 Thank you. Good afternoon. It is January 22nd and this is the Vermont Legislature's House Committee on Natural Resources, Fish and Wildlife. And this morning we were talking with the Department of Fish and Wildlife on issues concerning wildlife and this afternoon we have a number of representatives from different organizations who were both with the department and on their own on wildlife issues and so I want to welcome them here and I am pulling up the agenda myself right now. So, if the folks who are here, if anyone, does anyone have a reason that they can't stay out for the whole meeting, because we don't have to go in the order on the list but we can. We're not seeing anyone indicating a need to leave so we will welcome Kent McFarland from the Vermont Center for Eco Studies as our first witness welcome Mr. McFarland. And Chair, thank you for inviting me it's great to be here talking about wildlife monitoring that we're doing at the Vermont Center for Eco Studies where I work. Just a little bit about myself I've been studying wildlife in Vermont and beyond for, oh gosh almost 30 years now, and I've been a member of the State Advisory Group for invertebrates to the Endangered Species Committee since 2003. I've been chairing that for over a decade now. I was involved in both the 2005 and 2015 Vermont Wildlife Action Plans that the state put together with other organizations, and I was given special recognition for my work with Endangered Species Conservation by the Endangered Species Committee in 2016 so I'm a natural someone outdoor person, a conservationist who like a lot of you I love every moment I spend outside experiencing Vermont outdoors and in Vermont's natural heritage I just it's a treasure so it's I'm pleased to be here to speak about it. Today I'm going to go give you a quick overview of some of the work we do and I'm going to share my screen here. Today I'm going to give you just a quick overview of some of the work we have done and are doing at the Vermont Center for Eco Studies, and it's often in partnership with a lot of other NGOs in the state out of state. We do a lot of work with Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. We're partners in many projects, and also other federal and state agencies and of course, we have thousands of volunteers that help us with our projects, because we believe that to do sound science we need informed people to help get people to help guide and inspire conservation of wildlife and so our model is really uniting volunteers and science to get the work done. And we feel like it really succeeds because conservation is a lot more just about ecology it's also about people so having people that are really interested in helping discover the science and understand the conservation we feel like we just get a lot more done and more bang for our buck. Our wildlife work is centered in Vermont but you know and it takes place from mountaintops forests and fields. But then we also follow our migrating wildlife down to the Caribbean and sometimes as far as Argentina. And I wanted to just start by talking about two places that seem kind of worlds apart. One technical difficulty can you still hear me. We can still hear you. Yes, sorry. Sometimes you're the computer decides to take your headphones and grab it somewhere else. Thank you. So to sort of wildly different places and one of them really isn't even in Vermont anymore. So our kind of worlds apart are salt marshes and mountaintops we've got mountaintops we don't have salt marshes but they have a lot in common. They're both kind of small isolated patches of habitat on sort of our big New England landscape, and they're both really being squeezed by climate change. And they both have these impediments to being able to survive climate change salt marshes. They're not getting any higher very quickly, and they're stuck between the ocean and a lot of residential and transportation infrastructure so they can't migrate when the ocean rises. And while our mountains and across the Appalachians they're not exactly getting any higher very quickly so they're susceptible to climate change and warming trends just going upward in elevation. Through some advanced modeling one of our biologists Jason Hill and some of his colleagues they made a prediction that salt marsh sparrows would be extinct in the next 40 years these are little songbirds you see in that picture there that nest in the salt marshes on the ground. And they estimated the sea level and mean tides are going to get high enough over the next 40 years to make successful nesting impossible the nest will just get flooded out. And similarly if we skip over to sort of our neck of the woods in the mountain tops. Distribution models predict that many of our montane breeding birds, they're going to be extirpated from Vermont and probably all of New England, as probably by the end of the century as they move northward and upward in elevation. The mountains in the world they're moving on average twice. They're moving on average twice as fast as the world average and globally, we're seeing distribution of species that have shifted in the higher elevations recently, 11 meters higher per decade in elevation in the mountains, and they're also shifting the higher loud to is going further north about 17 kilometers a decade so things are moving and they're moving pretty quickly already from climate change. The bottom line is this, for anything we talk about today. We have to understand that climate change is going to drive and is driving the distribution abundance patterns of wildlife populations in New England and beyond right now and well into the next century so anything we talk about, whether it's land use change, whether it's invasive species, overarching all that we have to really take into consideration the current and upcoming climate change it's going to be happening. So if you look at what we're finding in the mountains here closer to home here in New England in Vermont. We have a report we put out every year called the state of mountain birds and it's based off of a project we call mountain birdwatch and mountain birdwatch is a project where we have volunteers that visit every year their expert birdwatchers they visit every year in June, these mountain top survey routes and count birds and we've done this for more than almost 20 years now actually. So we have all this data, all this collected by volunteers and our bio just scattered across the green mountains and all the northeast and you can go and look at it more detail but I'm just going to give you some quick synopsis of it one of them. One bird you'll hear all the time if you're up in a place like Mount Mansfield or any of the high elevation peaks is this little tiny warbler called the black pole warbler. This we're able to calculate what elevation has the highest abundance of warblers. It's important to understand that many of these species like the black pole have a strong relationship with elevation and vegetation this one, this black pole nest in our fur forest up around up above 3000 feet. So our analysis of our mountain birdwatch data finds that black pole warblers as an example, their entire breeding population and the last decade to 15 years has shifted up slope 30 to 80 meters already across New England so they're already moving higher and higher in the mountains from climate change and eventually they're going to run out of habitat, and they're going to have to shift northward. The other alarming thing is is that the population trajectories that we find over the last decade for high elevation birds is pretty negative so here's here are seven out of the 10 mountain birdwatch species that we monitor over the last decade you can see that all of them have declined. Our state bird the hermit thrush has declined the most. It's a wild thrush which is some of you may have heard of it's a conservation concern throughout the world, and we have all have about 10% of the population here in Vermont. It is also declined less by only by about 1.1 1.2% but still declining. On average, these birds are declining by 5% a year and I sort of like to equate it to, you know 5% doesn't sound like that much a year but if your retirement account was declining by 5% every year you would be not pleased. It adds up really quickly. So 5% a year decline. Like a lot of these species that we're going to talk about, not everyone is declining but seven out of 10 is alarming. Black cap chickadees, a habitat generalist they're actually increasing, increasing drastically in the high elevations. They've moved up slope anywhere from 10 to 100 meters over the last decade so they're rapidly colonizing higher elevations in the mountains. They're becoming much, much more numerous in these high elevation forests where they're virtually absent just a decade ago. And then two other species that we monitor, boreal chickadees and fox sparrows, they basically showed no decline or no increase. They're just steady as they go. So out of these 10 species, seven of them, serious decline, one of them a large increase and two of them, you know, they're doing alright. But it's pretty alarming when you have 70% of the species in our high elevation forests are showing such a decline. We just can't have that keep continuing and have these anywhere near us. Now if we take our trip down the mountain in little ways, we have another program called the Vermont Forest Word Monitoring Program. And that's been going on for a long time. And what's interesting about this program is you see the dots scattered all over the map. These are surveys that are also done by expert volunteers as well as other scientists. And they're done during the breeding season in forests that are insizable forests that are actually mostly unmanaged. So they're not harvested for timber. They don't have any roads in them. They're really large tracks that are relatively unmanaged. And we use this to sort of compare that to other sites that Alan Strong will be talking about later today. Other sites with a breeding bird survey that uses roadside monitoring. So this is sort of looking at what happens if we don't mess with the forest, how the birds doing there. So some of a check on these roadside surveys. And we're, we're surveying birds that, you know, a lot of you here and we'll recognize scarlet beautiful birds that migrate here from the south scarlet tanagers black through blue warblers black burning worlders. I mean, stuff that they're just gems in our forest. So, in 2013, we started analyzing our first 25 years of data for this project and came out with the status of forest birds, looking at sort of how the population trajectories were going with these and we're right now updating those. But if you look at this and I don't expect you to digest this right away but you'll notice there's a lot of reds, a lot of blues, a lot of blacks, reds mean the birds are declining blues mean the birds are increasing and black means there's really no trend right now. And you'll just notice that there's a big mix amongst all those songbirds in the forest, some are doing poorly 13 species are definitely decreasing. Eight species are increasing and 13 species. Yeah, they look like they're doing fine over the last 25 years there's there's no trend. You always find except in the mountain forest where we're seeing a lot of changes usually find stuff like this a mixed bag where there's winners and losers. And that's when we have to dig a little bit deeper into the data with this kind of thing. And I'll just show you one example that in the next slide, which is what we call aerial insectivores these are birds that feed on insects as they fly through the sky. So they're things that you might recognize like tree swallows and be in your backyard and some of your nest boxes for example, could be your Eastern Phoebe or wood P weaves that you hear things that wholly rely on aerial insects they they Sally out and grab these insects out of the air. These things, not only in Vermont that actually region wide and it turns out throughout most of North America aerial insectivores are drastically declining. The 25 year trend was a decline of almost 45% decline in these species. And you know the first question is what the heck's going on here why is it like that and no one knows for sure but at the same time that we're seeing this trend with these birds that feed on insects. We're also finding out that there's been a lot of places in the world and including in with some species in Vermont there's been a serious decline in insect populations worldwide. So people are calling it an insect arm again that you know many populations of insects as far as in Puerto Rico and Germany and the United States all over the world there's just more and more evidence that certain groups of insects are declining rapidly. You know if it was just black flies I wouldn't be so sad but these are things that are that really are the feed that are bread basket of songbirds and other things. So let's move it lower down. One of the projects where we've worked with with the Fish and Wildlife Department for years on this is our Vermont loon conservation project it's a great partnership between the two organizations. And back in the 80s of many of you might remember loons were honestly we thought they were going to be extirpated from Vermont there was there was only seven nesting pairs in 1983. So it is endangered in 1987 and the department and us and others immediately went, went together and making a management plan, a recovery plan. We executed that plan together and you can see the results. It was delisted in 2005 because we reached the plan's goals and we went well beyond them. So we've recovered Vermont, Vermont's loons you can go to lakes in the summer and hear the haunting call loons. There, there's healthy populations throughout Vermont now. They're even starting to colonize places that we wouldn't imagine they would colonize where there might be a little bit too much boat traffic mainly because again with joint effort, we manage the population really well with signage with education with work with lake organizations. It's really just been a success story and it just shows us that if we put our mind to it and a little bit of money to it, we can do really great conservation and loons are really fine example of that. We've recovered species law worked and we recovered the species and I think we can do a lot more of that too in the future, especially using volunteers as you see here putting signs out volunteers are a great resource to help with this. Another way we track loons is our annual loon watch day. That's the third Saturday of every July where we get as many volunteers as we can to adopt a lake that day and go out and count how many adults and how many baby loons are on the lake. And just like our nesting success, you can see that our loon count that's gone goes back to 1983. We've had the same success counting loons adult loons are going up really nicely. The sub adults have been bouncing around those are the adults that aren't that from the, those are adults from young from previous year that aren't quite nesting yet. And the loon chicks are slowly rising up to the number we count so it's a great way for us to cover very cheaply the entire state of Vermont in one day to get a quick count of how loons are doing. It's a great way for everyone to to get out and enjoy loons so next year 17th of July so sign up for a lake and get out there and help us count some loons it's really fun. Another example getting a little bit lower down these are sort of in brush lands many you might remember when you were younger living in Vermont or even elsewhere nearby whipper wills we used to hear them really regularly that beautiful night with a window open out in the edge of the field somewhere in the brush lands calling East they used to be really quite common in Vermont, and frankly all over New England. And their populations have crashed they've really really crashed and so much so that they're listed as threatened in 2011 in Vermont. So we kind of teamed up with, like, once again with the with the department to go out and find the hotspots where whipper wills are left so the map is showing us. We're over the last five years or so where with volunteers and our biologists like Sarah carline below, going out in the nighttime and doing broadcast surveys and finding out where are the whipper wills left now and once we find these hotspots. We go out and start to do some management and start to do some education and keep these hotspots viable and then maybe start to spread the population back out a little bit more in Vermont. Why did they decline so rapidly. Again, the biggest hypothesis right now is insects again, these things feed on really large moths and moth populations, it is feared, actually is known at these medium to large size moths their populations have really declined over the last 25 to 30 years. For a couple of reasons. And just to note, it is fun serving whipper wills but those little dots around our head. Yeah, those are all mosquitoes so it's not without peril when you're out there doing these surveys. And finally moving down to Valley Bottoms. I'm sure Alan this afternoon will talk he's not a lot of grassland work work we do some grassland work, but we resurveyed a whole bunch of points throughout New England. A few years ago that were done in the late 1990s. These are all at airports, huge farm fields right away areas anywhere that's a that's a type some type of grassland was surveyed during this period. Unfortunately in that period 1990s compared to 2014 2015 eight of the nine species were detected at an average of 41% fewer sites, including up in sandpiper it was found at only 4% of the sites where they were previously found. And eastern metal arc which is probably going to be listed soon in Vermont has threatened its site occupancy across New England declined by 76% bobbling so there's fewer bobbling so you might have those in your field so grassland birds are really taking it on the chin for a variety of reasons. So one one project that we have that sort of looks at birds across the entire landscape is, it's really turned out to be an amazing project it's called Vermont e bird. And it is a crowdsource project that takes birdwatchers data, collects it all at one spot, and allows it to be used for science. So while people are out enjoying birdwatching they're actually helping us monitor birds it's a win win. We've done this since 2003 now, we've had over 11,000 birdwatchers put data in here, we have millions and millions of bird records in here it's probably the largest database of biodiversity ever collected in Vermont for for a group of species. We've had even 2020 was a record year because with with COVID times everyone wanted to be outdoors, kind of alone so birdwatching was a great thing to do this summer. We had almost 3000 Vermont e birders contribute over 100,000 checklist of birds across the state so a rich data source that we get from birdwatchers, we're able to now teaming up with the Cornell Laboratory of ornithology we're able to now start to get trends across the entire North America, including Vermont so here's two examples of trend estimates between 2007 and 2016, you'd see wood thrushes which you hear singing in your woodlots and, and like interior for us, wood thrushes all over Vermont in fact the entire Northeast have declined in every block. Versus something like Eastern Phoebe's which you'll hear in your backyard sometimes there's they're actually doing really well in, in Northern New England, they're increasing versus in the center of their populations further south they're actually decreasing so they're actually getting more Eastern Phoebe's and doing better here in Vermont now so this is a great project because we're able to track lots of bird species with less money and great effort from birdwatchers. Well, I want to skip that that's actually part of the Vermont Atlas of life and I want to skip for the last 10 minutes or so here up and talk a little bit about our huge project of a mouse life. I want to ask people how many wild species they think Vermont calls home and you get crazy guesses you can get guesses like someone will say that there's probably 5000 different species that live in Vermont to some people will guess higher. And the truth is that we actually don't know how many wild species called Vermont home which to me and today's age seems pretty shocking that we don't have a list of even what lives in Vermont yet. In 2004 at an invertebrate state advisory group meeting I asked Dr Ross Bell who he was probably one of the greatest entomologists ever work in Vermont he was a professor at UVM long standing member of the invertebrate state advisory group, just an amazing resource but I asked him, just how many invertebrate species around here in Vermont which we were responsible for on the committee. And for each group he sort of he literally took an envelope out of his pocket started scribbling tallies for each group of invertebrates on like I think there's 100 of these 500 of these kind of Beatles and he's probably the only human that could have done that and after about 10 minutes. And he said, we have 21,400 invertebrate species in Vermont that were responsible for advising on. And then he had this kind of dramatic pause and he said, you know, but who the hell really knows. And that really stuck with me at that point because here I was on this committee, and we didn't even know what species existed, let alone how they were doing so for monitors like Ross and Joyce Bell who spent decades collecting insects in Vermont and others. And we helped this tradition of documenting biodiversity here and with our help at VC and others with the department and others, and great biologists, like Jim Andrews and others that are on this call. You know we've completed major statewide atlases of birds which Alan Strong's going to talk about later this afternoon, butterfly atlases we did a bumblebee atlas Jim's going to sure talk about reptiles and tibians which he works on and we help with that. And these great efforts and they're worthy efforts but they're a fraction of the state's natural heritage. We know there's 389 bird species or 58 mammals that we once had we've got 1585 native plants, vascular plants we've got like 400 mosses, etc etc we've got something like maybe 22,000 invertebrates let's say. So how many species we have in Vermont, you know the guess is something like 39,900 species is what I put it out right now but again I'm going to echo what what Dr bell said we really still do not know how many species live in Vermont, and you think that would only happen in a place like Panama or somewhere like that. So, for many of these groups, not only do we not know what's here but we don't have a reliable assessment of their distribution or, of course, not even a close reliable assessment of their population trends. And so I focused on birds at first because we're really good with birds and we need to keep staying that way but there's a lot of other groups that we just have very little data about what's going on with them. So, one of our keystone efforts for understanding what lives here or has lived here and where they are, and what their conservation status is and how maybe their population is going to do is one of our projects is to mobilize primary bird primary biodiversity data so this is like, these are the document species occurrences in time and space so it's that someone reported you know a ruby throated hummingbird at their bird feeder at this certain day at this certain time at this certain location. That's actually really important data and you add up millions and millions of those records and it gets to be much more important. These data are the foundation of conservation biology ecology, and really it's, they help us understand our place here in Vermont and beyond. They help us tell our stories. So we've launched this ambitious project that allows anyone to help gather and explore vast amounts of data on biodiversity across the Green Mountain State, which we call the Vermont's life. It's a library of knowledge of Vermont's animals plants fungi, maybe one day even micro organisms but who knows. It's online. It's a real time resource, there's maps there's photographs and there's data open for everyone all of us to use scientists naturalist citizens anyone. It's a place where past present and future biodiversity data is going to be stored and is stored and used and it'll be there forever to be used in a, in a way that can be used together. And you can see, we started it we already have 5.2 million biodiversity records from Vermont in here, covering over 10,400 species so we're well on our way. And we have this thing we call the Vermont Atlas of Life data Explorer that we just list least released and beta form. And the data Explorer actually is. It's the newest implementation of what's called the living Atlas platform it's powerful software that Australia developed. Now it's being implemented by countries around the globe via an open community and network of living atlases. And now the Vermont Atlas of Life is part of that we're part of that it's free. Thanks to Australia, and it's amazingly powerful. The Explorer it offers everyone totally free of use of course it's a way to explore right now these 5.2 million records of plants and animals. But it also accesses an ever growing statewide biodiversity database I mean we're just, we're including millions of new records every year now. It's a collaborative open digital platform that we hope will come from multiple sources, making accessible and reusable to everyone. It allows for data downloads on land online mapping analytical tools, data collection and aggregation it's really, we're really hoping it's going to be the place for us to really start to understand our biodiversity. And as we start to profoundly alter sort of the map of life locally in Vermont we already are, and especially on global scales, you know, we need this knowledge we need all this kind of knowledge so we can do proper management understand what's going on, who's doing well and who's not doing well in our biodiversity world. And over the next year, we'll be adding easy use biodiversity data dashboards or like the COVID dashboards you've seen so we can just instantly go in and check how we're doing with biodiversity live off the data that's being imported. And we'll be working on a state of the Vermont biodiversity report just to allow us to see what we know now and where we need to go in the future for more knowledge and so we can conserve and manage these. The other thing that this project does is it allows everyone to submit observations scientists submit observations a certain way but it also allows everyone anyone from grade school kids to retired people to submit data while they're out hiking while they're a birdwatching. I mentioned Vermont e bird that's one of them but the other big project is I naturalist that has a free app smartphone app on a robust website where we collect data from common species to super rare species from Vermonters of all walks of life and allows everyone to help us understand biodiversity. I'll tell you a quick little story about I naturalist and how it works Dale Furland as a was was fly fishing on the Black River one day, and he's not a dragonfly expert at all he's just a guy that likes to be in the outdoors and he saw this beautiful dragonfly on that rock. He took a picture of it, and it ended up in our project I naturalist and he said dragonfly I don't know what it is. Well Brian Pfeiffer who's on the endangered species committee and on our side committee, and he's a dragonfly expert. He's always on I naturalist looking at dragonflies he immediately saw that dragonfly and said that is a super rare first state record tiger spiked tail never been seen in Vermont before. Where have you seen it and he looked and he talks to Dale and Dale shows him on a map where I saw it well Brian knows that this species is a really interesting one and that unusually it likes woodland seeps. Fitting the Vermont it's a species that breeds and seeps under the canopy of hardwood forest so he takes a few people down to Springfield gets landowner permission finds this thing breeding and three different watersheds in Springfield. This species easy to conserve just be a little careful when we're harvesting around the seats which we already do when we're doing good while. And we had no idea was here and it's one of the top conservation concern species in the entire Northeast. So all of this because a citizen was enjoying wildlife and posted on I naturalist so having people out there doing this kind of stuff is really really great. We also have a lot of other projects on our Atlas. I just threw a smathering up here we've done butterfly Alice's. We're on a moth Alice we just digitized 50 years of cricket grass operated data that Dr. Bell had in his files so that we can now help figure out which ones are of conservation concern. You know who doesn't want to have cricket singing in August I certainly want to have that. We've done bumblebee Alice's I'm just going to quickly touch on a few of these again and all these are with citizen science help the bumblebee Alice we did really started because there was worldwide cry about bumblebee decline and so we went and looked at you can see that historic map. Most of the dots on that historic map are from collections in the UVM natural history collection. And just a quick word about that that collections at UVM are an absolute treasure and should never be lost and unfortunately, I got a report that over the years for decades. Either the upper administration of UVM is either ignore the collections at best, or have actually been detrimental to them by moving them into different buildings or not giving them any, any money to keep the collections safe. And so we really need the pressure. UVM to start doing a better job with these plant and animal collections that are a treasure trove of understanding, historically, what has happened like with bumblebees and in the future with collections and we can do much more than just look at these. These, these samples and dead insects, there's DNA samples that we can take into these things and use for science with bees you can even scrape them and find out what flowers they were visiting 100 years ago compared to now and understand how that's changed. There's just a treasure trove in that collection and just really needs to be taken care of a lot better. There's a lot there's there's a lot of professors and students doing that but they really need more support from higher up. Like I said, we went into collections and identified every single bubble be that was collected over the last 100 years and got thousands of bubble bees into a database. We went out and did the same kind of surveys across the entire state and unfortunately what we found is that half of the bubble bee species had drastically declined and four or five of them had literally disappeared from Vermont that used to be really common. And around the state. And that's led to three of them being listed in the state one of them federally, and another one is up for listing right now will likely be listed this summer. Also, and so these are the workhorses of pollination for us for blueberries for apples for all kinds of things and we have had seen a massive decline in these. And thanks to digitizing old data and going out and researching now we know what has happened and we got to do something about it. We did the same thing with butterflies, which enabled us to figure out which ones were of greatest conservation need for the department. And all this kind of work allows us to give state ranks to these with the department, figure out which ones need to be listed or not and have action plans for them. And of course we, we help develop wildlife action plans with this kind of data so just from wildlife out missing to action plans. It's really great to have that data to be able to make the right decisions the right choices about these things. And right now we're working on more work on a wild bee survey right now. Believe it or not, we didn't really know how many wild bees even exist in Vermont. If you ask how many people how many species are they think you know one. We're up to 301 wild bee species in the state, and they're probably 350. And these are all pollinators. We've discovered 37 new species in the last year. And 18 of those are introduced non native bees, some of which we had no idea we're here. And in other states, they are actually competing with some of the Mason bees that are very important for pollinating apple trees for example so you know we're we're discovering some of these introduced species we might have to take care of to and lady beetles who doesn't love lady beetles the same thing we digitized old data from the UVM collection. So a third of the lady beetle species not including the introduced one you find in your house that everyone hates the native ones a third of the native of species have disappeared over the last 35 to 40 years in Vermont. Some of these are now protected in New York, one is federally listed in Canada. And they found some recent populations of some of these missing lady beetles in New York and they're starting to reintroduce them and we hope that our also will be able to take action like that also. We're not just talking about Vermont we also share all our data to the whole world through what's called the global biodiversity information facility. We can't live here in a bubble. We're affected by things far away to as some of our work at VC I'll end here shows. We've tracked little black pole warblers from the top about Mansfield to the mountains of Venezuela where they winter. Using tiny little transmitters, we've tagged monarchs and track them from Vermont the whole way down to the mountains of Mexico. We've tracked up in sandpipers down to the shores of the rivers and the Amazon. We've even tracked migratory dragon flies from Vermont the whole way down into the Caribbean. So we don't live in a little bubble here in Vermont we can take care of Vermont as well as well as we're doing and even better. But to do that really well, we're going to have to go outside of our borders and we've done that in VC and I know the department does that too. We need to work with other states we need to work with other countries so we've worked on plans for big now stretch for example with seven different countries. We came up with an action action plan for conservation, same with bobble links we've worked with bobble links and track them through Venezuela the whole way to Argentina. And we made an action plan with all those countries on how we might start to conserve bobble links so I'll just end it there is saying that you know it's. I love Vermont, we do a really considerably good job here with conservation so far and we could do better in some areas. But we can't stop here Vermont we have to also think about about the world we belong to and our connections to all these other places via migration of some of our treasured wildlife. With that I thank you and I'll take any questions if I have time. Thank you. You know what I think we might have to hold on questions because we did add a witness to this afternoon's agenda. So we have three more witnesses to hear this afternoon and we have a new tradition of taking a five minute break about every 45 minutes or hours so I think we're going to hold questions. Hopefully you can stay with us Mr McFarland and we will resume in five minutes with Jim Andrews. Thanks. Sounds great thank you. So whenever you are ready Jim we are ready to hear from you. All right, great. I think I was put to shame by by Kent in that I didn't put any visuals together for you. I did send you my notes and I hope you get an opportunity to look at those notes or if I don't cover something in the notes feel free to get in touch with me. Hopefully or perhaps at the end of my presentation. So, my background really started in Millbrae College as a graduate student and then I continued there as a as a research scientist and then research scholar and then I moved my office home in 2008 so I've been working largely independently at Millbrae. But at about that same time or actually a little bit before then I started teaching at UEM. And I taught her pathology there until just last year 2019. Actually I felt a little fortunate that I happened to end just at the time when we had to start teaching remotely because boy it would be no fun to teach field courses remotely. I've been chair of the Reptile Infibian Scientific Advisory Group, which feels like forever for 27 years. So I'm one of the three senior members that's been involved with the Endangered Species Committee and the Scientific Advisor groups and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. And I've been coordinator of the Vermont Reptile Infibian Atlas since 1994. I started kind of in the same position that Kent said he's in now and that we didn't have a complete species list back in 1994. We couldn't tell you exactly the species that we had in Vermont and even now there's a couple additional species that we may soon call Vermont fauna because we are finding a few of a couple new species. So we're sitting at about 40 species as opposed to the, you know, out of the total 39,000 that Kent stuck at about the relatively few reptiles and amphibians. But we started this reptile amphibian Atlas project much like some of the projects that VCE has done. In that we tried to get everybody involved that was interested in getting out and taking photos of what they have seen under their wood pile in their backyard while driving the roads and send us pictures and give us an idea of what species we had in Vermont and some data on which we could base the conservation needs and status of those species. And so since 1994 we've collected over over 100,000 records of reptiles and amphibians around the state and we're starting to get a much better picture of their distribution and abundance and and some of the threats that they face. I want to, if you're following my notes, I'm going to skip down a little bit and talk specifically about some of our reptiles amphibians we have reptiles amphibians are turtles in case you're, you know, it's been a while since you've been in junior high or high school is turtles, snakes, one lizard, salamanders and frogs. We have some unique traits that make them particularly susceptible in one in that they can't fly, you know, they have to move along the ground surface. And so we have created barriers for their movement in roads and curbs and wells and things like this that make it difficult for them to move around across large parking lots or large areas of impermeable surfaces or drop inlets on roads that that these creatures fall down into and then, and they get stuck in there and die so there's, there's all kinds of additional threats to these species that you would not see in some of the other species that are faster and more mobile and that can fly and can travel around the landscape they also almost all of them require multiple habitats to travel between in a period of a year so let's say a spot is salamander is overwintering in the hardwoods up in your maple stand and then they come out of the ground in the spring and they have to move to a breeding pool. Then after the breeding pool where they lay their eggs, the young animals have to go through their larval stage and then emerge and then go back up into the woods and feed and then find a place to overwinter so they have to move across the landscape. In order to survive they need a mosaic of of interconnected wetlands, and they need to move safely between them. They also have permeable skin, so that anything amphibians I should say, have permeable skin, not the reptiles. Anything that gets in the water can go through their skin and end up in their blood. It's so that they're not as waterproof as we are, or or a reptile or a mammal. And so the toxins can get in them. They don't have to eat them, they can get right through their skin. So they make excellent environmental indicators and we've often used them as such. Like most species, the largest threats are habitat loss. As you may know, some of the figures that you might have heard. We lose. Well, if you look at the period between 1997 and 2007. We developed 75 square miles of Vermont that we built on built houses on build roads on build parking lots on. And even the more conservative now that was back some years ago, even the more conservative habitat estimations for loss now for significant wild habitat. And put us at maybe, let's say, 23 square miles per decade of significant wildlife habitat that we lose about 1500 acres per year and, and about let's say 35% of our wetlands since European settlement and 2 to 400 acres of wetlands every year. And actually, when you think about Vermont being a finite area, and if we consume that amount of the wildlife habitat each year, then clearly we're going to lose populations until we deal with this loss of habitat. It's not just loss of habitat, but it's also fragmentation of habitat where we, where let's say the spotted salamander needs to get from its wintering habitat to its breeding habitat but has to has to cross 22 a or root seven or root 100 in order to do that. Now with with a bobcat or a deer they could get across that road relatively quickly even though clearly some get hit, but the data show that where we have what once the traffic density reaches a certain point populations near roads disappear because they can no longer produce as many young as are killed trying to get across those roads. So habitat fragmentation is probably the second most common problem habitat loss fragmentation and lastly I would put in the category degradation. Okay, so we would include many of the toxins that we're putting into the environment. Climate change introduces the introduction of new predators, the introduction of new diseases that we didn't have. Those three threats are the primary threats though I will mention a couple others. As we go through some of the species. For example, collection on a few of these species are collected even though it's illegal to collect them there's a price on them. And so there's a black market for collection and sale and our game ordinance have arrested some people multiple times. That were not bright enough to realize they shouldn't try to sell stuff online. But they get good money for and some of these people can do quite a bit of damage and then I have a group of course my snakes that are not always well liked by the people that only landed in living the houses next door and so persecution direct persecution is is an issue where people just kill species or run over snapping turtles. So, out of the 40 species of reptiles amphibians that that we're using as our baseline number, 19 of them or 48% are considered medium or high priority species of conservation need and I assume most of you guys have heard that technology species of conservation need it's a, it's a, it's a conservation threat listing that all it was an exercise that all the states had to do in order to try to get prioritized federal funds coming into the state. We have a 48% I mean that's a really high really to me a scary percentage that that we're concerned about eight of those are 20% of our species are listed as threatened or endangered in Vermont. The, the boreal chorus rod, which I know most of you would not even have had the opportunity to ever see it was only found in Northwestern Vermont Grand Isle and Franklin County, and we were on the edge of its range it's being more northerly and but that species just plain disappeared and we haven't seen that species since 1999 the last one to see that was fishing wildlife biologist Mark Ferguson back then. So we assume that species is gone and sadly, we don't know why that species disappeared which which bothers me I really would, would like to at least have an idea of what happened to that species but we, we don't. The Canadians, who also lost the species are, are starting a reintroduction program and we've been talking with them and, and, and we may be able to cooperate with them but a sad situation for the for the boreal course frog is an inracer, which is not the snake that most of us that grew up in Vermont are familiar with this is a big snake I mean we're used to two foot snakes or two and a half foot snakes and this one gets up to about six feet. It's fast. It's nervous. But we haven't seen a racer in Vermont since 2014. Now here's another one this is edge of range in that it was Wyndham County, most of Wyndham County that had this species and in recent years it's been Guilford and Vernon. I assume that we still have some of these guys in that one population that one at risk population that we have down there. And what one of the threats for racers is is that being a big a big snake in an active snake. They cover a lot of territory. And so they may travel in a period of a week or two. Let's say two or three miles. Trying to find a block of appropriate habitat that's two or three miles long that they can safely traverse. Now in this particular case they're right along interstate 91. They're on one side of them. And then over the other side is the Connecticut River. And so, and they also are a species that that that likes a lot of open habitat and so they actually benefit from power lines, and they will use the edge of the interstate. That habitat but boy that's a risky habitat for them to be moving around in as you know. We had a collaboration with Fish and Wildlife. We spent some time studying the North American racer number years ago and we had transmitters and two of those snakes and and one of the snakes was taken by predator I think it's a red tailed We saw that hawk flying away with some snakes and and then another think was was run over by a four wheel drive vehicle, you know, log road. So anyhow, I'm hoping that we still have some some of the species left in that one corner of the state. I don't know that for sure. Fowlers don't not found in Vermont since 2007. This is a really quite a different sort of habitat demand that this species has in that it likes disturbed soils, sands and gravels along rivers that flood. And my guess is that we have control the Connecticut River and for good reason, but we've controlled it enough so that we don't have those raging floods that deposit sand and gravel on these lower fields. Along the river sides and so we have less habitat for this particular species than we once did. So, I assume again with this one that we have some limited numbers here, but it's been a while since we've seen it. And it's just this one population in Vernon that that we know of that we have left spotted turtle. We do have current records and we have one population that looks that looks Matt would you get that. We have one population that looks like it's fairly strong in Addison County. And two other populations that are definitely at risk. Spotted turtle likes wetlands that travels around an extensive wetlands but it also uses adjacent uplands or adjacent woodlands and conservation problem and in that a lot of our conservation efforts have focused on wetlands let's say and protect wetlands but may not protect the adjacent woodlands or uplands that are around it. And so, for some of these species we have to make sure that not only do we protect the wetland but that we protect all the rest of the habitat nearby and allow the species to travel to that habitat and from that habitat safely. Spiny softshell turtle. Luckily we have somebody in fish wildlife was really shown an interest Steve parent in the spiny softshell turtle. It is again edge of range it's only found in Vermont in the north, northern and election plain. And we have current records. We have two populations that that we're aware of it's unlikely that we have any other we would have had a third historically that would have been associated with the delta of the Winooski River. But now, we've lost that population, but we have two remaining populations, one associated with the delta of the lamoille, and one with the delta of the missus boy and Steve's putting in a lot of work there, trying to maintain nesting habitat because they've we've lost a lot of the nesting habitat, which is beaches along the edges of near these deltas where these spiny softshells lay their eggs and so a lot of a large percentage of the shoreline has been developed or ripped or changed or altered in some way or it's heavily used by humans. Jim, I'm going to, I'm going to take a little time out and I'm looking, I'm cheating a little looking at your notes and I want to make sure we get to some of the bigger picture policy recommendation kind of. There's a lot of that I can skip to yeah teed up that would be really helpful, I think for us as we're thinking about how to plan our work. Okay, well let me go up to. I know Alan's going to talk some about the Endangered Species Committee, but I should jump in there. The danger species is set up so that it has the Endangered Species Committee gives advice to the Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources and it's just advice it's non binding. In return, the Endangered Species Committee gets advice from the scientific advisory groups and the scientific advisory groups. I think are tremendously important. We have one for each taxonomic group so we have one for invertebrates and birds and one for fish. And I chair the scientific advisory group for reptiles amphibians these these groups meet two or three times a year. We also provide information directly to Fish and Wildlife when they request it. I think that these guys are essential these groups are essential in that they are independent of government and Fish and Wildlife and state agencies. And I say that because while most of our advice is followed through on, there are times when there are politics or state policies that will override the species advice that we give and so I think it's really nice that we have these independent scientific groups made up of in a lot of academics but but also informed say with the bird group there could be a lot of non professional birders that that really have quite a bit of useful information that they can provide. The SEGs are independent in that they choose their own chairs and they solicit and recommend their own members. Our advice is is almost entirely followed up on by the Endangered Species Committee and Alan will talk to you more about how that's structured. They pass their advice on to the Secretary and a great majority of the time like I said they follow through but sometimes politics will get in the way or or some policies that that override our advice and and it it disappears they hear it but they don't follow through on it so I think there's a real advantage to the SEGs and the independence of these SEGs so that they can really speak their minds and provide the science freely. I will say that you know when we provide advice to the to the secretary she will turn around and then ask her staff what they think about our advice and in a few occasions where it's a hot political issue. The advice will get filtered out as it works its way up through fish and wildlife so that she doesn't actually get the advice of the people working in the field. She gets the advice of the appointees and the policy people a little bit further up. I understand that but I think it's one of the benefits of the scientific of independent scientific advisory groups is that they can feel free to provide that information the secretary is at least going to hear it, whether or not she follows up on it or not. That's a different issue. So fish and wildlife. I would say that although fish and wildlife has come a long way toward paying attention to non game species and putting attention into bats and some attention into some of his bird species. Personnel time and money are still heavily skewed toward game species. And as you've heard Kent say most of the species are not game species and and fish and wildlife has a mission statement in which they have responsibility for all species and although we've made progress there. And there's still a bias toward time and energy and money for the game species. There's been limited ability or expertise sometimes say with, let's say with beetles or mods or snakes that that's within fish and wildlife. Last year was the first time we got somebody on board fish and wildlife that actually has a background in in snakes loop graph now. So they're working in that direction, but there's still a lot more expertise that they need. And the scientific advisory groups do help provide some of that information. Funding and personnel. I mean I've listened to these guys for the last 27 years and worked with them for the last 27 years. And they are just getting spread thinner and thinner. Their responsibilities have expanded with with active 50 with endangered species. And the funding and the staffing has not increased at the same rate as as their responsibilities have. I don't know if Steve told you earlier today. He's going to retire in the spring and it looks like they're not, they don't have the money fish and wildlife doesn't have the money to replace his position instead they're going to try to spread it over a number of other people and I think that's a really unfortunate. So fish and wildlife needs a dedicated threatened and endangered species staff person Steve has done most of that for the last 20 years. But I think that we really need somebody within fish and wildlife that could really take the lead there is in addition to a non game coordinator, additional staff for active 50 review additional expertise and staff and invertebrates and plants, particularly invertebrates because they really the big groups. And I think they need to develop a wider funding base. Still a great deal of their funding comes from hunting and fishing traditional recreational activities federal and state. And although they've, they've expanded their constituent based some. I think there's a huge group of wildlife watchers out there. Plus, when you get right down to it we're talking about healthy working ecosystems and, and we all should be invested in healthy working extra ecosystems and I think we, we should all be funding it. Somehow, either through the general fund or through taxation. In terms of long term prospects for wildlife. Continued habitat loss fragmentation of degradation will continue to bring about the loss of wildlife. Without the loss of wildlife populations and we're, we're talking a lot about species and species disappearing but there is no question. We're losing populations that say common species like wood frogs and spotless elementers and pickerel frogs, we're losing populations all the time through development. What you spend a lot of time looking at is when actually lose species, but those species which are most dependent upon the most unusual habitat types like sand plains and old fields and low pH pools. Those are the species that are going to disappear first and be most threatened. Those that can survive pretty well and in mixed hardwoods. They're not the longest but we really have to be addressing habitat loss fragmentation and degradation if we want to maintain these healthy. Working ecosystems. The environmental damage sadly. We're listening too much to traditional economists and we have to really be listening to ecological economists. We've sent people like the folks at the Gund Institute were fortunate to have them at UVM. So, a lot of environmental damage comes as a result of economic activities that sure they generate jobs and they generate funds but they can also do a fair amount of damage. Not that they couldn't happen without that but we don't really have the built in controls in our economic system that controls or reflects that that damage and so there's lots of externalities in our economic system there's lots of things that are not accounted for there's lots of environmental damage that takes place at the same time as that money is made. And we have to figure out how to put those what are currently externalities back into our economic system and and really it's ecological economists that that can help us with that. And although nobody likes to say it, we need to stabilize our human population size and I'm not just talking about that in Vermont we're in the world. We have to be doing everything we can to stabilize human population size and that does not mean tell people how many kids they have. It is only education and and availability of family planning resources, and people will choose whatever family size they want but they need to have that available. And I think we should say publicly that at some point, we do have to stabilize our population. I mean you could try to turn Vermont into New York City, but do we want to be that and could we be that and would we have working ecosystems if we did. We have to address one population and two, the resource use per capita, which is sometimes just written as as affluence. So that we can get our are these these negative impacts on habitat down to a level where the ecosystem cannot only support us but all the other species and there there is a frequently referred to equation, which is the iPad equation that some of you may have heard of that I equals p a t that the negative impact of our activities can be roughly calculated by looking at the number of people times the affluence of the people and by this we're saying that we have a lot more impact on our environment we take up a lot more in terms of we drive more cars, we create more waste, we create more toxins. We have a lot more impact on our environment than a Messiah, say has so population times affluence times technology, and we've worked a lot on technology, in terms of trying to figure out what are crops out of a given field or, or how to have renewable resources. And that's all great stuff and important stuff, but the other two parts of the equation, we don't talk about population and resource use per person. We have to we have to stabilize both we can't. The idea that we can have a continually growing population and I'm here and a lot of media people talk about this, these days where cheese Vermont needs needs to bring in more young people. Well if you look around the world, population is stabilizing in Germany and England. It's not just Vermont. It's all developed countries and it's stabilizing because of birth rate. People have always left this state my, my sister worked overseas my brother moved to Seattle, but what's different, what's different now is that we have a lower birth rate, the people that are here are having fewer kids. Well, population is stabilizing, which is a great thing in terms of wildlife. So we'll still have space for snowshoeing and hunting and fishing and all the recreational activities that people want. We'll still have fully working ecosystems but we got to look at those other two parts of the equation, and we're not doing it. We got to talk about that certainly issues that come about when population stabilizes like schools, school funding. It's all about security, but population stabilization is a good thing. It's what we need. And it is what is going to allow us to have all the resources and the attractions, natural resource attractions that we've had over the years. So Amy, I think I've covered my notes. Great. Thank you, Jim. You've given us a lot to think about. That was awesome. We do have two more witnesses so let's just take a quick break, walk around, shake it out get a drink of water and come back in, in five minutes, and we'll, we'll pick back up again. Okay. Thank you. All right. Is bill Kirk Patrick here. Thanks, Alan. All right. So we are getting a little tight on time Alan I'm sorry to report that so if you can cut cut to the highlights that would be really helpful. Yeah, happy to do that. Thank you. And I guess, I guess what I'll say, maybe just as a, you know, sort of a brief introduction. My name is Alan strong. I work in the Rubinstein school at UVM and I teach in the wildlife and fisheries biology program and I guess relevant to this particular hearing I chair the state endangered species committee and also an avian ecologist so a lot of the work that I do has to do with bird conservation and bird, you know, understanding threats to bird populations. So, I guess I won't spend a lot of time talking about, you know, the endangered species committee in a lot of detail. A couple of things that I think are worth noting is that the endangered species committee really is is is the group that provides advice to the secretary of the agency of natural resources, both in terms of species that should be designated listed as threatened or endangered, as well as making recommendations about permits that might be issued for an incidental take. And the probably the most important thing that is probably is worth mentioning with respect to the current endangered species act the one that was most recently updated in 2016 is the fact that we now in addition to protecting animals and plants individually we also have protection for their habitat. So there is now an opportunity to also designate critical habitat for threatened endangered species and we're in the process really of trying to kind of feel how that is going to work out. We have at this point, probably, I think about 10 proposals for new listings, some D listings, some up listings from endangered to threaten but also three proposals for listing of critical habitat for the common turn nesting islands in Lake Champlain some nesting beaches for the spiny softshell turtle, and then also one of the major bat caves a hibernacula in near Dorset. And so we're really kind of interested to see how those are going to work out because those would, in addition to protecting the species themselves would protect their habitat so kind of a important addition that happened in the upcoming update of the endangered species act. I think just in just in terms of the makeup of the endangered species committee we have six members that are from the public. And so we have expertise in in flora in fauna in agriculture, and then three representatives from one from forest parks and wreck. From agency of agriculture and then another from fish and wildlife so there's nine members in total on the committee, and a lot of the work that we do kind of comes to us from what are called scientific advisory groups so there's six scientific advisory groups. Each representing different taxa so there's a flora scientific advisory bird group birds mammals invertebrates. Fish and one more. And, and so, a lot of the impetus for proposals for listing or expertise that might that we might need in terms of trying to decide whether or not a permit should be issued for an incidental take comes from those scientific advisory groups and those are made of experts, both in state but also some of the scientific advisory groups also have folks from out of state who are just really well versed in some of the issues with respect to these rare threatened endangered species of plants and animals. So those are, you know, in some ways kind of the engines that are driving a lot of the work that we do in the endangered species committee, a proposal for listing or some some constraints that might be put on an incidental take permit come to us from the scientific advisory groups and we're the ones that can make a decision and provide the final advice to the secretary. I provided a, I provided a slide if you got, I guess my handout that just went through some of the current listing in terms of the number of species that are listed either as threatened or endangered in Vermont. If you have a copy of that, you probably saw that by far it's dominated by plants and plants probably compared to fish and wildlife or just easier to count easier to census they don't move around so and we also have some really fantastic botanists in the state of Vermont so we have really good information on populations of some of these endangered and threatened plants. And then, you know, from there, probably. I would say that the information on invertebrates is probably lacking to some degree just because we don't have really good information on population status of some of these species, especially of insects and you probably heard a little bit more about that from from Kent McFarland We have really good information on birds. You'll hear a little bit more about mammals from Professor Kilpatrick, you probably heard some from Jim Andrews on reptiles and amphibians. So, you know, when you go from taxa to taxa they're definitely different challenges in terms of understanding population sizes and how best to census them. But birds we do have some really nice data on so that's been that's been really helpful in terms of both the scientific advisory group being able to kind of understand how big the population is and what sort of threats we might have as well as understanding more regionally how their populations are faring. So really in terms of listing when we're thinking about whether or not to characterize or to nominate a species for endangered or threatened status. We're really looking at three different criteria so a lower declining population size, a limited number of subpopulation so they may be only be found in two or three different places in the state. And then a known or suspected threat to the population's viability. And so that that piece has really been important because we've had a number of species or we do have a number of species in Vermont that are, they're just rare. We just don't have that many of them, but they seem to be at low population sizes as far back as we have recorded data. Those are not the species were really interested in listing as threatened or endangered really interested in those ones where we can pinpoint a threat to the population. You know whether that's something that's specifically due to human induced factors anthropogenic factors or whether we're seeing, you know other threats that you know may have to do with, you know, natural cycles or, you know, changes and predator pre dynamics something like that. In terms of some of the current issues for the endangered species committee. We are really interested in this critical habitat designation and how well that's going to work. We took the three species I listed earlier common turn the bat cave and the spiny soft shell nesting beaches. We took those as kind of low hanging fruit for, you know, sort of easy test cases, a lot of the land is either already protected or they're willing landowners who are really interested in the conservation of those species. And so we're just not really sure when we get to species that may have a distribution that includes a lot more private land as to whether or not that's something that we can actually get enacted. These are kind of a test case to just see how well we had, you know how whether or not this is going to work in terms of being able to actually designate critical habitat. It's really a powerful tool in terms of protecting species, but whether or not it's whether or not it's something that can be used on a lot of different species, we're just not really sure at this point so something that we're really interested to see how well we can make that work going forward. I think two other issues that are sort of weighing on the minds of the endangered species committee right now. A couple of them just have to do with issues of uncertainty so not necessarily having perfect information either in understanding, you know one what is the population size how many individuals do we have a particular species. And then number two, how widespread is a particular threat to a species. And it's just a challenge when you've got species that have that are rare that have uneven distributions. And oftentimes have to just use your best scientific judgment in terms of understanding what those threats are so. We have been dealing with some, some issues of pesticides, both with respect to mosquito control as well as lamprey control and those are a couple issues that just have continued to be challenging in terms of trying to figure out what are kind of the best ways to manage these nuisance populations while minimizing the effects on endangered species and so those are a couple, those are some of the issues that we're, we're kind of struggling with right now with the on the endangered species committee. Well, let's see. Maybe I'll just stop there. Representative Sheldon asked for me to present just maybe a little bit information on bird populations and how we understand bird population trends in Vermont but even before I go any further I'll just ask if there's questions specifically about the endangered species committee or the work that we do. So if you're in the, in the interest of time it would be really good to just we're going to have questions at the end. Okay, so, and if you so if you can condense this down and then we'll hear from Bill and then we'll have questions that would be awesome. Okay, all right. Well, let me, what I'll, I'm going to, if I can find it here I'll just share my screen for these last few slides. You all see that. Yes, we can see it. Okay, great. So, we have basically really five sets of five places where we get data for bird populations in the state and I think that Kent McFarland probably talked to you about a couple of these Vermont Center for Eco, Vermont Center for Eco Studies Mountain Bird Watch and also their forest bird monitoring program and also Vermont Center for Eco Studies as well as other groups around the state do a number of kind of species or habitat specific studies that go on looking at, you know, particular species in particular places and have helped to answer some questions about population size and trends. The two I was going to mention and spend a little bit of time introducing you to one is the US Geological Surveys breeding bird survey. And the second one is the Vermont breeding bird atlas. The breeding bird survey is something that's been going on now for 50 years and it's really just kind of an amazing data source, and I won't go into a lot of detail about how you can use those data, but if you want the, if you have the copy of the pdf of this presentation that breeding bird survey is a hot link and you can go on there and play around with data and take a look at it and if you ever want some more information on how to interpret that and be happy to do it. The data are all collected by volunteers and they all have to go through a training program to really assure that they can identify birds by sight and by sound. And actually they're done by, by roots, so it's 25 mile roots, and each root has 50 different points and at each point, the observer stops and counts everything all the birds. They see are here for three minutes, and those data are aggregated. And so you can see this map shows where those breeding bird survey roots are throughout North America, and you know it. As many maps do this one stops at Mexico, but their sites in Mexico and Central America as well. And it's just a tremendous source of data in terms of understanding the, the trends of different species, and their populations and how that varies geographically and so we know a lot of what we know about bird population trends have to do with this national breeding bird survey. The second one is the breeding bird Atlas, and so as opposed to the breeding bird survey which is really looking at abundance, the breeding bird Atlas is looking at changes in distribution. And so we have two time periods where again volunteers spent five years going out and documenting the distribution of breeding birds throughout the state of Vermont. And so each, the state was divided up into random blocks, and these kind of light gray squares that you can see on the map of Vermont where all the places that were surveyed. And so in this particular case the yellow bellied flycatcher, the red dots represent places where 25 years ago, they were found, but weren't found 25 years later. And the blues are where they've actually popped up, they weren't there 25 years ago and now have come back. And the gray are areas where they were found in both of those atlases. And so we've got amazing data in terms of changes in bird distribution over this 25 year period. And this is something that's really helpful when you can look at this on an individual species basis but one of the things that we can actually do is take a look at that and kind of aggregate it by habitat type. And what I've done here for this particular slide is the X axis or the different kind of habitats or groups of species in the state. The red of those histograms indicates the plate the sort of number of individual species that have showed a decrease in distribution. The yellow is ones that have stayed the same and the green are species that have actually shown an increase in distribution. And so you can see here that there are, you know, particular places where we're actually, you know, not doing particularly well and conserving birds so the aerial insectivores is a group of birds that feed by catching insects out of the air, their populations have declined very generally. And so the boreal species and the high elevations through first species of the species that are found in the Northeast Kingdom or up at the on the mountain tops, not doing particularly well. And then also some other ones, you know, we're showing some sort of mixed results grassland birds not doing particularly well shrub and interior forest kind of a 5050 some few increasing some decreasing and not explained, but owls are not doing particularly well with a change decrease for most species in terms of their distribution in Vermont. So these are some of the data that you can get from that that second breeding bird atlas in terms of understanding how populations or distributions of populations have changed over a 25 year interval. That's the last line I had so I'll, I'll stop sharing and can pass the pass the torch to Professor come Patrick. Thank you. That was very helpful. Professor Kilpatrick. Are you available. You have appeared. You're muted Professor Kilpatrick. We still can't hear you wondering if you have a bad connection maybe you could turn your video off and try talking. Well, we can't hear you at all. I'm sorry to report. I think you were in the meeting twice but now I only see you once I think. You're in twice I'm wondering if you're on the muted device by any chance. All right well we are not able to hear you Mr Kilpatrick. Amanda if you can help him behind the scenes. In the meantime I think I will look to the other presenters and just see if members have questions for the presenters we've heard from so far. Yes, I was going to start but I'll let representative McCullough kick it off. Go ahead Jim. So, so it's not a question but it's a comment, you know for the committee. We heard about the amazing success of the wounds recovery, your committee on natural fishing wildlife some number of years ago, band led sinkers for fishing. The bottom. That was a part of it. I'm done. Thanks. I'm going to ask it's a general question I'm not sure who's best suited to answer it but it seems like in my time in Vermont and as a professional working here in natural resources. I think there's great strong statements about what we think we know about certain species and then they seem to have kind of upended it and so when I see these graphs of 50 years of bird data, which is exciting on the one hand it's still a very human scale. And so I guess I'm wondering how you as as scientists and monitors. In the context of could this just the declines and the increases. Are they natural variation, are they, we just, we don't really know because we haven't been watching that long. How do you kind of wrap your heads around that. Anyone. I'll talk. Well, sure. If you go back far enough if you go back 12,000 years, you know, when we're all covered by ice. None of these critters were here and they all had to work their way. They were gradually into this into Vermont and the Shippling Basin some came from the north some came from the south but right at which we are seeing declines right now. I do not believe it's normal. And I think it is is the result of human activity. So, you know, if you take that 50 year time frame and, and, and yes I think it's a, you know, I think you're perfectly correct in saying it's kind of a human scale interval. Probably the biggest drivers that that we see for many of these populations are land use change so changes in agriculture changes in you know maturation of forest. Development patterns whether that's forest fragmentation or kind of new developments. And I think you could explain a lot of the changes in distribution of our wildlife based on those. And then I think when you've got other other species that require digging a little bit deeper. Kent could probably mention, you know, some of the invertebrates. But you know if I went back to that. You know, the material insectivores just thinking about, you know, some of the things that we do in terms of main, you know, keeping down insect populations whether that's just for, you know, whether that's for agriculture whether that's for, you know, just keeping good when you walk outside. Those are, those are things that take a little bit more digging to figure out exactly what the challenges on those and, you know, when you take a, you know, you put, you combine a whole set of birds that are dependent on insects in the air and you can combine that with, you know, many species of invertebrates that are declining. So it's not just going to be land use change that's driving that it's probably going to be other, you know, sort of fine scale features as well. Yeah, it's a really good point I just add that, you know, monitoring is the first step and then to me it's like the flag raising it's like wow there's an interesting pattern here. And so to find out like, okay, is this, you know, as you, as you mentioned representative Sheldon, is this natural, is this a short term thing or is there something we can peg it on like Alan and Jim are suggesting. And so, for me, it's a two step full two step process it's monitor, raise the flag, do some action and figure out what's going on behind what you're seeing. And it just takes a lot that takes time and it takes a lot of effort but and keeps me up at night think wondering you know what's going on with some of these, some of these trajectories for sure. Thank you. Other questions. Representative Dolan. Good afternoon on this late afternoon on on Friday. I enjoyed all these presentations, it gave me a sense of all, in terms of the breath of work that is ahead of us, the breath of species that perhaps are some are declining, and some are as you mentioned, we haven't found in recent years. We've found the species pertaining to insects to plants to birds to other wildlife amphibians and the light. And I really struggle with with how do we, what would be your recommendations in terms of how we can best prepare the state of Vermont. These 21st century type of challenges whether it be habitat loss or climate change or or the, you know, the breath of impacts that you described. We need to have a science based approach across the spectrum here and we really look to your recommendations and how we're going to accomplish a science based approach to handle these challenges. Yeah, great, deep question. And I, you know, I think that there's some advances in monitoring that are going on that are enabling us to keep track of populations remotely that don't necessarily require the same amount of people power that we've needed in the past automatic recording devices that we can place out in the field and keep track of bird sounds or amphibian calls, you know, other ways that we can that we can monitor remotely. And, you know, the other thing I guess I would also say and you know, love to hear Jim and Ken's response to this is, you know, I do think that we, we know a lot, and there's a lot of, you know, I think sort of common sense initiatives that we can take that will, you know, that will help us better understand or predict population changes. You know, I think, you know, as we're starting to, you know, think much more deeply about forest fragmentation I mean we have a tremendous body of literature on the effects of forest fragmentation on wildlife populations and so it you know it doesn't. I think in terms of you know moving ahead smartly with a science based approach, we shouldn't be thinking about reinventing the wheel every time a problem comes up and being able to say let's you know let's take a look at what we've got in the literature let's take a look at some of the results that have been maybe done in, you know, nearby states or things like that, and we can apply those to some of the problems here. So I think, I think, you know, both in terms of being able to be more efficient in our monitoring but also understanding that we have a lot of science and a lot of good information to rely on without having to, you know, sort of start from scratch. Yeah, I don't agree with that 100% Alan and you know acting on our science. You know we do, we and everyone has done a lot of great science and we got to act on it. We can't just publish the paper we got to we got to act on it and do something and that's why I was thrilled to be invited today be honest with you because this is the start of acting on it. And, and we also have to understand that when we act on it. Some of the things that react on their synergistic effects to a really great series of papers just came out last week concerning the decline of insects worldwide and the lead paper. I think the title was something like death by 1000 cuts, and it was really an interesting article about, you know, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out what's going on with insect decline in the world, it's all kinds of stuff. It's not just you can't just point your finger at one thing it's not just climate change it's not just land use change. It's not just insecticides. It's like everything death by 1000 cuts. And so, when we're working on wildlife populations I mean we got to think about that with all this stuff that it's everything is sort of a synergistic effect on the on something else and so for working on one subject or trying to do something with climate use all those things can add up to help wildlife population so we really have to think big to the point where it's scary it's a little bit scary actually but it's a sign of our times that we we've got to act in big ways I think. So, I would say that, you know, in addition to trying to address the issues of individual species like the loons and the lead thinkers and stuff. We have to be looking at some of the bigger picture issues that will save many species as a result. And so addressing habitat loss addressing habitat fragmentation of trying to figure out I mean if we could have an and we get rid of all traditional economists and replace them all with ecological economists that have some training in ecology and realize what the impacts are of some of the things that they're promoting. And I'll get back to it and you know, size of the human population and the amount of resources that we use per person of getting those externalities back into our economic system so that our economic system can can help control and slow down some of the damage that's taking place. In my mind week, we could trace most of this back to human population and resource use per capita and so trying to figure out how to deal with those things and still maintain a sustainable economy and safe ways. Is what we got to do as well as working on the individual species. We got to deal with some of the big picture issue the big drivers. I think Bill Kirkpatrick is on the phone. We have a couple minutes bill you. I don't know if you've had a chance to hear some of the questions I think in in lieu of trying to do a presentation today. If you want to weigh in on sort of the policy topics that have come up. Great, but we try to finish up by three o'clock on Fridays. So, I'm sorry to have tried I think I overpacked the agenda here but if you have anything to add we'd love to hear it. Still can't hear bill. I think he's muted on the phone. Technology at its best. Okay, sounds like you have two devices on those so if you could turn off the one right. Sorry just a second. It's like you're on the space. That is better yes. Yeah I just would like to comment I thought I thought Alan did a really good job of of identifying what I see is our real problem. Our problem is basically we can generally never have enough information to really know about the current trends of populations whether they're going up they're going down or whether they're remaining stable. And, you know, in the case of mammals where I think we've done really good jobs for conservation, like with with the curtailment of wind turbines but that has resulted in the loss of collection of data by designing Fisher traps that won't trap Martins, and that has eliminated most of our input of information about the current status of American Martins. So both of those ways the conservation really has affected the loss of our of our sources of attaining population data. The other thing that that I would like to say that usually we're based with some idea of trying to determine the the extent of the threat that occurs to these particular organisms and that I think some of us feel rather rather frustrated, because we think we should be taking a very conservative approach to try to protect these species, where the agency of natural resources in many cases seems to be wanting data that about the extent of the threat that's really not likely obtainable in in a reasonable period of time. And with that I know it's late afternoon so I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I'm going to ask you though, could you be. What are those particular species that you're talking about that. The concerning the threats. Yeah. Well, I think there's, there's, there's two I, in addition to be the chair of the the mammal sag I also serve on the herb sag. So I've been involved a lot with the lamprocyte treatment and its impact on mud puppies. So that's certainly a situation we have a lot of data that says there's extreme threat to the continued existence of mud puppies. I've done some genetic work that shows the mud puppy populations in the Lamoil River and what used to be in the Winooski River is a very unique population that doesn't occur in the rest of Vermont. I think as Alan mentioned then we've been infected with. Recently, by discussions of other insecticides or pesticides, in this case for mosquito control and how it might be impacting listed that species. Thank you. Thank you all for being here with us today. This was most edifying and we will continue to explore kind of current issues in wildlife on Tuesday afternoon after the governor's budget address so stay tuned we're going to think we'll move on for Friday afternoon but thank you so much it was really great to meet you all and have you join us. Thank you very much. If there's any questions please contact us anytime. Right. Great committee I think that's a wrap for the week and thanks for a good week and sticking with it. As always feel free to be in touch with me. If you have any questions or concerns and have a great weekend, we will see you again on the floor Tuesday morning.