stepping back and kind of looking at where can we prioritize or could be some good recommendations. But I would also say that as Ms. Bin mentioned, examining the recovery process and how that relates to delisting species and examining really the resources that are needed kind of going back to the original part of my work with the NRC is, and if there's capacity in this building or through other funding mechanisms to look at ways to expand the staff, then we could look at ways to have the work that's part of this bill and recovery planning and mitigation planning and other elements of species conservation. As I've already said, understanding if there are certain species or species that warrant accelerated attention for habitat designation, understanding if there are additional tools for habitat conservation. That was kind of what I was looking at in my papers. There's these some models of incentive-based programs that have actually worked in other parts of the country. It would be worth looking at, can we grab other tools that we're missing right now? Are there additional tools that would help landowners? And if they're incentive-based, then perhaps we get some good benefits if we can look at structuring it the right way. I would say it's important to look at the role of the endangered species committee I appreciated hearing Alan Strong's testimony. I think there's a lot of great work that that committee does in advising. The secretary, it's an advisory role and we have seen some examples where they've provided input and the secretary has not agreed with the Endangered Species Committee and how to rectify what the role is of the committee as stated strictly advisory. I think we could look at how the agency responds to the Endangered Species Committee's input if they do disagree with the committee, maybe building a stronger record of why so we can really understand why maybe the scientific input from the committee is not. And if the agency has its own expertise that they just simply disagree, then I think it could be helpful just to outline what that process looks like a little bit more. And I would say that the example of Franklin County Airport has already been brought up. I think that was an example where there were a lot of disagreements. I wouldn't say necessarily from what we saw is how the agency was trying to protect the habitat but certainly displaying that VTrans went ahead with that work not securing the necessary permit up front. And I would say that because of the funding pressures that went along with that project that the permit was issued very expeditiously. And what we saw through that process was a couple of things that were concerning to us where for example, the Grassland Restoration and Management Plan and the long-term Grassland Habitat Mitigation Strategy were developed subsequently to the permit being issued. And so some of them happening many days after the permits issued. So for us, part of the complication and if that happens and I think that more than anomaly, I don't think that's the basic practice of how the permitting works. But if it does, it means the public like a group like ours doesn't get the comment on those mitigation plans. And it means the permit's been issued. And so if those plans aren't being executed very well, then it has to become an enforcement issue. In our minds, there could be some work to improve the process that's outlined in the law itself to say the permit is approved when those plans are developed and developed adequately with the satisfaction of the agency and then the permit should be issued. I think kind of doing this subsequently. And if there are issues with that, I would obviously want to know if there's more flexibility that's needed. I would want to know why, but I just think that was a troubling sequence. And so I think if there's an opportunity to look under the hood at the law, those were actually some comments that we raised to the department before this bill was introduced in the fall. And we had actually asked to have a productive kind of dialogue with the department, see if there are ways to actually improve the law. So I really do support efforts if there's a way to kind of sync some of those ideas with the broader ideas that are here with what other folks have put on the table today that it really does make sense that this is an opportunity to look at what provisions in this bill could move now, what are more appropriate to step back and look at more comprehensively to have maybe a set of comprehensive recommendations come back to the committee for future work next year and allow for some important discussions to happen about looking comprehensively at sort of the whole list of ideas that could be tackled through an update to the law. And so with that, I know we're short on time and I could follow up in writing with if you want to know what provisions we think support at the moment versus those that would benefit from a broader conversation, I'd be happy to do that, but I'll just, I guess I'll pause there, I'll be short on time. We definitely welcome your and other folks here who've joined us in this conversations, written testimony and suggestions on the bills that we're talking about. In particular, I think we'll look for guidance from the department on pieces they think feeling comfortable moving and then everyone, everyone else's comments are very welcome and then what might go into the further study category be really helpful. And although today was compressed, if we're able to do something with this bill we will have more time to hear from all of you again and others on this topic. Thank you all. It's clear that you're passionate and giving a lot to the state of Vermont. So thank you for your work in all of your different capacities on this topic and for joining us today. We're adjourned for the afternoon.