 I've been looking for this for a long time, so it's good to see a lot of faces that we haven't seen in a long time, and it's good to see y'all. We have a long lengthy meeting, I think, tonight, so we're going to jump into the approval of the meeting minutes. You all should have received those, the length in the emails. Is there any motion to accept those minutes? Brian? I'll second it. Any discussion on those? You'll make me point out a typo. There was a typo. Sync. S-I-N-C. That's it. Any other discussion? No. Alright. So yes, we'll be the approved minutes. Brian? Bailey? Yeah. Excuse me, but I'm going down my vote sheet, so it's not going to be in order to take it. Sorry, but it's going to be too much for me to try to look around. Okay. Brian Bailey. Michael Bancroft? Yes. I am the S. Wendy Butler? I am the S. Okay. That's right. It's not Cousin. Dave Fielding is not Cousin. Mike Holson? Yes. Nancy Matthews is not Cousin. Brian McCarthy? Yes. April Ward? Yes. Jay Sweeney? Yes. Marty Vanburen? Yes. And Bill Pickett? Bill Pickett was not President Knack of Plansmen. No. No. It was Stacey. Stacey Stens. Okay. Those are approved. We are going to get into the public comment portion. Will you have the sheet? All right. For those of you that are new in attendance, we allow up to two minutes of public comment for those who have signed in and want to comment on something. This is not a time for back and forth between four members, and you, this is the time to just state your comment. Will is going to run the timer on the screen, so you can see the countdown and have plenty of time to wrap up as you get down to two minutes. And I just would like to add, I'm a good Mr. Chair, that we're gonna give petitioners time to introduce their petitions, so you don't need to do that and you won't be confined to two minutes. So that's for Rob and Walter who are on this list, so if you guys would just wait until your time to present, that'd be great. I think Dave is on this list. Dave is on this list. Or Dave is on this list, I think. Okay, so he's presenting the trail cam. Okay, that's good to know. I mean, you can make a public comment as well if you'd like, but I just wanted you to know you have a time to petition. Okay, so when you're called on, if you would like to speak, just please state your full name and your town or residence and then we'll start the clock. So after, I think that's Walter, after Walter would be Mike Covey. Thank you. I'm just gonna make a few statements here. We hear a lot of whether or not concepts are ethical or unethical. We've got petitions in front of you that are from organizations that are dedicated to ending traffic, we're very open about that. And seem to always find a way to determine that any hunting happens to be unethical. We hear statements like we support trail cameras. The chair of this board actually received an email from one of the presenters tonight stating that they supported trail cameras and then they submitted a petition that's in opposition to a certain type of trail cameras. And that will be followed by the statement that somehow they're unethical. We hear that these groups support hunting and fishing as long as it's for sustenance, as long as it's for food. Yeah, just within the last couple of weeks, rabbit hunters have been attacked for training. There was a group of goose hunters that had a really good day and they were characterized as unethical because one of their representatives of these organizations didn't like the pictures, they took the geese they shot. They shot them within legal limits, within legal season, by legal methods. But suddenly it was unethical because there was a dislike of some of these pictures. You know, we need to stick to facts and not beliefs. We have a great group of biologists with a legal action model at the department that can really give us solid evidence and would give us solid evidence if there was a need to curtail seasons. The department doesn't shy away from opposition to, or from, it's not even opposition, from creating an awareness among this board. One there is a potential problem. And we saw that back when there was a petition to enhance the broadcast trapping season, the other was some concern. And in an abundance of caution, the department opposed it and in an abundance of caution, this board didn't pass that. So I just want you to think really critically about where these petitions are coming from. Mike, the other names are on the list that have yeses are presenters. And so that will wrap up our public comment portion. Okay. Unless is there anybody else who might as well like to know? We're not doing that. Okay, great, yep. Okay, tonight, so we have four petitions in front of us tonight in front of the board. The way that we're going to do this tonight is we're gonna hear from all four petitioners first. So 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes. We each get 10 minutes to present. And after that, we will then hear from the department and we will get their response. We'll have three multiple presentations on responses to all those petitions. And then the board will discuss after what action, if any, they would like to take. So that is the schedule of events for tonight and that's how we're gonna go about it. And I will turn it over to the commissioner to see if anything else the department would like to say. Great, no, we'd like to do a brief introduction to the department's response, so we can wait for that until after the petitioners present. Okay, so why don't I go ahead? The first petitioner is actually on the line and this is for the petition to place a moratorium on fisher trapping. And we'll just, why don't you just let us know when, Lisa, I believe it's ready to go. Hey, Lisa, are you there and can you hear us? Yes, I can. Can you hear me? We can hear you actually really nicely loud and clear. Oh, good, all right. Go ahead, Lisa. I'm still, okay. Yeah, why don't you go ahead, Lisa, and we'll start a clock. We'll just keep track. Okay, you won't need it in this case, but that's fine. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight. As you know, this is a petition requesting a moratorium on fisher trapping. So on February 15th of this year, protect our wildlife submitted a petition to the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board requesting that a moratorium be placed on the trapping of fisher. Our petition also asked that Vermont Fish and Wildlife provides a scientific basis that includes peer review as to why there is a trapping season on fisher with no bad limit. Two analyses of cash-free unit effort data, which is what is used to determine changes to fair furbearer populations over the last 30 years, one by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department and one by an independent biostatistician, shown a marked and alarming decline in the fisher population beginning in 2003. The significance of the pregnancy in the grassline prior to and since 2003 may also be indicative of another concern we have with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department process, which is the shifting baseline. If that is indeed a factor, then it underscores even more vividly the advisability of hitting the pause button while the department makes some adjustments to its process so that there can be more public confidence in its data. Additionally, earlier this year, protect our wildlife documents to strengthen these in Vermont Fish and Wildlife's 10-year average harvest of botanical and other species, highlighting a concern we have with the data that Fish and Wildlife uses to inform their policy decisions. The department did acknowledge these discrepancies and corrected them in the latest furbearer news letter. But stepping back, I would have to ask Fish and Wildlife why there is a trapping season on fisher in the first place, they are not a food source and furbearer health are worth very little these days. I think the answer has to be that it's a recreational trapping opportunity up with the desire to kill predators who are viewed as competition over prey species that hunters and trappers want to kill. There is no science-based imperative to manage fisher population via trapping, especially when the stability of their population is tenuous. Our petition also addressed pressures on the fisher population in addition to trapping, chief among which are the presence of a number of credentials that the department acknowledges are ubiquitous throughout the state. In its 2020 furbearer news letter, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department states that due to budget constraints, it was unable to do any testing last year to determine their effects on the fisher population. But it stated that testing would be done this year as, quote, there are a lot of unknowns regarding how rodenticides influence carnivore survival, end quote. There are other mortality factors such as this temper that are not yet well understood and need to be investigated as well. Obviously, mortality factors that are unknown and not studied cannot be controlled in the short term. But the most statistically significant one, trapping, can, it is the only form of mortality that we can control and we should. In the last 10 years, 3,037 fishers have been trapped or killed for little reason other than sport, a primary motivation for which is the elimination of any competition for gains that hunters can take during designated hunting season. It is currently no bad limit on fisher, so unlimited fisher may be trapped and killed during the December season. This, however, does not include those fishers that are killed outside of the legal season as non-target or those who are killed in December property. Fisher function has a key predator on our landscape and best available science informs us that predators should be protected, not hunted or trapped for recreation or commercial purposes. The fisher's diet consists primarily of small mammals, rodents, and the occasional porcupine. Furthermore, fishers do not over-populate their territory. So, given that in 2019, 32 fishers were killed in just one wildlife management unit alone, we feel it is incumbent upon the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department to place a moratorium on fisher traffic until the decline in the population and all contributing factors can adequately be assessed, studied, and addressed. Given that fishers have a significant role in maintaining ecological balance and that telling them is overwhelmingly done except in rare cases, simply for sport and given that traps set for fisher also catch non-target species, such as bobcats and the endangered pine martens, continuing this practice in the face of what needs to be a significant decline in the fisher population is simply not responsible management. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lisa. If you have a few minutes, if there's any brief questions for Lisa from board members, I'm going to name a few. If you want, Lisa, could you just clear something up for me in the petition? Who are the people referenced on the consultation team? There's a retired PhD ecologist, the conservation by the... That's right. Who are the people referenced in there? There were no names given, that's all. I was just curious. Well, we can get all that information to you. But I would like to respect that person's privacy just in case they don't feel comfortable having their name released. But we will consult with them and we can get any information that can be required to you tomorrow. Okay, thanks. I think that wraps it up. Oh, Bill. Lisa, you were talking about a wildlife management area where 32 fishers were taken? Yeah. You told me what area that was? I don't have it in front of me right now, but once again, I can reference the materials we have and we can get that information to you. I believe it was in Southern Vermont, but I'm not totally positive. Sorry. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Appreciate that. And the department will have their response in a little while. So thank you very much. Thank you. Moving on, we're going to go to the petition to close trapping seasons that was submitted by Walter Medway. Walter, we'll just, if you want to stand up for where you're at. Hey, Lisa, well, Will is going to turn down the volume on the phone a bit on our end, but hang on the line. You should be able to hear us just fine. Great, thanks so much. And Walter, if you just give Will a minute to run back over there and get to start. You can move in tonight. And feel free to come up, Walter, if that's better. Yeah, please, please. Yeah, eat it all. Yeah. How was this? Is this work? That was great. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome and have that. Go ahead, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak before you tonight. I am here representing six other signers of the petition, Michael Haas, David Kelly, Jennifer Lovett, James White, Senator Vincent Aluzzi, Peggy Larson, and myself. On March 30th, we sent to the chair our 10 findings and the literature that we use to support those findings. And I really won't go into any review of those, assuming that you've had ample time to go through those 10 particular points. On April 8th, I did forward to the chair an additional finding and some other documents. Those come out of legislative hearings that took place after March 30th. And I thought that the information was relevant to the petitions that we have assembled. Those additional documents include the VW's Vermont Wildlife Coalition's fact sheet on trapping myths and it also included a link to a YouTube video showing two Vermont trappers interactions with a trapped bobcat kitten just prior to before it was killed. And then we added one additional finding that again came out of the testimony. And I'm going to read it quickly. It's finding number 11. Again, I believe you've gotten all of this information. It is the position of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department that bobcat do not need to be managed through hunting and trapping unless there are extraordinary circumstances. This position is in stark contrast to the annual seasons for bobcat that the board approves for both hunting and trapping. The department's position appears to recognize the multiple ecological benefits spreaders bring to the landscape coupled with the fact that unlike deer or beaver, the success of their offspring is so tightly connected to prey availability. Our 10 finding goes into this in much greater detail. The key point is that our first petition calling for the closing of trapping seasons for predators listed is an alignment with the department's position. And since submitting our findings, just a couple of quick updates, Macy's has ended fur sales. The governor of New Mexico just signed into law a bill that would prohibit trapping on public lands within the state of New Mexico. And just yesterday Israel announced that it was banning the sale of boats for a product. The only exception would be those used in religious ceremonies, practices. The rest of my comments are more general, perhaps at the 10,000 foot level. And I'm hoping that it will offer some context to why the petitions have been the petitions, the two petitions that we have submitted the rationale. We are in a time of great change. The wildlife profession is demanding that change occur. Perhaps no one greater than Dan Decker who has been recognized with the highest award from the Wildlife Society, the highest award from the Wildlife Management Institute. He's published a paper with his colleagues called Wildlife Management in the 21st century that says we must change wildlife management. The Association of Fish and Wildlife Management published a Blue River Power Report recognizing license sales revenues dropping a wildlife crisis that we've never seen in the earth before and perhaps their seminal statement was state fishing wildlife agencies must transform their structures, their operations, and their cultures. Third point, the department's own staff based on a survey done by Colorado State University said that the majority of the staff feel the department is not doing enough to address change. And I would go on to say that there have been polls conducted by the University of Vermont Center for Rural Studies that also indicate that there is a disconnect with current public policy that you create with what where the public is at. And trapping is certainly a good case where we know that the majority of Vermonters oppose recreational trapping based on that survey. And clearly we know that legislative leaders are looking to change wildlife governance. We've seen that in this past legislative session including even a proposal S129 that would make this body instead of a public policy and regulatory body advisory only. Chapter 10, I'm sorry, Title 10, Chapter 103 of the Vermont Statutes are very clear. Wildlife is held in a public trust. Wildlife is a public asset by law. It is not owned by any stakeholder group but by all the public. And wildlife must be managed to reflect all of the citizens by law. The petitions before you reflect the circular calls to modernize Vermont's wildlife governance, to bring it into the 21st century, to reflect public interest and public values so that those values are reflected in the public policy that you establish. We hope that board members will look at our petitions not as a challenge but as an opportunity to say things are changing, the drumbeat is changing for change in how we manage wildlife. And I would just conclude to say there's at least one point of common ground. None of us want the legislature to be involved in making decisions about wildlife. It should be done by the appropriate bodies. But if a wildlife governance is not reflective of the public interest in wildlife, then the legislature really becomes the only place where change can occur. So again, as you look at our petition, the two petitions, I hope that you will at least consider the landscape calling for change. In the profession, in the association that represents the interest of state fish and wildlife agencies across the nation, department staff, the public legislators are all saying we must change the way we conduct business regarding how the wildlife is managed. I thank you for your time and attention. There's a few minutes. Are there any questions, three questions for the water? Yeah, I have a question. This department staff survey, was that part of that call? Elmora State University published the study. It was done in 2018. Was it done for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department staff? Yes, sorry, I wasn't clear. That was the staff of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department specifically. You're all right. You said a number of plans and we must change the way we manage wildlife, but you agree that wildlife needs to be managed, you can practice, correct? I would concur with the department's position regarding Bobcat, and by Bobcat I mean all predators. I don't think there's any reason to manage predators unless there are extraordinary circumstances. Extraordinary circumstances, which again, is the department's position. So I would have no difference there. Deer, turkey, bear, that's a different story. Predators are, I think, a very different beast. So you're saying you don't think that the department's responsibility includes the management of predators and less under extreme circumstances? There's been no ecological, there's no biological rationale to trap or hunt Bobcats. There is none, none, unless there's some extraordinary circumstance. That's the department's position and the position that we support. I think you can say that not only does that apply to Bobcats, it applies to other predators that are hunted and trapped in Vermont. Again, ecologically, ecologically, there's no reason. It's self-limit. All right. The decision is two part of the decision. Yes, sir. One is stop all trapping on predators. Yes, sir. And then the moratorium along, or anything else? Unprepared? That is correct. The moratorium that we're calling for is that you take the information that we have assembled and fully digest that to determine whether the current trapping practices are in sync with our findings and with certainly the cultural and ecological landscape. And then go forward with your trapping program, but we're simply saying reset based on the findings that we presented to you today or March 30th. We're not saying stop and we're simply saying establish a trapping program only after there's been a very thorough review based on our findings. On your findings? Yes, sir. Not thereby. I'm asking the board to review the findings that we've put together to see if decisions about trapping still make sense. You have the power to make public policy and we're presenting information to you that we hope you will consider and influence the decisions you made about regulations and about the public policy that you'll establish for all of our monitors. I'm just wondering if this is a continual circle that we're going to be going around that you give us this information. The board decides that you know, that's not what we believe, so they decline. And then we go back around and say, turn it over again. I would not support beating a dead horse. If the board has, in good faith, gone through the findings that we have presented and you perhaps accept some, reject others, but then make your decisions about trapping, there would be no reason to come back and beat that horse from my perspective. This is a one-time opportunity for me. Thanks, Walter. All right. I think that sums up pretty well. Yeah, I appreciate it. Next up. Rob Long with a petition to return the end of trapping season for the river waters on February 28th. Is that acceptable? Great to be here in person. The petition is to revert the season back to what it was prior to 2016. I think it was when it was extended to the end of March. A brief comment regarding, I'm here for the Mont Blanc Wildlife Coalition. And I just wanted to, it's been a sub theme, it comes up time again. We get kind of lumped in with these groups now and then. The one reason I'm so a part of this group is I don't think we're one of these groups. I grew up here in Brown, here hunting, fishing. I still have a hunting license. I'm looking at a group really keen to hunt is turkey. And then we get out and do it. But when we say we support hunting, we support deer hunting, for instance, not just for food, it's ecological essential that hunt deer in Vermont. I have a green violet, biology community. And I've stayed, even though I'm a wildlife artist, professionally, I've stayed looking in natural sciences with the Smithsonian Institution on a project for 15 years now. So I've stayed fairly current on my science, not like a professional scientist here at the department, but, you know, it's a pretty well-read link. So we don't, we're gonna have some cloaked agenda to get rid of hunting. We honestly support hunting. We don't support all predator hunting on quite as pat on it as some people are. Bears, for instance, are predator, but on the wars and can be problematic. And I think the department does a good job of them. We supported their big game management plan. They'd comment on it. I think the only thing that gave them a C was bears because of the body part sales. But it wasn't the overall management. And we gave an A on the deer. And a B on moose, whatever. They were kind of arbitrary greats. We don't have a cloaked agenda. We honestly support hunting, we support fishing. We're not big fans of recreational tracking. I understand tracking has a legitimate role in research, has a legitimate role in conservation sometimes. But I'll move on. Just kind of wanted to have a little background so you have some idea what the petition's coming from. We all have this, I'm sure, so I know you have a long meeting, so I'm gonna respect that and not go through the whole thing. The basic, I attended the board meeting back in 2016. I don't know, I think one Mr. Pickens was here then. But I may be wrong. But anyway, I attended that and the Elkhart meeting that was going to it. And at both of those, one of the main rationales for extending the otter season to match the extended beaver season was given as animal welfare. That being that because of the trigger on it, say a kind of air being offset so that the otter could tend to swim through or the beaver would still hit it, that offset would sometimes cause the trap to not miss fire, but fire late and catch the beaver, say in the chest or the hips. And it would drown as opposed to being killed in the quick-killed trap. At Elkhart, I pointed out that it's in here as well and I'm not gonna repatch the whole thing. The AWZ Association of Fish and Wildlife Agency is summary of research on the best management practices of tracking. Summarize the times to set for various quick-killed traps. And you can look it all up with all of this thing. There, pretty much the overlap with drowning is almost complete. There's marginal improvement, maybe the quick-killed trap in that you have five minutes to 10 minutes to drown, whereas it's up to five minutes in a quick-killed. So in theory, you could have a quicker kill under water, but you also need to water, which is 800 times as dense as air. So that was pretty much dropped in the reading comments and it came back down then to about as bycatch during this extended season. The Department of Testified was about one big year. And your number that was caught during Newson's Beaver Trafficking, which was part of why the Beaver Trafficking season was extended, was around five. And they're now catching 19 extra orders in 2019. So it seemed a cure worse than a disease to some degree. Both those main rationales, now I understand that those orders are usual, they're not legal orders, as opposed to bycatch orders. But again, the value of health is not a great deal. So again, I think it's a cure worse than a disease. Not a good look, in my opinion. And I just based on the fact that those main rationales are either having dropped in by the Department of Reading comments or have been somewhat undercut by the number of orders they're now being taken. This calls for a coming back to the original season. And with that, I'm a wrap up of five minutes and 20 seconds right here. Any questions for Rob? I remember writing the original reason why the your agency was against it was there was concern about uphearing as that was the business line. I looked into that a lot. And I read the department's position on it and I understand that at first glance there seems to be a real dissonance between what is on the auto fact page on the original department's website and the rationale behind the fact that they protected orders by stopping them because they would start reading and started in the cops in late March. So they stopped having trapped them in late February which to any normal general layman makes a lot of sense. I understand that, and I think that's still something of an issue because while the cops don't go out of the den for a couple of months and there's very little chance they're gonna get trapped in the current season. So mothers do it from time to time. When mother gets trapped, the cops are doomed. And I believe the board did away with the tent club rule on approaching our theater lives which ought to be discriminated. So if we join our mother then in our lives and the track gets set in the tent feet of the entrance and she goes out, she may well be caught. I think it's something of an issue but it's not as big an issue as it seemed at first when I read that. So yeah, I think that's still in there but it's just a brevity in this video. I didn't assess it just now, but I do appreciate it. Any other questions for Mr. Moore? I've got a question, Mr. Chair. Rob, you sent me the Vermont Wildlife Coalition's position statement on hunting a while ago and I appreciate that. I appreciate its clarity. When I read that statement, it seems pretty clear that it's in opposition to trapping, hunting of predators, all use of dogs except for bird dogs, use of game cameras and other electronics. So that's a pretty big, I'm not saying that's all hunting but it's a big slice of hunting. Well, I would say deer or turkey, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, it's about 90, 95% of hunting in the state and we are 100% in, you know, bigger support of deer and turkey hunting. I don't have a problem with electronics in general and I don't have a hands-off. I prefer to see less, I think skill is a good thing on the field. Like I said, I haven't done a lot of hunting lately but I still hunt as a wildlife artist, I have to get referenced and I basically don't have a camera so I still use my hunting skills as a kid, I've been all a rich kid and I use them extensively. I don't use game cameras, I get my photos in person in the field. I find you get to know animals better that way but that's me, I'm not opposed to somebody using a game camera. The only thing I would have, and I think that's what the petition is, is live action in game cameras. I think that's getting to a point where, where do you close that door? Dogs, I have my brother, he's a highly trained bird-nees, I mean, bird dogs are water fowls, they're great but they're right there in control of the hunter and you don't have, and actually a skilled bear hunter, I, you know, I could see it but there's so few. How many were just sitting in the car for the truck, waiting on, you know, all the way around the ramp and all the country side and you know that's led to all sorts of problems and it's a bad image for hunting. I think it turns a lot of people off on all hunting to have that happen. And I think that's a real, a lot of like management strategy because some of you guys are 100% essential to, especially for deer. I mean, that's a, that's our big flagship species which if we didn't have hunters, we'd be in trouble. So, and this is where I think we really are, I admire the department, I do and many of the people in it, if not most, and grew up that way and I still do. I think we are after a lot of the same goals, it's just, you know, we do, we part ways on recreational travel and some freighter, I would say. I'm not, I'm a little lawfully on bears so I'm gonna stay out of it because I understand they can be a problem species because they're omnivorous, they're a predator biologically, but not necessarily apologically. But yeah, bobcats, as was pointed out earlier, I can't imagine why you have an ecological reason about a bobcat or a verifisher or overweasels for that matter. But on general hunting, most hunting in Vermont, as I've said, if you're a turkey, you couldn't get bigger boosters than us. Good, okay. Thank you very much. And now we're on to our last one and that's the cell phone game camera petition and Mr. Kelly is going to present. I have a booming voice, all right, mind I'll stay right here. Yeah, before I talk about the petition, I'm the vice chair of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition. I'd like to address some of Mr. Covey's comments. I grew up in Vermont, I grew up hunting in Vermont. My grandfather was the state treasurer, my dad was the deputy commissioner of agriculture. Everybody in my family has hunted. I lived for six years in Montana after I got out of law school and I worked with a licensed hunting guide in the Madison Valley. I also worked with a trapper. We trapped coyotes and beavers on the branches of the Madison Valley. So I learned something firsthand about trapping. I pretty much stopped hunting after I got out of law school. I haven't hunted a lot in Vermont, except for a number of years when I had an English setter and we bird hunted. I was a good friend of Steve Wright and Steve and I used to fish a lot. I'm going fishing tomorrow. I was in the Galloway River in May, July 9th, one of my old fishing buddies and I are going to fish soda deuth in Yellowstone and then we're going up to the Clearwater River in Idaho. So I've been a long time hunter, a long time fisherman but I'm also very, I very much support most of the positions of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition. It is a coalition. It brings together a lot of different people and a lot of different opinions. Many of us have backgrounds like mine in hunting and fishing and growing up in Vermont and I want to make that clear. And one of the things that we are opposed to are these live action trail cameras. I noticed in your 2021 hunting rules and guide, you write, we all have individual specialties but whether it's cracking white tail bucks through miles of snow, reading the landscape to the exact square inch where a roaming bob can walk the next day or seducing a reluctant lawnmere through the early morning fog, the thread that threads us together is appreciation of the land. And I try to imagine the addition of this sentence which says, and some of us specialize in setting up a covert WC series LTE cellular trail cam with a 32 MP incident image transmission compatible with Verizon AT&T systems. That has nothing to do with any hunting tradition my family or I have ever known either here in Vermont or in Montana. If the licensed hunting guide I worked with in Montana were to have a client come to him and suggest something like this, he would have been a gas. And I've never met any of the people that came hunting to Montana who suggested that we do anything like that. It's virtually unthinkable. I can imagine nobody at that table would do, would use equipment like that. And I think that the Vermont General Assembly spoke pretty clearly for the people of the state of Vermont when they outlawed the remote discharge of firearms. This is very much along those same lines. We can see other states like Nevada and Arizona and Montana saying no to this type of unethical behavior. And I believe that if we really care about the hunting tradition, it behooves us to recognize where the lines are drawn between ethical and unethical behavior. And this is plainly not fair chase and it's not ethical. And that's all I really have to say. Thank you. Are there any questions for Mr. Kelly? I was just going to, you quoted the Boone Pocket Club's position on live trail cameras. Are you aware that they've changed their stance on this? I'm not aware of anything except where I quoted. Would you like me to rate them to be enlightened? As we come around to that, I'll, if you stick around, I'll read it in the mail. Are you familiar with Justin Spring at all? With who? Justin Spring, the director of the big game records for our food and property? No, I'm not. I'm not. Stick around, I'll read some of this. Are you telling me that the Boone and Project Club now supports the use of live action trail cameras directly connected to a cell phone to identify a game? That's all. You're happy to decide that? Is that what you're saying? I'm happy to have that. I just had a question. Can you just answer the question? Go ahead and answer it. Okay. Yeah, they actually do not ban or against live action trail cameras. They're connected to cell phones. That's correct. That's 100% yes. And I had that conversation yesterday with Justin. I am a member of the Boone and Project Club and I'm an official scorer with him. And I spoke to him yesterday by phone in regards to the Boone and Projects position on. And they are, and he's actually sent me the language that they have now adopted. And I'll also go into what happened in Arizona and where their stance is and what their stance really is and I'll talk to the department about it as well is that, for example, in Arizona it's having problems with water tables and it's affecting the congregation of game animals at specific areas. And the Department of Fish and Wildlife for Arizona had concerns that these cameras would have an impact on their ability to manage these animals. So that's what brought forth a ban on the show cameras in that state. And Boone and Project does support that. That actually has an effect on the ability to manage the game. So that's one. Then two, they still believe that if a hunter's decision is made based on a whereupon or to take the game based on the live action camera that is their line of what would be ethical and unethical. The camera itself, they don't find to be unethical or the fact that you even use one of those cameras. It's that if it makes the decision for you. And the diversity across the United States is quite diverse and some of us have had the opportunity to hunt Colorado and Nevada, those types of states and don't have big forested areas. And being able to get the game remotely greatly dictates where you're going to go, could protect you. You know, they sell your moral companies. And it makes the game more susceptible versus big woods of Maine, Vermont, your ability to have been, you know, this is not necessarily going to change your outcome, John. Anyway, that is the line. I will do the verge direct when we come around to that. But I just wanted to let you know what their stance is and how that applies to these other states. Again, their stance is that if any technology, it doesn't just happen to be choking us, it could be anything. If it's having an effect on the management of any species, it would support the ban by the state of Vermont. Well, I see that I still have a couple of minutes. And I would submit to you that if we have a situation where a hunter sets up a live-action trail cam connected to his cell phone while he's sitting in his car to identify after he's already used trail cams to identify at what time a deer is going to get to a particular pond, he uses that as his means of tracking a deer. Again, I cannot imagine, unless I'm completely out of step, how that would be fitting with a Vermont hunting division. And I would be shocked if anybody at that table ever hunted with that type of technique. And I guess it goes back to GPS, it goes to the event of a lot of technology. Let's save some of that for discussion. But if anybody has more specific questions for Mr. Kelly or Mr. Titian, let's see. So you want to ban the trail cameras just for your season, our seasons of hunting? No, I don't want to ban trail cameras. I use trail cameras. We have a lot of wildlife where I live. I love watching the wildlife. I love watching when the fox have kids. I love having, seeing, we have bears run through our yard. Quite frankly, we've had cows with radio colors chased bears through our yard. And I'm not too crazy about that. But I use trail cameras, I would never use them to identify when and where to hunt, especially connected to my cell phone while I'm sitting, waiting to shoot a deer. So you wanted just the cell phone cameras? Oh, live action cell phone connected to your season? Is that what you're saying? It would be primarily in your season. I would leave that up to you. But I think the issue that needs to be considered, I mean, we've already said, look, you can't hunt with grown. We've already said we're not gonna allow remote discharge of guns. We've moved into a whole new era of technology. And when we move that technology into the tradition of hunting, we're doing something that's fundamentally changing a critical tradition. We need to think carefully about the introduction of these new technologies into our hunting tradition. And I would implore this board to consider the implications and the ethics of these new technologies. We are living through a technological revolution that's changing everything. And if we let it change our hunting tradition, I will tell you the biggest loser will be the hundreds because most people will look at that and say, my God, we're gonna do that to deer and bears and bobcats. One more question? Anyone? Thanks, Mr. Kelly, appreciate that. That wraps up our presentation portion from the petitioners. Let's go ahead and jump into Kim's. Yeah, I'd like Mark to give a brief introduction to all four petitions or three petitions that are gonna be addressed by the biological staff and then I'll address the live active camera petition. But I'd like Mark to give us a brief introduction. Thanks, commissioner. Nice to see everybody in person. And I've been along a lot of year and a half or so. Too many computer meetings we've had, but I'm gonna go over them real briefly, kind of let you lay out what our presentations are gonna be here tonight for you. But I also gotta say, as someone standing before you with the honor of representing wildlife management in the state of Vermont and doing it for you and all the citizens here. And I've just ended my tenure as chair of the Northeast Wildlife Chiefs representing 13 states, seven Canadian provinces, the US Fish and Wildlife Service there as their leader the last two years. It really hits me hard to take offense to some of the comments I heard here about our wildlife profession, not advancing, not being modern, not coming up to speed to do that. And I felt I just had to say that to the board, representing my staff of 35 full-time people, 10 seasonals worked just as hard as the full-time people. The reason we're here tonight in what you're gonna see is the reaction my staff had that I had when we saw these petitions come forward and a cherry picking of comments on important studies that we have been involved with to try to help advance the movement of wildlife management, not only in Vermont, the region, but in North America. And a lot of this also is the pre-constituents that we rely on are getting attacked on one of these petitions and a couple of the others. They help fund our conservation work in Vermont, the Northeast in North America since 1937. They are important to us and we do work with them for the conservation of all fish and wildlife. And I think we see the benefits when we are able to talk about Fisher, Bobcat, Blackbeer or whatever here in the state of Vermont, do that. Are we perfect? No, but I think we have a dedicated staff. You're gonna see that tonight in these presentations. We're gonna, one of them just review with the closed trapping season and one aspect of the petition as for the closing harvest of red and gray fox, Bobcat, Fisher, weasel, coyote and otter. For the record, I think we have at least two weasel that are here found in the state of Vermont. Another petition on is that moratoriums should be placed on the trapping of Fisher. We wanna return that one of the petition calls for a return to the end of the trapping season for river otters to February 28th. And then the fourth petition that you just heard from the last petitioner was to forbid the use of live action trail cams for locating, identifying for the purpose of taking wildlife during hunting season. The first three, our wildlife staff has been working on since March, actually February when these came up. We took it serious. There's a lot of elements that you read and that the petitioners just presented to you. Not so much verbally here tonight. Some of it came out, but when you go down through what they sent you in writing to do that. Our staff took that serious. They spent the last three to four months. And I'm saying staff, I'm talking about several people within the wildlife division. A lot of people on our furbear team, you're gonna see Kim Royer that you all know before. She's been with the department for about four decades. She not only has been our furbear project leader, one of our chief leaders in wildlife habitat throughout the state of Vermont. And is right now is our interim species program manager filling in till we're able to fill that position right now. We also, you're gonna hear from tonight Dr. Katie Geter, who's been with us for almost four years. She is our key biometrician and research manager for the state of Vermont. The furbear team, I just wanna note those folks that they spent an awful lot of work on and you're gonna see it tonight and you're just gonna see part of it. We're also trying to work on some written text that will have you some documentations for you and the rest of Vermonters to see as questions come forward. Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? And you're gonna notice the tremendous amount of scientific research that went into the presentations. You're just gonna get some snapshots of it tonight in the PowerPoint. I'll get that out of the board as soon as we finish it and it'll be up on our department website and available for people in Vermont to see as well. But just let me make a note on the furbear team. I think our Lieutenant Sean Fowler, you're here, he's on the team, been on it quite a lot of time. It's been a lot of work with our team on this position. Chris Berger. Chris, thanks for coming here tonight. I think you know it's Chris from the other day on the computer working with you on the Turkey project. As you see, our staff wears lots of different hats. Also, you're gonna see Dr. Katie Geter in a minute. Chris Saunders, Nicole Meyer, who heads up our Hunter Education program. And I also wanna note, especially to Mary Beth Adler, who's been a long-term seasonal for us. And maybe Cameron, I don't know, it's 20 years, 30, it's probably healthy. But tremendous work for the department itself. So, Cam is gonna lead us through on first addressing the tracking petition with a PowerPoint on that, and then we're going to perhaps potentially, it's your call, what you wanna do, Mr. Chair, but we might recommend at that point to stop, ask us questions on it, and then take that issue up on the board on what you wanna do. Either deny it, table it, have us come back with more information, if you please, or accept it. If you accept it, they will move forward trying to provide you more information on your deliberation. Then the order petition, Cam's gonna lead us through that. And then the Fisher petition, both Cam and Dr. Geter are gonna be teaming that. And the last petition that we wanna address will be the game camera one, and our commissioner is gonna lead the discussion on that one with you. We didn't get into that as a biological staff, because at this point we have no information that game cameras, cell game cameras, any other technology that hunters are doing is affecting our ability to manage wildlife in the state of Vermont. So, it's really, it's a whole different type of issue, and I think it's appropriate for the commission. So, that's our game plan. I think, Will, you said what? Pizza's coming around seven, we'll take a break. Six-thirty. Six-thirty, okay. So, whenever it's kind of convenient, Cam, I'll let you kind of you here, judgment, and when the good rate comes to do that. I also wanna recognize, you don't have the other department staff commissioner? Yeah. Introduce themselves, too, because a lot of this work, it's not just the wildlife division that works on managing wildlife. There's also what, 35 full-time workers. So, our director of warden services, if you want to introduce yourself, please. My name is Jason Batchelter, director of warden service. We have Lieutenant Fowler, who's a Northeast District Chief, and warden Delfton Cersey, who's out of more towns. Thanks for being here tonight, guys. Thank you, Mark. And of course, Will, Dwayne, and Catherine Gessing, and Forrest Hammond. Forrest, as you know, is our black care project leader. We can say a few words, Commissioner May, later on that, but Forrest is also involved with us and all these other issues, too. So, and it really is a team game here when we start talking about wildlife, as we can say. I might suggest I'm going to move into these seasons. Please do. That would be great. Yeah. And Jim Kim, hold on. So cool. Is that a favorite of mine? That's... Can you guys see that, all right? Absolutely. It looks great. Do I need a microphone, Jim? It's not dark on me, I'm good. Okay, great. Well, thanks, everybody. And I think this presentation's going to be a little bit different than the presentations you're used to hearing from biological staff, because if you went through the petition, you realize that it's more about values than it is about wildlife populations and biology. So I'm going to actually give you, start with history, which is going to give you some context, which I'm sure a lot of you already know. And then I'll get in and address each one of those findings one by one, point by point. So we start about the time that Jesus walked the streets of Nazareth. And we had a Native American culture here. Don't worry, I'll shorten it up a little bit. Time will go faster. We had a Native American culture here that was by necessity. They lived lightly off the land. They were basically hunters and gatherers. They relied heavily on fur, for clothing and wildlife for food, and beaver for food and clothing. And they lived that way until the Europeans arrived on this continent. And you can imagine, the Europeans came looking for natural resources, and it would be hard to overstate the role that this search for natural resources had on the exploration of this country. And they came with, you had people who were in the Stone Age basically, and these folks came with metals, metal pots, with linens, with knives, with guns. And they said, we'll trade you any of these things for beaver, for fur. And of course, it seemed like a great deal to the folks at that time. Of course, we know what came with those Europeans. There was lots of disease, which essentially decimated those populations and the culture that really supported those populations. And so we basically, prior to European settlement, may have had as many as 200 million beaver before the Europeans got here. But by the end of the 1670s, nearly a quarter of a million beaver had been taken out of the Connecticut River Valley alone, according to shipping records. And by the time Vermont was settled, beaver had probably been very, very, almost extirpated from the state for maybe 70 years. So Vermont was settled a little bit differently than Southern Vermont. As most of you know, you've seen the stone walls out on the landscape. People came up from Southern New England. They came into family groups. They carved out subsistence farms on the landscape and started clearing the forest. In 1760, we had as few as 3000 people of European descent here. By 1790, 85,000, and by 1800, 155,000 people. This is called the surge. This is when Vermont really drastically changed. These people were all bringing up livestock, trying to eke out a living, clearing the land. And we all know the story of Vermont. By about 1830 or 40, we had cleared. We'd gone from about 95% forest to about 35% forest. And this had a drastic effect on the wildlife that lived here. You can see just from this graph, Vermont is the red line right there. We were cleared a little bit later, but still a drastic change in the habitat that was here. They also came, like I said, with livestock. And they had to protect those livestock in order to protect their living. And so there were bounties on most predators at that time. Everything from wolves to mountain lions to lynx to bobcat to fox. And this is just a map of the valley records from 1777 to 1781 on wolves. The blue dots are actually mountain lions. So that period of time, most of you are very aware of this, that whole period of the 1800s. We lost many of our most iconic wildlife species as a result of that drastic habitat change and the unregulated taking of wildlife. There were no laws, no seasons. Nobody overseeing the take and many of these species disappeared or at least their numbers decreased drastically. So in response to that, the legislature in 1876 established fishing game commission. They had a fish commission first and they expanded it to fishing game commission. And then the current department structure actually was established in 1906 with the first hunting and fishing license in 1908 for 50 cents. Quite a deal back then. And the legislature act of the state for the people of the state and the state shall fulfill this duty with a constant and continual vigilance. We take that pretty seriously and I know you guys do too. Then following that, the Congress actually established a tax with the support of the sportsmen's community on guns and anals and archery in 1937. This is what's funded many of the restoration efforts that have occurred since then. And of course in 1950, they followed with a tax on fisheries equipment which has helped to support much of the fisheries conservation work that's gone on. Today our budget, about 60% of our budget, upwards of 60% of our budget is actually comprised of dollars that come from sportsmen related activities still. So like I said, these were the funds that established, re-established many of these populations that had been extirpated or had declined as a result of those changes in the 1800s. So 1878, I think it was a precursor to the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen that actually brought some whitetail deer back into the state. I'm sure many of them came in on their own as well. In the 1950s and 60s, the Forest and Parks Department in cooperation with the Fish and Wildlife Department brought in Fisher from Maine and New York and released them all over Vermont. And that's been a huge success story. 69, turkeys were reintroduced and actually the department participated or led a trap and transfer program for turkeys up until the 1990s within my career. If you can believe it, I'll never say never. 1956, we didn't have a residential loose population and my professor from UVM actually pinging geese in Addison and look what happened. So, and then in 89, 90 and 91, we actually were involved in bringing the American Martin back into the state in the Southern. We partnered with the US Forest Service and released about 108 animals, I think it was, into the Southern Greens. And we thought that had failed and mostly because we had had some of the warmest weather, warmest decade on record. But actually, while I was not furbearer biologist for a period of time, Chris actually started a monitoring program with Connecticut State University and we have a poor population down there, which is exciting. Other Fish and Wildlife restoration efforts are ongoing, moose, lake sturgeon, beaver, peregrine falcon, lynx, eagle, walleye and that's just to name a few. I mean, that's basically what we do is manage and restore wildlife populations. That's what drives us, that's what we're committed to. So, to circle back to the petition, the petitioners and I think maybe even Walter mentioned this or maybe it was Rob, mentioned the survey that was done by the Center for Vural Studies. And yes, there was a survey question that I think it was POW paid the Center for Vural Studies to ask and it was about trapping. I think to me it seemed to be worded in such a way that sort of led the reply to a certain type of response. And they call it the most definitive and independent survey that's been done on trapping. I would beg to disagree given that there's surveys that have gone on across the country on trapping, including Vermont. We did one as part of a communications survey in 2015. We found 56% of Vermonters actually support regulated trapping 27% opposed. In Maine, they did a much more comprehensive survey and they had 75% support for trapping 17, regulated trapping 17% opposed. Connecticut 61%, Indiana 75% and Wisconsin 77%. I think it's disingenuous to suggest that one question from one survey is the most definitive response on how the public feels about trapping because it's a nuanced topic and it's complex. So finding one, the petitioners contend that the current public policy on trapping contradicts the Association of Fish and Wildlife agency's blue-riven panel results. Now, we have read the Association of Fish and Wildlife agencies blue-riven panel. We actually support the findings of the Association of Fish and Wildlife agencies recommendations and their recommendations are basically, we need to broaden the tent. In order to address the threats to wildlife going forward, we need to have everybody care about what's happening with our wildlife populations and the habitat that supports them. That's exactly what we wanna do. That's exactly what we have been doing. In fact, way before AFWA came out with its blue-riven panel, this department, and I'm sure many other departments across the country have partnered with a whole host of organizations to address these threats and Vermont has partnered with everybody from the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Vermont Audubon and the Nature Conservancy and Vermont Coverage and the Vermont Woodland Owners Association and on and on and on to try to motivate and move these issues forward. Just the development of the Wildlife Action Plan alone, we had 60 to 72 different partners participate in the development of that plan in 2005 and 2015. So there's been a lot of input on the part of partners and the general public on the work that we do. You, as a board, know that every time we make a rule change, almost every time, I won't say every time, we go out for public comment and we collect those comments, we take them seriously. Doesn't mean that we're going to make changes based just on those comments. Our mission is the conservation of fish, wildlife, plants and the habitats they depend on. That's the basis for how we make our recommendations and how we make these rule changes and these, it's not a popularity contest. It's not like, oh, we get this many votes on this, so we're going to move in this direction. It's about what's in the best interest of the resource and people's connection to that resource. The petitioners talk about equity and equity is important. We agree that we need to be including everybody in these conversations, but that doesn't mean that we are trying to narrow the tent. The aqueous point is that we're trying to expand the tent, not narrow the tent and by banning a whole group of people from doing an activity that's ecologically appropriate, including indigenous people, we're actually narrowing the tent. We're doing exactly the contrary thing to what AQUA is recommending. We can still support these folks who have spent generations living lightly off the land and still expand the tent. It's not a counterproductive activity. We can do both. And they have no bearing, these regulated activities have no bearing on the ability of the other folks who don't hunt and trap, who I respect. They don't have to hunt and trap, but these activities have no bearing on their ability to see and enjoy these wildlife populations in any way that they want to. So there's also, the petitioners also say that that the information around trapping or our position on trapping was not codified with all people at the table. And I think we believe that actually our position on trapping was codified in 1793 when the Constitution was written. And it doesn't specifically state trapping, but hunt back then when you were hunting for something, you might have used any different device, a muzzleloader, a bow, a deadfall or some type of trap. So we believe that the Constitution actually covers trapping as well. And we recognize that today people are more concerned as are we about animal welfare, fair chase, respect, sustainability. These are all things that we've been working on for the last 20 or 25 years to try to address through our hunter education classes, our work on the BMPs, which I'll get into a little bit more later. So yes, we need to rework the way we do things, but that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. The petitioners, this is finding two. The petitioners in this finding claim that, and I think maybe Walter mentioned this in his discussion, that petitioners claim that Vermont's current practices are odds with the thinking of prominent leaders in the wildlife profession and violate the principles of the public trust and good governors as a spouse in Decker at all. This is kind of interesting because I read that paper, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago whenever it first came out, and we actually invited Dr. John Orgen, who's a co-author on that paper to come to our management team and expanded management team retreat that we had and actually go through those governance principles with our management team to kick off our own relevancy efforts, which was before AFWA even did theirs. And I called Dr. Orgen because I thought, is this a correct interpretation of those governance principles? They seem, that's not what we heard when he came to speak to us. And he basically sent me about a backer quote that said, I disagree with the above statement. The governance principles we put forth state that wildlife governance will produce multiple sustainable benefits, will allocate benefits from the trust and other principles. We are the trust, we're the ones responsible for managing and allocating these resources that clearly provide space for people who track. It is the trust administrator's responsibility, again, us to ensure such allocations are sustainable. And I'm not aware that any science that suggests otherwise in Vermont. So a co-author of that Decker paper still suggests that trapping and hunting are part of the work that we all do. So then the petitioner suggested in that same finding that there's no evidence that diverse perspectives inform current practices, nor do the practices reflect the wildlife values held by most Americans or their interests in the out of doors. Well, the department does their own public surveys quite frequently. And you can see from this one, we ask about the things that we do and whether or not the public supports the things that we do and supports us as a government agency. This question, do you agree or disagree that the department effectively balances the interests of anglers, hunters, conservation groups and the general public? 76% of residents agree that the department balances these interests. And this is up, we did the same survey or asked the same question, I guess. In 2003, it's up from 67%. 7% disagreed, but that's down from 11% in 2003. So at least up until 2015, we were making progress in terms of how the public looked at this department. Again, another question from that same survey. Overall, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department as a government agency or do you not know? Again, 76% support of the department as a government agency up from 57% in 2003. And only 3% were dissatisfied down from 10%. And even, I think, which is better for us and something we're even more excited about is that fewer people don't even know who we are. Cause we want, those are the people we want to connect with the outdoors. And the Dr. Duda, who actually oversaw this survey said to us in a meeting afterwards that given that government is generally so negatively viewed, the response to this survey is even more impressive. Lastly, we asked in 2013, but I don't think we repeated this at any point, the percent of respondents who indicated that each of the following sources would be very credible source of information on fish and wildlife and outdoor recreation. The top two sources, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Department and a warden from the Fish and Wildlife Department. So apparently we still had some credibility back then. Finding three, and finding three is a little dense. I'm gonna just refer back to the petition specifically. Basically, the petitioners say their concerns about current public policy on trapping as established by the Fish and Wildlife Board are buttressed by key points drawn from APHWA's annotated bibliography. And I didn't try to address all those points because we agree with most of them. These points are things like wildlife professionals generally agree that public values towards wildlife change dramatically over the latter half of the 21st century. We have seen this coming for probably 20 years and we've been working on trying to deal with these changes. There has been a gradual shift away from traditional values that emphasize the use and management of wildlife for human benefit towards a more protection oriented approach to wildlife. Now many researchers actually attribute that to the urbanization and suburbanization which they claim on lots sort of the anthropogenic tendencies, anthropomorphic tendencies, pardon me. And really the role as I saw of the whole APHWA effort was to help state Fish and Wildlife agencies navigate this changing culture, recognizing that we're going to be dealing with a whole lot more polarization in the public than we've had to deal with to date. And one of the key messages out of the Blue Ribbon Panel is although core constituencies like hunters and anglers will continue to be key allies, there's a need to broaden the stakeholder representation to ensure Fish and Wildlife conservation remains relevant and supported by people from all walks of life. Yeah, sounds great. Who's to disagree? While I was talking to Dr. Orgen, oh actually I think this came out of a paper he did. He said it is unfortunate that advocacy groups are transmogrifying principles developed by wildlife professionals designed to advance our profession in order to challenge accepted and legitimate wildlife management practices. It is unfortunate because we need everybody to work towards addressing the real threats that are out there. The petitioners go on to suggest that wildlife management's been captured by consumptive interest groups. And we've basically been providing access and opportunities to the general public long before the APHWA Blue Ribbon Panel. And I'm just gonna go quickly down through some of the things that we've done over the last 30 and 40 years to actually address wildlife protection for the entire public of Vermont. We've been a leader in landscape conservation design, probably most of you have heard about this. This is the Vermont Conservation Design Map. We actually started with a Black Bear Range Map in 1991 where we mapped critical habitats for Black Bear, large forest blocks and connected corridors. And that sort of jumpstarted this whole effort to look at our landscape from the big picture and how do we connect Vermont up to New York, to Canada, to New Hampshire. And so we've involved probably 20 to 25 partners in this effort over maybe a four year period and have created a lot of outreach materials for towns and regional planning commissions as well. We've had a person that's specifically appointed to actually work with town and regional planning commissions to try to incorporate wildlife protection language into their town and regional plans. And we developed those two books that can be used by town and regional planning commissions to actually pull language right from those books in order to incorporate it into their town plan. And we've worked with Vermont Natural Resources Council to actually assess what kind of difference we've made over the last 10 or 20 years. Most of you know that we've done a lot of work with Act 250, the protection of what's called in the bill necessary wildlife habitat, but suffice us to say it's basically critical habitat for deer wintering areas which provide habitat for a whole host of other species. Black Bear habitat, mostly bear-scarred beach stands or oak stands, wetland habitats and you notice the yellow bars are rare threatened and endangered species. We've actually seen an increase in the protection of habitat for rare threatened and endangered species in the last 10 years. Land conservation acquisition, maybe you heard that we actually purchased our 100th wildlife management area in 100 years down in Shrewsbury. We have 135,000 acres of WMA lands which are open to the public for wildlife-based recreation. Any public for wildlife-based recreation. And we've recently been more involved in an effort to protect and to purchase wetland habitats through an EPA grant. And we've purchased about 2,400 acres of wetlands that can be restored. We manage all these lands for wildlife. We have a visitor center at Dead Creek. We have roads for access and we've done about 1,000 acres of management. I think, was that this year, do you know, Mark? Or was that just one year? Yeah. We have a private lands technical assistance program. We have three and a half staff members who actually go out and work with private landowners to manage their property for wildlife to benefit wildlife. We over the last year conducted 577 site visits and had 22 different workshops. We partner with all those groups and more that are listed down at the bottom to develop those workshops. And it's just an amazing program. And then we have the Wildlife Diversity Program and I didn't want to go into depth. It's just that we have a whole program of people that spend time monitoring, managing all of the rest of the native wildlife plants and natural communities that are not haunted and trapped. So as a result of our relevancy efforts, we actually have stepped up access to the out-of-doors and stepped up our outreach to people other than our traditional users. We actually have WMA tours for anybody who wants to come. The general public, we have birding tours. We have actually started outreach to new Americans in the Burlington area and to the indigenous tribal members to try to sort of figure out how we can work together and create synergy to move wildlife forward for those folks. We do public presentations pre-COVID, probably I did maybe two or three a month. And on all different kinds of topics, every single biologist does presentations all year long. We train landowners at Covert's Trainings twice a year. We actually host a teachers course where we train teachers on wildlife issues. And we actually, as all of you know, we have the two camps where we have many youngsters come and learn. So basically our wildlife division breakdown of activities, upwards of 70% of the wildlife division's time is spent on habitat, management, protection, conservation and wildlife diversity. And it's actually even a little more than that because in the species management program, Chris and I also manage the endangered martin and lynx. So there's a lot of effort going into programs and projects that affect all Vermonters. And so to suggest that we are captured by just the sportsman's group is naive at best. And at worst it's actually an intentional effort to undermine the department's credibility. And that saddens me very much just as Mark said. So are we gonna keep working with hunters and trappers? Of course we are because of the years of effort and funding and work that they've done for conservation. Are we gonna continue to partner with our conservation partners? Of course we are because they also contribute to the conservation of wildlife. And I think this is what it's all about. Wildlife managers must avoid the temptation to use only the preferences of a limited group of stakeholders as the basis for decisions. We couldn't agree more. I think it's somewhat ironic that a small group of stakeholders i.e. the petitioners are suggesting that we only listen to them and ban a whole group of people that have been participating for generations in an ecologically appropriate activity. Finding for, I'm not gonna get into too much detail here. Finding for is that trapping is at odds with the North American model of wildlife conservation. I couldn't disagree more. Again, I hate to keep referring back to Dr. Oregon, but he was a co-author on this technical review. And there's no evidence that anybody thinks that hunting and trapping are not part of the public trust resource. I think what's important for wildlife professionals is that we manage that resource so that it's available to all people. And that is how the furbearer project manages our furbearers. The impact from trapping on our furbearer population does not change its ecological role at all. It doesn't change the natural processes and it doesn't affect the ability of anybody else who wants to view or appreciate those animals to do so. I will say also that over in Europe where they have banned the trapping of animals, they trap for human conflict, they trap probably hundreds of thousands of foxes, millions of muskrat, all that get wasted. That is contrary to the public trust. Finding five public pushback against trapping. Oh, wait, you know what? Maybe I should ask Will as the pizza here. All right, great, keep going. Keep going, all right. Okay, can I do another one, Will? Another finding? Okay, let me know. I'm happy to stop at some point. I'll move that to your discretion. Okay, it's here. Is it here? I'll do one more. I'll do one more, yeah. You're on a good roll here. Okay, go ahead. You got me at the edge of my seat, Kim, so keep going. Okay, finding five is public pushback against trapping in other states. And again, I think Walter might have mentioned this. Other states and jurisdiction, they claim that that justifies that we actually ban it in Vermont. And I think what's really interesting, that survey that was done by Manfredo in Colorado, which was also referred to by the petitioners, they actually asked the question of both hunters and non-hunters, the things that actually threaten wildlife going forward. So they asked the question, what's more important to you, protection of wildlife or economic growth? Notice how similar the responses are between both groups. Do you value private property rights over the protection of wildlife habitat? Again, very, very common results. There's only a few percentages different between the two groups. Climate change, do you think climate change is a threat? Again, almost the same. So why would we wanna polarize people around these issues that we think are so important to the future of wildlife when we need everybody to work together to address these things? It doesn't make sense to create polarization where we don't have to. Again, this is from Manfredo. I think this one's pretty interesting. Manfredo basically, this is the Colorado survey. He broke people into values groups. Traditionalists is somebody who believes that wildlife can be harvested for food and clothing. Mutualists believe that we should live in harmony with wildlife. Pluralists believe that they basically have, they change their values based on a specific situation. And distanced are the people that really don't care too much or have much connection to wildlife. These are the people we wanna get, the distanced people. We wanna get them involved in wildlife. We wanna have them feel like protection of wildlife and habitats important. What's interesting is when they asked the question about support for the Fish and Wildlife Department in particular, it was almost, every single group was above, is that 70 or 80? Anyway, I mean, all of those different values groups all think that what we're doing is important for them and for their lives. So, you know, what can I say? I'll end it there while we can have lunch or breakfast, dinner. Okay? Yeah, let's take a 20 minute break or so and I'll reconvene the meeting and I don't, will. I don't know if there's enough to share but typically we do. So if those in attendance want to, perhaps we can take a go ahead. Mark says there will be so. I've had it. Here we go, finding six. Four or five more to go. So, finding six. I think the petitioners take the position that trapping is not highly regulated. There's actually 42 different laws that govern the harvest and sale of furbearers and that doesn't include the laws around the seasons. I know there's always been concerns about bag limits but we actually look at average catch per successful trapper and those are always quite low. I'd say for otter it's probably two at this point. I forget fish are three to five or something. Five at the peak and three now or something. I can't remember exactly. So, if we thought that that was a problem, we would change it but at this point we haven't felt like that has impacted the population. We have the longest running biological database and I think in the region it's not the country. And we collect mandatory collection of fish or otter and bobcat carcasses. We've collected catch per unit of effort data since 87. We have mandatory fur dealer reports. We are doing camera surveys to detect rare and threatened species, lynx and martin in particular. And we've actually done a survey for the veterinarians in the state. We've done it twice. I think it was probably 20 years apart. And it was remarkably similar from 20 years ago to the one we did, I think it was 2018, where we have an average, we'd like to get this to zero. We have an average of six animals taken to the vet for treatment that have been caught in traps but that's in 314,000 trap nights. So it's a very, very low number. Again, if we could get it to zero that would be great. Animal welfare. I could do a whole presentation on animal welfare. The development of best management practices. There's association of fish and wildlife agencies has been working on the development of best management practices for at least 20 years, if not longer. They actually adopted testing standards that came from three different countries who developed those standards together, Canada, Russia and the EU, the European Union. They're the highest animal welfare standards for any harvested animal in accordance with the International Association for Standardization. So there's an international association that we're meeting the welfare standards for. They've tested over 600 commercial trapping systems on 23 different furbearers and we hired over across the country 1,000 trappers, wildlife technicians and state agency biologists. We followed strict protocols. This is a research effort. It was science based. We actually had veterinarians do blind postmortem examinations on over 5,000, 8,000 of these animals, 8,500 of these animals. In part of this research effort in 230,000 trap nights over 21 years no threatened or endangered species was ever captured as part of this. And they were using the same traps the trappers use right now only modified to some degree and using the same systems. And still no threatened or endangered species were captured. No domestic animals were captured 99.95% of the time except for two cats. Those that were captured were released unharmed. Now that's pretty significant over a 20 year period. In addition to that, the Association of Veterinary Medicine actually refers to the AFWA BMP website and endorses the research effort that's going on there. So these are just so you guys know and I can go into this at some point in the future, not tonight, but these were the types of documents that were developed. There's actually a BMP document for almost every species in the region. There's every species that's trapped in the region and it outlines for trappers what type of trapping systems they might use to pass for the BMPs. And the department was actually involved in this effort for 10 years, upwards of 10 years. We actually had people on the ground. We hired trappers and field observers to work on this effort. And since that time, we've been promoting it at every chance that we get. We put it in our newsletter almost every year. We go to the rendezvous and talk about it. We presented in our trapper education classes and actually a survey that was done, a national survey that was done in recent years actually found that Vermont trappers, 74% of them know and or have incorporated BMP systems into their trapping programs. What's interesting is that it's not really designed to be a regulatory process because trappers need flexibility to apply certain types of trapping systems in certain types of territory, certain types of landscape. And so there is flexibility involved in the whole process which makes it really difficult to enforce. So we've been working really hard to try to get them adopted just on a voluntary basis. There's a question on the petitioner's part about whether trapping is an important tool for conservation. This is pretty hard to dispute. We've actually hired trappers to recover the American Martin that we introduced into the Southern Greens. We hired trappers in Maine and trappers in New York. We could not have done that reintroduction without the help of avocational trappers. We use trappers in Vermont in particular on the protection of endangered spiny soft shell turtle. We hire them to try to trap things like raccoon, skunk, foxes that are impacting the nesting turtles on the shoreline of Lake Champlain. We've used trappers in two research efforts that we've had. One on bobcats where we radio collared bobcats, another on coyotes back in the 1980s. And we had help from avocational trappers who helped us actually either trap these animals or helped us design the systems that we were gonna use. And I think we would have not had the success that we had without the expertise of those people. Human wildlife conflicts, I'll get into a little bit more later, but yes, it is an important local tool for dealing with specific human wildlife conflicts. And as I think I mentioned, we collect these carcasses and collect information that allows us to monitor for these populations and actually get information that we can't get in any other way. The petitioners question the role of trapping and mitigating density-dependent diseases. And I think in this case, mitigating the operative word, we would not suggest that at the trapping, the levels we're trapping today, that we would have any kind of population impact on disease because we're just not taking that many animals. However, trapping can play a role in lowering densities in localized populations. And it has done that in places in Canada. I think more importantly from our perspective is that we are able to monitor for different diseases because we collect these carcasses. And we've done canine distemper testing on I think 70 Fisher, a couple of years ago. We found one positive response in Vermont which was a positive thing from our perspective. We partnered with a tough student and she was collecting liver samples for rodenticide testing. We did that about two or three years ago. I think maybe one of the petitioners suggested this. We actually have followed up on that. We sent another 30 samples this year and we hope to send another 30 in the next fiscal year. And we're trying to participate in a regional rodenticide effort. There's other states that are really interested in this New York, Pennsylvania, Maine. And so everybody's trying to send their samples to the same lab so that we can get a regional look at what's going on with rodenticides. We partnered with the University of Vermont and several other researchers to look at genetics of our population. We have folks from Wildlife Services come to almost every session and collect information on rabies. So these carcasses really provide a lot of information on just the health of these populations. So really important. Trapping is an important tool to reduce human wildlife conflicts. This is a case where I do think the petitioners cherry picked out of, they actually refer to white at all, which is a relatively new document on best management practices. And my guess is I went through it to try to find out how they could refer this to white. And I found this one statement which says, hence broad generalizations about the effectiveness of avocational trapping at reducing human wildlife conflicts, RMYs. I would agree. I don't think we would ever suggest differently. But you go on, it goes on to say, there are however sound arguments as to why avocational trapping can and does at times benefit management and strong correlative examples of extensive trapping restrictions leading to increased human wildlife conflicts. So, and that example comes from Massachusetts. That's one example at least where in 1996 there was a referendum that voted out trapping. Trapping became banned in Massachusetts soon after the population of beaver went up by three. And along with that went the number of complaints from landowners and road crews. What happened as a result was that the legislature actually gave municipalities, not the state, but municipalities the right to hand out permits to actually remove dams and trap beavers. As many beaver now are trapped with the supposedly illegal body gripping trap as are trapped with the cage trap. So, I understand the impetus behind that whole effort, that referendum, but I don't think the results actually ended up the way that those people hoped it would. Because now the attitude, public attitudes, towards beaver and the wetlands they create, sadly the wetlands they create as well, have turned and people are much less supportive of beaver and wetland habitat. And they now are viewing beaver more as a pest than as a valued furbearer. And this is something we want to avoid. We need the people to really care about these animals, not think of them as vermin. We have actually had a program for 20 years. Our first line of defense, and when we get a complaint from somebody, whether it's about beaver or if it's about coyotes killing sheep or concerns about coyotes and sheep or concerns about skunks under the porch, we always talk first about practices that might exclude those animals from that activity. And we've had a beaver battle program, a water control structure program for over 20 years, where I have a technician who actually spends all season out working with private landowners and town road crews to install water control structures so that people will live with those wetlands and with those beaver if at all possible. I will tell you that in 40 years of experience or at least 20 putting in beaver battles, it doesn't work all the time. And sometimes the only option is to control the population so that people can live where they're living. And it makes sense when you think about the fact that we were developed, our road system was developed without beaver on the landscape. Should it surprise us that as beaver have come back as we actually introduced them that we have conflicts, we don't have the cultural caring capacity to support the beaver that could be here from a biological perspective. That's just the way it is right now. So this is another piece that came out of that same paper. It's basically says, and this is the paper that is quoted by the petitioners, advocating trappers or trapping in general need not have a population level effect on a species or demonstration thereof to justify their potential role or value in reducing localized damage and conflicts. And I called the author, I called the lead author, I called Brian White to ask him if he knew of anything in his paper that might suggest that trapping is not an important tool for reducing wildlife, human wildlife conflicts. And he said, well, how could you even say that when there's a whole federal organization, Wildlife Services, which uses trappings to trapping to actually address human wildlife conflict? So the author himself was saying, this is not a good interpretation of this paper. Trapping plays a multi-dimensional role in wildlife management. And this is the hardest thing, I think, to try to talk about, but we don't need, I don't believe, we need to justify trapping based on its role in wildlife management. I think it connects people to the land in, maybe it's a different way than other people connect to the land, but it connects people to the land in ways that are important. And it's really a right and a privilege as long, and these are important caveats, which you guys know, as long as it's ecologically sound, sustainable, and leaves room for enjoyment for other publics. That's what we're trying to do here, is balance the needs of one group against the needs of others. And it's a challenge. I mean, it's not easy, as you folks know, but this is what we're trying to do. And I think the petitioners suggest that our messaging is not consistent around trapping. And I would say, yes, it's consistent, it's just nuanced, and it's complex and complicated. It doesn't fit well into soundbites and into Facebook posts because it's much bigger, more complex issue than something I can talk about in five minutes. And so if you don't understand the whole complex issue, you are gonna think that we are perhaps not consistent in the kinds of things that we say. But I believe that they are yes, buts to a lot of this stuff. The last finding, creditors are critical to ecosystem health, yes, yes it is, they are. And I don't think anybody in this room would argue with that today. We manage these fur bears to ensure that those predators that are on the land and on the landscape can still function in an ecological way. That's what they need to be able to do. They need to still be functioning as a prey species, as a predator species on prey. And we believe that based on the current harvesting regime, we are not impacting predator populations to the point where they're not doing what they're supposed to do on the landscape. And also, it's not affecting people's ability to see and enjoy that they're out there. So we can serve everything. I mean we're responsible for every living thing that's out there, from invertebrates, to wildlife, whoops, to fish, to natural communities, plants, and the habitats that all of these things depend on. It's a huge responsibility. And it's one that we take incredibly seriously. It's what motivates everybody in the department. I've worked there for almost 40 years. I would never want to work anywhere else. I'm proud to work with the people I work with. They are committed. They're big picture thinkers. They're progressive. They're thoughtful. And it's really saddens me that our credibility is being undermined because of people who want to impose a, not a biological, but a moral imperative on another group of people. And because that's not something that I personally agree with and the department agrees with, then our credibility is maligned. We serve everybody. And we take that part of our mission really seriously. Not just today, whoops, whoops, not just today, but I'll leave that up there. Not just today, but for the future too. And basically I put this up here because really what it's about, it's so simple. It's about sharing. It's about, okay, you don't have to agree with each other, but it's a resource that we all cherish for different reasons. And it's about learning about why other people value something versus why somebody else values something. And then working towards the threats, the big threats. And those are all those things that we keep talking about. Habitat loss, fragmentation, impacts related to roads, climate change, invasive exotic species, pollution and sedimentation, and disease. These are what are threatening our wildlife populations going forward, not trapping and hunting. In fact, regulated trapping and hunting is just one way that people connect and care about wildlife. And to Walter's point, yes, are there bad apples out there? Yes, probably you guys can all point to one or two. That we don't endorse that activity. Our law enforcement people work hard to try to address those things. But there's people out there in every walk of life that don't follow the rules and that's just something we have to continue to try to work on. So the bottom line is that it's about habitat. It's about making sure that these species have the habitat they need in order to live into the future. And that's gonna help us with resiliency in the face of climate change. It's gonna help us to minimize habitat loss and fragmentation. And it will be what allows us to have sustainable wildlife populations going forward. So I just leave you with a quote from Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife management. And Aldo was bemoaning the fact that he was on some river where it had been dammed and there was no longer as many fishes there had been when he'd been there previously. This was way back in the 1940s, I think. There were once men capable of inhabiting a river or land without disrupting the harmony of its life. And I think what he meant was that not hunting and fishing, hunting and fishing doesn't disrupt the harmony of the life. It's the drastic changes that we make on the landscape. And we all humans, we're all part of this complex system. We all have impacts. And we should be introspective about our own impacts and how we can all live a little bit more lightly on the land. And certainly if you're getting your food and your fiber from a local, organic, ecologically appropriate source, your impacts on the environment are probably far less than if you're buying soy products or industrialized bees at the grocery store wearing cotton. I mean, all these things have an impact that are much more hard to actually point to but are having tremendous impacts on our wildlife. So I'm very concerned about the fact that we are polarizing our Vermont public to the point where instead of working together towards these things, we're actually creating dissension and spending, I'll tell you, a heck of a lot of time on issues that really don't matter to the future of wildlife. I could be spending a lot more time on land conservation and land management and managing species population than writing a response to a petition. But I spent a heck of a lot of time on this response instead of doing those things and it irks me. So I will leave it at that. Thank you guys. Thank you, thank you, Kim. So Chair, if you're right, do you want to act on this? And the only exclamation point I will make is I think obviously you could tell from my comments in the presentation that we strongly oppose eliminating or even restricting the trapping regulations as they are now in the state of Vermont. And the one point I'll make that if you think about everything Ken said, every program we do, whether it's being able to take on our education course or the conservation camps, have technical assistance provided to you with a landowner, a citizen in the state of Vermont, you name it, every Vermonter and other people who come to the state have that opportunity to do that. We're not in the business of trying to restrict people. The most restrictive people that we serve are hunters, anglers, and trappers through regulated legal means. Thank you, Kim. That was the next one. Any questions before I go on? I assume, should I just go on to the auto one? Would you like it? I don't need to. Do you have any questions for Kim specific to this? I think we should do their other two presentations because this is gonna be cumbersome. Yeah, that's right. So if there's any questions now related to that one, go ahead and ask her, but I think you just go on. Okay, so this one's a little bit more biologically based and it's the petition to shorten the otter season to the end of February, back to the end of February. If you all might remember that we lengthened it, I think in 2017 to the end of March. And first I just wanna mention that it is listed, otter are listed as a species of greatest conservation need. In fact, I actually chaired the committee that listed otter back in 2005 and Chris chaired the committee in I think 2015 that actually relisted them. Species of conservation need does not mean threatened and endangered. We considered the committee considered otter to be common and abundant. But basically what this allows us to do is if there's ever any concerns about destruction of habitat or reduction of riparian habitat or possibly impacts from toxins like mercury, we can use state wildlife grant funds to actually address that. That's what putting them on the species of greatest conservation need list does for us. We have plenty of other species similar to otter that are common and abundant, that are also on the list of species of greatest conservation need, many of which are hunted or trapped. And for the same very similar reasons, either a concern about potential loss of habitat in the future or possibly concerns about some other disease or other issue. So the premise of the original season expansion, I think we've talked a little bit about this. I'll go through it pretty quickly. It was to eliminate the offset trigger on beaver traps, allow the utilization of otter that were caught incidental to beaver during that March season. We just didn't want to see these beautiful animals wasted and to minimize the harvest of otter that might be taken in nuisance beaver sets in late spring and summer, which is why we have a longer beaver season. The question came up then, why did it not just shorten the beaver season to match the otter season? We manage beaver with an eye toward, we manage otter with an eye towards beaver because beaver are a species that otter spends a lot of time in beaver habitat. And like I mentioned in my last presentation, that road system there, a lot of it was built prior to beaver being restored back on the landscape. So the number of calls that we get are my technician fields about 400 calls related to human wildlife conflicts in a season and does about 50 site visits. And so he's pretty busy. So we are trying to manage the beaver population to minimize the take outside of the season when they would get wasted. We want those beaver to be utilized. But does our current data support this change? And it's a good question. I appreciate the question. I think we need to be very careful about this expansion and make sure that we're not impacting the population. So we reviewed the biological data and we found that since the change, since 2017, we have really only 42 people who successfully trapped otter in the whole state on an annual basis. That's an average over the last three years. Each one takes an average of two. So it's a pretty small number. At the highest harvest, only one otter is being taken every 94 square miles, which is like the size of three towns in Vermont. And the Trapper Mail Survey, which began in 87, has been mandatory since the same rule change. So we're getting good data back. This is a map of the otter taken in 2019. And you can see there's some clustering. It's usually related to either where the trapper effort is and or where the best otter habitat is. That western side of the state is pretty much the Otter Creek drainage. You would expect that probably more otter would come out of there than some of the mountain regions. But you can also see from that that of the 7,100 miles of waterways in Vermont, there's a lot of waterways that aren't getting any kind of impact from that. This is a graph and it's a little messy, but if you look at the orange line, that's the number of successful trappers. And the blue line is the average number otter harvested per trapper. Both are relatively stable over time. The number of successful trappers has declined since the petition was implemented, or actually, yeah, rule change. Rule change, thank you. But it's probably the decline is from a drop in Pell prices. Actually, the markets really kind of crashed and places COVID actually eliminated the market for some of these species in Canada. So we're not surprised about that decline and it's just a very small number of people that are successful right now. That it's in line with our trapping sales. You can see that they had a bump up into like 2012 and then they've kind of steady but declined a little bit as well. The otter harvest is pretty stable. It goes up and down, but over time it's pretty stable. And you can see we made three season changes to the otter harvest, one back in 1980, I think that is, 88. We reduced the season from October 25th to March to October 25th to the middle of February. So we shortened the season then. We actually increased it in 2001 and two, I think. We increased it back to the end of February and then the most recent increase was to the end of March. It doesn't appear that these season changes, the expansion had much effect on the harvest. In fact, the most recent one, we've had some of the lowest harvest we've had in a long time. And the fact that the population is healthy and stable is supported by our otter catch for 100 trap nights. The trend in that is also relatively stable, although we've had a couple of years of pretty high otter catch for 100 trap nights. So several different indices are suggesting that this season change has really not had a tremendous effect. One of the things that we noticed, and those of you who were on the board back then will remember, this is a graph of the number of otter, the blue is 2013 to 2016, the number of otter taken by month. And you can see February was a pretty low number. And from that, we projected that March would be at least as low. I think we estimate it's 10 otter would be taken in March. The average harvest in March over the three years has been 16.6, almost 17. So it's not awful. It's a little higher than what we projected. But you can see that the effort has shifted. It's shifted from the months of November and January and into the months of February and March. People are trapping later in the season. Okay, that's a little bit, could be a little bit concerning because of what Rob suggested about concern about pups and orphaning pups. So we looked at that pretty carefully. And if you look at 2017, we actually took only two females of breeding age in 2017-18. We took 19 otter total, but only two of those were females of breeding age. In 2018-19, we took only one female of breeding age out of 11. And then in 2019-20, so far, I mean, we have to do some more aging because of COVID, we didn't get all the carcasses in on time last year, so we're aging them this year. There may be a few more than one. It might be two or three, but a very small number out of these 20 that were taken in March of last year. And you can see also at the bottom, the percentage of people that were actually targeting beaver during that season. So it is possible that some of those otter might have been taken anyway, even if we had kept the season short. So what this may end up doing, and we're not sure about this yet, this is pretty preliminary, but it looks like the trend in males to females is increasing. So, and that makes sense when you think about it, when you move your effort into the spring, when you're getting closer to parturition and females are gonna sort of shrink their home ranges, males are still out there, they're gonna become a more predominant part of the harvest. And this has been found in New York where they have a season through April, they see that 70% of their harvest is actually male otter. So it's not surprising, but we're waiting to see whether this actually continues. We don't know yet. So in summary, the number of trappers taking otter is very low, 42 around the whole state. The average number of otter taken is 2.1. We have many miles of waterway that are not even impacted. Since the season expansion, the total season harvest is lower than the average that it was prior to that. So it was 192 that total season harvest average was 192 between 2010 and 2016 and 109 between 2017 and 2020. This isn't because of the expansion, this was as the expansion. So we actually have less effort going on out there probably. There's been a shift in effort to later in the season which may result in an increasing trend in males which would be a good thing. And the number of females of breeding age in March is really low, one to two per year. And that's, you know, if we could keep it fairly low, that would be great because we'd be kind of accomplishing several goals at once. If it changes, if we see that this is potentially impacting this population going forward, we'll come back to the board. We'll continue to look at these indices and data very carefully and we'll be back if we have concerns. So Vermont's river otter population, we believe, seems to be healthy, stable, and widespread. And that's a great thing. I guess not questions yet, right, Tim? Keep going. I think if you have specific questions about that, that's fine. Any update or other stuff you do? We, I think you can go back to the summary on the data right there. So the take between 2010 and 2016 was 192. Average. Yeah. 109 was 2017.20. What's the difference on the amount of trappers per hour? There's some that may infer that as a decline in population versus actual trappers. And that, if that decline happened as a result of that change in the harvest, because it happened during the year that we made the change. So we have information, basically the catch per unit effort information would help or not on that. I mean, in terms of numbers of trappers before and after. I mean, the successful number of trappers you could see from that graph is higher before. So you can see how the six, number of successful trappers is the orange. It goes up and down and up and down. It had started to decline even before that. But I think it's probably more to do, at least based on what we're seeing with the information and data that we have, it's probably more to do with pelt prices, decline in pelt prices than it is in effort than it is to do with a decline in the population. Okay. And as far as the number of trappers or trapping licenses, has that been a decline as well? Yeah, that's, well, you can see it here. It peaked in like 2012 or 13, but not, it didn't peak then. I mean, it peaked way, way back. But there was a peak when we had very high pelt prices in that period of time. And it's slowly sort of declined as well. And of that, I mean, we're talking of an aging population here, I hate to say it. And so we have a lot of people buying licenses. These are regular trappers, but the number of those that are actually going out anymore is declining. But I mean, we can look into all that stuff a little further. I don't know, Katie, you have anything or Chris to add to that? Well, I just go forward one slide or two slides. The slide with the, now I guess it's back, I'm sorry. The number of successful different. There, okay. The average number harvested per trapper hasn't declined at all. Yeah. And just to me, when I look at this comparison, it's not the concern of the number of successful trappers going down. It doesn't bear out. I mean, there are fewer trappers, but those that are trapping are still harvesting the same number of otter. If it was a population related decline, you would also see a decline in the average number of harvested per trapper. And then the CPU data as well is a second measure of that where, you know, there it is. Actually increase in catch per unit of Africa, which would be indicative of increasing population. Yeah, and that will, you know, that's, this is early to actually take that to the bank yet, but we'll watch that trend going forward. Okay, so I am gonna, if there's no other. Oh yeah. Can you just go back to the percentage of the trappers trying for beaver next month? Percentage of trappers trying for beaver but taking our, no, you were on it. Okay, wait, that one? One more. Perfect. Oh, that one, okay. Yeah, yeah, sorry. So that's percentage per beaver that got. That's right, that's the percentage of the 20 that actually were, in our blue card data, we asked them what they're targeting, and that's the percentage that said they were targeting beaver. So it varies, you know, it was higher this year, this past year than it was initially, but you know, and a lot of that is just based on whether it's a human-wildlife conflict. Even during the season, we try to get people who have human-wildlife conflicts to at least do the trapping during the season rather than in the summer when the animal is not primed and probably except for the meat is gonna get wasted. Whether have anything to do with that? Like, whether have anything to do with that? Oh, with the shifting? So it's an easier spring, harder spring? Exactly, that has a huge effect, yep, yep. Okay, I'm only gonna, because we talked about the rodenticides already, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna probably turn this over to you except to say, you know, we're gonna keep testing for those. If anybody has an interest in the results of those at some point, once we get them back, I'm hoping, you know, there'll be some regional, regional results soon too. And I'll just wanna say that, you know, Katie's gonna go into the details, but this is just the results from the Martin camera work that's being done in the Southern Green Mountain National Forest when cooperation with the Central Connecticut State University. And so we've got cameras out, so it's not just about our data, it's not just about our harvest data, there's other, and I think Katie will have a map from other camera collections. But you can see here, the red are cameras that picked up six fissure or more. The yellow, the beige are five, I think, the yellow are four. And I think I believe that what the researcher told me was that out of 51 cameras, 49 had fissure pictures, at least one. So in terms of whether or not this population's at risk, it really, at least in this region, it really does not look like it based on the camera work that we've got done. We can get cat for unit of effort on cameras too. So I'm gonna turn it over to Katie because she can actually explain this much better than I can. Thanks, camera. Sure. Sorry, sorry to trip you. Hello. A piece of settlement in, that's what we're getting at. Yeah, that wasn't a very enthusiastic response. I was expecting more. So just as a reminder, I'm Dr. Katie Geter and I'm the biometrician and research manager for Vermont Fish and Wildlife. I've been working there about four years now. I'm going to be going through the fissure petition, which is to place moratorium on fissure trapping. And so I'll be presenting Vermont Fish and Wildlife's response kind of in three parts. I wanted to start just by bringing us back to the mission. Vermont Fish and Wildlife's mission is the conservation of fish, wildlife plants and their habitats for the people of Vermont. So the people means all people, all values, all benefits. Just like what Kim was speaking to through both of her presentations, our mission is really to provide those benefits for all. And that includes a complex set of balancing different biological, social and environmental factors. So I just wanted to place the department's response within that context and I'll come back to that. But I wanted to dive right into the petition and the next 10 slides or so will present responses to specific parts of that petition. So what you see in the red writing and the quotes is directly taken from the fissure petition. And I wanted to point out some scientific facts using these. So the first is Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has not taken management action to maintain a sustainable fisher population, one that is similar to that inferred from the CPUE in 1998 to 2004. So CPUE is catch per unit of effort. This means that you have a trapper who sets a line and for whatever species they're trapping, they catch that number of animals within a certain timeframe that they have the trap running for. So the unit of effort there is what is used is the trap nights. That's a 24 hour period. So if you have a trap line running with five traps for five nights, then that's your unit of effort and the five animals that you catch is the number of animals CPUE is calculated by taking that number of animals and the trapping effort and calculating a catch per hundred trap nights. And that is only one index of a population. It's an index of a population, which means that it doesn't equate to a population at all in no way, shape or form. It is an index of a population that is combined with a lot of other indices of populations like sex and age trends, sightings, roadkill and surveys. This isn't to say that CPUE is not valuable. It is, it's just not a population. You can't infer a population from CPUE. And I will probably say that again, about 10 times before this presentation is over. CPUE is just one index. The reason why we use all these indices is because wildlife is so difficult to track. You can't just go out into the wild and count the species that you'd like to get an idea of. And even if you wanted to do that, even if you had the capacity to do that, you're still only getting a minute step shot in time. So just as an example, say the Fish and Wildlife Department had a bunch of money. I know, funny, right? And a bunch of employees. So many of them, we wouldn't know what to do with them. Say we could go out and count these species. Well, the most direct way of counting wildlife that we currently have using technology is probably by cameras. And so if you take the number of count points that you would need to do over the entire state of Vermont for forest habitat for a species like Fisher, you'd end up with thousands of individual count points that you'd have to cover. And that would end up in costs for cameras, SD cards, staff and labor costs, gas and mileage, data hosting and analysis. And it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and you would still only get that one two week timeframe. Another couple months later could be a completely different scenario. So it's not so easy to count animals and it's certainly not possible to infer a population from one simple indices alone, index alone. So, there it is again. One index is not a whole picture. The analysis of the Fisher population presents evidence that supports a decision that the season for a Fisher should be closed. That the evidence that is used in the petition is CPUE. However, there are many other factors like diseases that Kim mentioned, toxins, climate change, development, prey, hunting and trapping and other recreational pursuits like biking and habitat factors and cars on roads that can affect a population. And if you're only using one simple index based on hunting or trapping then you're not getting the whole picture. You are not, it can actually end up obscuring all of the other factors that can indeed and do affect wildlife hugely. So specifically, some of the statistical analysis that is presented in the petition is not valid. There's another quote, CPUE data calculated using the VTFWD method and the traditional method provides little help in evaluating any trends in the monitored population. It took me a while to figure out what the VTFWD method and the traditional method actually meant. It wasn't described very well. So I recreated the data and spent some time analyzing it in different ways until I figured out how what these two methods meant since there wasn't any real explanation provided. But basically what the VTFWD method is, they're both methods of just calculating a CPUE by taking the total number of animals and taking the total number of effort and calculating a CPUE that way. The difference is, the difference still gives you one measure of CPUE per year. So that's not what the department uses in analyzing and inferring animal populations. But basically the traditional method takes the total catch in one year and the total effort in one year and just divides it, the catch by the effort. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't account for many trappers out there who might not catch anything. It doesn't count those zeros if you calculate it that way, statistically. It's also not at the sample level. If you're sampling a population, you wanna calculate that measure on the sample level, which is the trap line. You don't wanna just take an entire total and use that because that's going to obscure a lot of the nuances in that data. And I did actually provide an explanation of this. Quote in green is from an email I sent to the petitioners to explain why calculating CPUE in the way that they do, that traditional method that they espouse, why that traditional method is not statistically valid. And so that's that quote over there from my response. And I offered to explain it further to their biostatician colleague that was mentioned. And I was told that they didn't work with the department for obvious reasons. I'm not sure what those reasons are, but regardless, I couldn't give any more explanation than that. So another quote from the petition is that the VT method introduces substantial variability. This is the VTFW method, which again, it only gives you one measure of CPUE per year. So it's really not what we use in our analyses to infer a population. But basically, this method that they refer to is taking each trapline CPUE and then averaging it out to get one average per year. It's a minor difference, but the reason that they give for not using it is that the data is substantially variable. And that's what I'd like to point out here is that data is and should be variable. If you don't have variable data, that's a problem. You're doing something wrong. The natural world is complex and convoluted and you want your data to reflect that. So I'm not really sure what the petitioner's issue with variability is, but it's actually a good thing for statistics. So this is our CPUE that is calculated per year. That's what this graph is showing. It's showing those individual circles. There's too many of them each year to really show them very, very clearly, but you can see that there's multiple little circles each year. Each of those circles represents an individual trapline. That's why you see a lot of zeros in each year because there's a lot of trappers that don't catch anything. You also have some where those hundreds in 2019 and 1993, that was one trapper that happened to run two traps for two trap knights and caught two fisher. So that's what that is. But it still reflects the reality of what those trappers are catching and the nuances of it. And that's what we look at. This is what we analyze. We don't analyze one CPUE measure per year. We might present that as a trend just for visible visual purposes because this is difficult to interpret visually, but analysis wise, this is what we analyze. So the petitioners did a statistical comparison of CPUE that is shown in this, hopefully that's showing up, right? It looks really fluorescent green on that screen, but hopefully you can all see this line over here. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah. So. Petition of a car. This is taken directly from the petition, by the way. This graph, so I do apologize if it's not too visible or anything like that. But each of these points here in the line is an average CPUE that's calculated by taking the total number of animals and the total number of effort and calculating one CPUE from it. So that's the comparison that's presented here in the petition. That's the statistical analysis that is being done on that data, one point per year. So statistical comparison that documents that the Fisher harvest since 2003 has been significantly below the lower 95% confidence limit of the mean harvest from 1990 to 2004. So I actually, I didn't see any mention of CPUE here. I saw harvest and the mean, if you look at the mean harvest from this data, it's actually almost the same between these two periods. So there were a lot of statements in the petition like this that were a little bit confusing because I think the positioners were confusing CPUE with harvest. And so it was difficult even for me to kind of interpret but this statement is just false. It's that harvest is a difference of three individuals. It's really not different. And the other aspect of this is that CPUE dropped below the lower 95% confidence limit or almost two standard errors below the mean of the baseline period. I know I'm losing some of you here because this is where it starts to get into some of the more nuanced statistics except this isn't nuanced statistics. This is really quite basic and a false statement because confidence limit is different than a standard error. And if you understand what they mean, I'm not gonna try and explain it here because it gets into equations that are going to just lose you entirely. But essentially what it means is that if you make that statement, you are basically saying that your CPUE dropped from the top red line to the lower red line. That's two standard errors below the mean of the baseline period. So I'm not sure what the petitioners are trying to say here. I think that they mean that they're trying to show a decrease in the CPUE that shows in the period from 2004 to 2019. But the understanding of statistics is not quite there. So it took me a while to actually even understand what the petition was saying. So, and here's the bigger picture because that CPUE trend does show, it's based on one measure per year, but it does show a decrease. And so here's the bigger picture for that. When there's a statement made that CPUE dropped below something. This is the data that the department uses. These blue dots here. This is individual CPUE for each track one. And so the bigger picture starts to emerge that that decrease is really being driven by some pretty high individual, maybe 10 or 15 points in total that drove that CPUE up during that period. And essentially the CPUE remained the same if you run a regression on all those points, it doesn't have a trend. It doesn't have a decreasing trend. It is being driven by a few trappers that happen to have higher CPUEs. Doesn't mean that they're catching more Fisher as I showed with the average number of Fisher. That didn't change. They just happened to catch Fisher with fewer effort. And so if you look at the effort versus the catch, you'll see that there was a season change in 2004 where the season was extended from two weeks to one month. Yeah, yeah. So because of that, if you look at that blue line, the blue line in that graph is the total of trap nights for that year. And the total catch is an orange. Right after that season extension, you see those lines flip because the CPUE never changed. The catch, the average catch didn't change. It was just that there was more effort now because the season is a month longer. That's what drove the CPUE down. Also, because we don't only look at CPUE, you have to look at all aspects of population dynamics. The male to female ratio for Fisher from 2004 to 2019, it's been remarkably quite stable during that whole period. There hasn't been any change. If there was a change in a population, you would expect this index to vary more or to trend down or up. Same thing for age ratios. So if you look at the proportion of juveniles in the harvest, that too has been remarkably stable every year, right around 4.5. And it doesn't really vary much beyond that. And so those two indices give us more evidence that the population is stable. Moving into even more bigger picture into some of our collaborations that we have with other researchers that Kim mentioned the camera studies that we've been working on with the University of Connecticut. There's another camera study that we've been working on through the University of New Hampshire that is actually, it's kind of going to be ongoing moving into some other species and involving University of Vermont as well. But the results from this study, part of the results from this study that I have from a paper in 2019 by Alexei Serret-Nadel shows that what the left hand map is showing with the green, that is basically the probability of occupancy that's derived from cameras. It's a mathematical model. It's commonly used and it's very well verified in the research. It shows that basically that bright green is about 90% occupancy of habitat, probability. Probability of occupancy of habitat. So that's showing that across a wide sloth of Vermont, Fisher have a high likelihood of occurring in those habitats. That's a big area of Vermont. That's huge. That tells us that Fisher are very well distributed across Vermont. And when we actually have those cameras out and they're collecting detections, those detections are high. And so they're high in every place where cameras are located. So all of this tells us that Fisher are widespread. Their populations are stable and they're doing quite well in Vermont. So the other point in the petition that is made relates to a baseline period where the petitioners say we also believe that if the baseline period were extended further back, it is likely that the situation would be even worse. I'm not sure what this baseline period is based on. There's no context for any kind of stability during 1990 to 2004 that it's based on. There's no acceptable threshold for Fisher population numbers or CPUE or any kind of, I guess, thought process for why this is a baseline period. I really couldn't figure out why this was the baseline period. And in fact, if you extended it further back, the situation would be even worse. Well, for historical context, Fisher were so endangered, like Kim mentioned, in the past that they had to be reintroduced. So this concept of shifting baselines, I think, is a little bit tenuous because there's no reason given for why 1990 to 2004 is such a great baseline. It also discounts all the other years prior to that, that Fisher were on the landscape. And so the Fisher petition really ignores a lot of the complexity that Kim and now I am trying to emphasize in wildlife species management. With harvest data that gives us quite a lot of really valuable information. You don't only have catch per unit of effort. You also have sex and age data for a lot of the species. You collect disease and toxicity information that can be used for surveillance. And all of that is in the context of expert statistical knowledge and analysis that goes into this. And on top of that, there's also road incidental mortality, camera networks that we've mentioned, general habitat approaches like Vermont Conservation Design, forest and land cover data, habitat surveys, public opinion surveys, I could go on and on. I couldn't really fit it in the slide, but we use a ton of different science to back up our decisions for managing the species. So the three, I'll just end this petition response with three going over three of the main points that were made at the end of the petition. So these are three of the, this was like the evidence that was given for the Fisher moratorium. And this is taken directly from the petition. So starting with the first significant decline in the number of fishers trapped over the last 15 years. This as I've already shown through average catch not changing is false. There's no significant decline in the number of fishers trapped. And that bears true for, so when we report the number of animals that are trapped, the CPUE calculation is different in that for fur bearer reports, the reported number is, it is now more with mandatory reporting. It's more in line with what the actual number is, but before mandatory reporting in some years, if you didn't get a high percentage of reports back, you might be undercounting those species, total catches. So that was adjusted using records for records for some species. And so that was adjusted to reflect more of the actual number that would have been reported if you had a 100% reporting rate. So that's the derived average here in those green boxes. And the reported average is just how many the trapper reports reported. But it really doesn't matter how you calculate it because both of them are not very, there's no significant decline there. And actually the derived average shows an increase in the number of fish are trapped over the last 15 years. So there's really not much of a difference. Here's the trend line for reported catch and derived catch. And you can see actually that in more recent years, they match up more closely because of mandatory reporting. But regardless, there's no declining trend there. Certainly no trend at all. And so moving on to the second point that significant decline in Fisher-CPUE over the last 15 years, as I explained before, effort increased as a result of season change. Catch didn't change, effort did. And that's what made it appear like the CPUE declined. Finally, Fisher harvest since 2003 has been significantly below the lower 95% confidence limit of the mean harvest from 1990 to 2004, a proposed surrogate for a sustainable population. The first part of this statement is false, as I've shown. And CPUE does not equate population. It's a useful index, but you cannot use it alone to infer a population. And so the last part of this presentation, I just wanted to touch upon something that kind of bothered me with this petition, specifically because I tried to reach out to explain the science. And this relates to this idea of fallacies and how it affects the department's ability to conduct the great work that they do. And so when there's this issue of a shifting baseline, this is the baseline that this is the historical context that Vermont's wildlife conservation and management is based on. Before the department existed, there was really low forest cover. There was many species were in severe decline to a point where they needed to be reintroduced. And today there's 80% forest cover across Vermont. There's studies that have shown that Vermont has some of the largest unbroken habitat tracks and highest species richness of all New England states. So this figure here is from a graduate student at UVM who did her doctoral research on predicting the habitat and occurrence of 10 common species, wildlife species in Vermont. And she's doing a postdoctoral degree right now working on projecting these models forward, which I'll show in a little bit. But basically Vermont outlined in black compared to all the other New England states, the red is high species richness. This was based on a ton of data that was gathered on expert opinion, on species occurrence data, camera data, land cover data. And it showed that Vermont is in really quite a great place right now for species richness and for habitat. We're in a great situation right now. And that is no accident. It's because of this department's work. It's because of a number of other organizations work. It's because of the collaborations that we do. It's because of all this hard work that goes on that everyone wants for wildlife conservation. And when you make false statements and make errors in trying to interpret data from a statistical standpoint that is just wrong, then you undermine expertise, trust and credibility that has taken years and years to culture. And so I want to harp on this fallacies point because poor science is when you take a single metric and a value, you don't explain a baseline. You use inappropriate statistics. And this increases the likelihood that your conclusions will be biased. It basically just manipulates data to support an opinion and it doesn't account for all the other indices and data and threats that you have to incorporate for wildlife management. But most of all, it deludes the value of science. And that's what probably bothers me the most about this particular petition, is that it flies in the face of good science. And as a biometrician and a scientist, I've always loved animals from a very, very young age, but I was always fascinated in the why. I always wanted to understand the answer of why something was the way it was. And so I've always been a huge proponent of using the best available science and using the best methods and diluting the value of science does nothing to help wildlife conservation. A quote by a scientist, Eugenie Clark, she was in the medical field. She said once that we ignore public understanding of science at our own peril. And I think that's why you heard from Kim about all the hard work that we do to try to engage the public. It's so important that the public has a good understanding of what we do of wildlife management and science because otherwise you risk getting quotes like science-based wildlife management requires no special training. Well, it does. And science-based wildlife management is simple and it's not. And wildlife scientists put their personal values first. Well, they don't. And wildlife scientists can't be trusted. And they obviously can, but you risk all that if you don't really work hard to connect people with the land and have them understand what you do. And so I just wanted to end here with emphasizing that this is where we're at right now. Vermont Fish and Wildlife conserves and protects hundreds of thousands of acres of land. It also conserves many animal and plant threatened and endangered species in addition to the species that it manages. And it's involved in not just wildlife recovery but habitat and fish as well. And science fallacies put all this at risk. And I wanted to end here with the follow-up to that graduate student here, Skye Kirven-Gelman et al that figure I put up before that showed the wildlife species diversity in Vermont. This is from a follow-up paper to that where she predicted based on different scenarios moving forward in the next 50 to 100 years what New England would be facing depending on different scenarios of development and climate change moving forward. And so under all these scenarios, I just want to point out that this top one is our current situation. All the rest are future projections. And look at that red. That red indicates species diversity, the high species diversity that we have right now. Under any scenario, any future scenario, we stand to lose that. That's really scary. So we really need to keep working at conserving species and their habitat. It's so important. And we can't do that if science is constantly being attacked and diluted. And so I just wanted to end by showing that and the important work that is at stake here. Are there any questions here, Kate? I just, I already asked him earlier but I'm not sure everyone else heard it. And I thought it might be somewhat beneficial. But the part of that petition there was a reference to the levers from the fishers that were sent to the testing and they're basically asking for a moratorium on trapping. I think it was important to point out that the levers were a product of trappers, is that right? That's correct. And the other aspect of that, if there is something that may be of interest such as a new disease or something that they're studying, I think based on what we're seeing and that continuing trapping gives you more samples to continue the study. And that would be your best collection effort. It's allowed us to collect on a whole host of diseases and toxins that would have been a lot more challenging to actually collect that kind of information if we had to ask for volunteers to send them in. Well, let's move back up front for the discussion. To the petitions individually just so we have a clear record. And I would suggest we do that on the first three and then discuss the live action trial camera petition after this. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to go through them discussion-wise in the way that they were presented to us from the department. So the petitioners have had their chance to say what they want to say, but if there are any further questions for the petitioners and specific things you're looking for, I don't know if you're here anymore. No. Where are the petitioners? I guess they left. That's just boring. Well, I should say though that Lisa is not on the line anymore but she did say if we have questions for her we can get her back on the line. So, but the others haven't been on the line. So let's talk about the Mr. Medlitz petition. Any discussion on that? Are there any questions for the department? I would just a comment. I was gonna say from obviously both great presentations but from yours it basically says that quoting a past college professor, statistics don't lie but liars use statistics. So you've made that clear and I was thankful for that. Jay? I just had a question, the petitioner's not here but maybe somebody else can answer it. You made a comment that fishers compete for some of the same game species targeted by hunters. What if fishers target for food source? Small mammals, no shooting air. They reintroduced for porcupine and they do take porcupine but squirrels, any small mammal. I think that's a misrepresentation of why we have a season on Fisher in my opinion. Bill? Just a couple of notes. When I asked Lisa if she could tell us more than 19 fishermen were taken and somebody asked her who wrote the paper and she couldn't give us the name. That bothers me that those are facts that are being thrown out there that they don't have any backing for. Whether or not she presents it later on, I don't know but we're here to make a decision on facts that are not backed up by somebody else. That just irks me a little bit. The only comment I had about Kim's presentation was that I kind of disagreed with her statement that a trapping has no bearing on non-hunter's ability to access and enjoy wildlife and I think that that's vastly understating the value of trapping personally because I think that it has incredibly enhanced their ability to enjoy that. But perhaps we were just being too humble but that was my take on it. I think that if it wasn't for trappers or hunters or fishers to bring back a lot of these species, they wouldn't be around for people to enjoy. So that's my own comment on that. Is there a motion? And this is on the petition to suspend trapping seasons? Yes. Mr. Mezler's petition. Well, the first one. It's moratorium on the fisher trap. Well, I brought it up, we were gonna do it in a way that Kim presented. So she responded to Walter's first. Which one is that? Petition to suspend trapping seasons. That was with the 10 findings. Okay. I'd like to make a motion that we reject that petition. Just a second. Okay, so we have Brian to deny the petition and that. It sounded like Marty. Was that Marty? No. Marty was the second. Is there any further discussion on that? I'd like to comment on your reply to that petition. I think very well done. I cannot imagine the comment of putting the response. I think very well done. Was that motion include the suspension to the moratorium? This is just the motion on just the one petition that was presented by Walter Medwood. The second one listed on your agenda, petition to close trapping season and petition to suspend trapping. Yeah. And so a yes vote was to deny it. That's correct. There was for clarification, there were two aspects of that petition. Yeah. It was to close the trapping season and then that and also asked for closing harvest of red and gray fawn. Named about six pieces. It did not name all the furbiers in the state. So that's what you're denying. You wanna make it clear that you're denying all the aspects of that petition. Yeah. That's correct. Yeah, okay. The entire tactic you got from me. There's no more discussion, so I will go around the horn here. A yes would be to deny that petition in its entirety as it was given to us. And that would be to see the opposite. So Brian Bailey. Yes. Mike Bancroft. Yes. I mean yes. Wendy Butler. Yes. I don't think we're not here. Mike Colson. Yes. This is not here. Brian McCarthy. Yes. The Roblox. Yes. Jay Sweeney. Yes. Marty Van Beren. Yes. Bill Pickens. Yes. All right. No. The petition is denied. Okay. Next up on our agenda tonight, we will get into the second one that came to it, which was Steve. The law. It's also made tonight. Otters. Yeah, Otters was the second one, yep. Is there any discussion on the petition to return the end of trapping season for the Otters to head towards any questions, comments? Quite crap. Well, I'll say that I commend on all of these presentations by the board, by the agency, because I think it's very easy when you are very passionate about a subject to find information to support your position. Unfortunately, that information sometimes is not backed by sound practices or science, and I have no reason to believe that the information that was presented to us by Ken or the board, Dr. Geider tonight, does it have solid backing in the world, in the world we live in, in Fish and Wildlife? And I found it very educational, and I haven't found anything in this presentation of the petition that leads me to believe that we have a reason to change this, and I'll make a motion that we deny this petition. I'll second the motion. Thanks, motion. Brian, seconds. Is there any further discussion on that? It was an interesting presentation. It was, I mean, I will say, it was interesting to follow up with the change that happened years ago and see what has resulted from that. It was also encouraging to see that, I think, populations are still just fine. Any more discussion on that? So a yes would be to deny the petition. Brian Bailey. Yes. Mike Bancroft. Yes. I'm the yes. Wendy Butler. Yes. Mike Coulson. Yes. Brian McCarthy. Yes. Dave Robler. Yes. Jay Sweeney. Yes. Marty Vampirian. Yes. Bill Pickens. Yes. Can we last on these petitions would be the Fisher? Is there any discussion on the Fisher petition? I'd just like to say that in reading that and having weighed it in light of further education we received, that there was no compelling evidence whatsoever of bird practices, or detrimental to the abundance of the wildlife. And the ACFC supported that petition. Bill. This is not scientific. This is just a dumb trapper doing this thing. I've been trapping the same trapline since about late 19th century. Myself and my partners catch for Fisher has gone up or down by four fishers per year over that time here. And we normally trap from December 1st to about the 16th or 17th of December, and then we quit. Because we've got all the fishers that we've wanted to catch. In the last three years, we have averaged 18 fishers a year off that crap line. I can't see where the fisher's operation is declining. Not in that area. But I don't live in downtown Bermuda. It is disappointing that they're not here to answer questions. I just want to say that. I think this is a repeating occurrence, and it consumes a massive amount of time. So I make a motion that I was disappointed. Yeah, Marty? Marty's made a motion to deny. I'm sorry. Who is the second? Jay. Jay. Any further discussion? I suggest that if petitioners are going to bring the occasion to us and use resources to make a presentation and inform us that they need to stay. Because to me it's equal to somebody plugging their ears. I think that's disrespectful. Given the amount of time that was put into the response and the offer to work together multiple times, I think that we saw tonight is disappointing. This is another powerful circle. We'll do back here again. Yeah. Insanity. Any further discussion on that? Okay. We ask you to deny that. Brian Bailey? Yeah. Mike Bancroft? Yes. I'm a yes. Wendy Butler? Yes. Mike Coulson? Yes. Brian McCarthy? Yes. Artie Van Buren? Yes. And Bill Pickens? Yes. All right. Let's deny it. Last question on our agenda tonight is the cell phone camera position, and that petitioner has also left. So that's my part and won't give you a scientific response as you saw from the biologists earlier for two reasons. One is I'm not capable. And the second is this petition is really not a biological question either way. It's not necessary to use cell phone cameras for the management of species and for successful hunting. It's also not having any impact on harvest and population aspects of the population by increasing harvest. So this is really a social question. I thought that the petitioner made an interesting and important point when he referenced the breadth of technological change. And I think that you will see and recognize that the technological changes that have happened in hunting are just as broad as they are in other aspects of our lives and aren't restricted to cell phone game cameras. They involve regular game cameras. They involve rhinos and other types of electronic communication. They involve the GPS tracking for dog hunting. There are many aspects of technological advances that have impacted hunting. And so I would suggest direct request that the board deny the petition both because there's no biological imperative to do otherwise and also because I think this is a much broader conversation about the ethics of using a wide variety of technological advances in pursuit of game. And I don't think that cell phone live action game cameras are unique or have an outsized impact on enemies. So I guess with that I'd request a discussion or questions from the board. I'm happy to have questions directed to other members of the department. Of course as well. But I do not think that there's a fundamental difference between use of cell phone game cameras and the use of other types of electronic advances, particularly communications, when people track deer, if there are two or more people tracking deer and they are unable to be in communication with each other via radio or via Rhino. I think that is just a significant advantage, if not a greater advantage than a live action game camera. And I don't think that this petition should be approved singling out one aspect of the wide variety of technological changes that we've seen. So happy to answer any questions. I'm sure that either law enforcement members of the law enforcement division or members of the biological staff are here. We'll give you their opinions and their perspectives on it as well. Members? Yeah, Brian. I was curious. I'm not sure who to direct this question to. Is there any case whatsoever of anybody actually looking on a cell phone and says there's a deer. I'm going to go kill it. It's absurd to me to think that it may give you a little bit of an advantage, but you're still going to grow out there where your camera is. And I can't believe that it's happening. I know a lot of people that have these cameras. And the biggest use for them is, hey, look at that. They've got a nice picture on their phone. They saved the picture. I don't know if a single person has actually used it for their advantage but all of them are here because a deer or a bear or whatever in their food plot and ran out there and chew it. I mean, I've never heard of that being done. Mr. Baylor, we have confirmation of one animal and the wardens, feel free to speak if you know of any more. And the only reason we know about it is because it was in the newspaper in the Addison Independent last year where a gentleman who was at work had a deer pop out and asked his boss if he could leave and he wouldn't shut it. I was very suspicious. There was someone keeping that deer there that was not illegal. We weren't able to prove that. I'm not sure how far the investigation went, but I made it now and I want to look into it. But without some sort of ability to hold that wildlife there, you're setting up on a trail in a deer's or bear's home range and hoping to get a picture out of it. I agree with you 100%. It's very unlikely that you're going to have any success. This guy was an anomaly and the only one I've heard of were the wardens and feel free to speak of others. Have a hard time visualizing that happen or at least to the extent of what this gentleman was saying. He's talking about ethics. I'm sure it's possible. I'm sure it's happened. In the rare occasion, I'm also equally sure that somebody has radioed their hunting partner and told them, I'm by this mountaintop and he's coming towards you. I don't think this is particularly unique among the different changes that have happened in technology. Without even getting into other aspects of technology beyond electronics. I hear that would have happened and happened often. I guess that would have a different opinion. All the people that I know of. I have one myself. I actually never said that on my phone. The people that work, and also you get a picture of a bear and all the trees have something. They save the picture. I don't know of anybody that's ever used one. So yeah, that's a deer. I'm going to go out and shoot it. I don't know. Dave. I just wanted to get a record of the exact language with B&C as it was quoted from the petitioner and I did speak to Justice Crane. Justice Crane is the director of the Big King Management Records for the Golden Crockett. I did speak to him. He is from this little mountaintop and he sent me the exact language and I'll quote it. It's showing my usage, the use of any technology that delivers real-time location data, including photos, to target or guide a hunter to any species or animal in a manner that elicits an immediate real-time response by the hunter is not permitted. And it's not permitted for entry into their records. And speaking with Justin, they are the beings, he sits on the board and some of their statements they put out, he's part of that. And they are not against cell phone cameras at all. But they are a, they walk a fine line of keeping technology not too invasive on them. And it is a fine line because it is a constant involved animal. So many other examples that were mentioned were the GPS College, for example. They don't ban or don't allow the GPS College to maintain our dogs for like the online repair. Just not at the time of release, but if you want to turn them on after the fact that the dog's active on, they're fine with that. So that's where their stance is. But they're not out advocating for the ban and state laws to actually prohibit them. In regards to Arizona, I mentioned it briefly earlier to the petitioner. Arizona banned them because they're dealing with water table issues on public lands. It's really, it's concentrating animals and the fish and wildlife were concerned on the air ability to manage the land. So moving project did make a stance that they could support the ban on that, those cameras in that state, only because it was having a management effect. And that is their stance. If any technology doesn't just have two cameras, if it's having an effect on the management of the animal, they do stay behind the banning of that technology, whatever it may be. But anyway, that's their stance. That's the official language from their record, but that is where they're at. And that came directly from it. My question to the petitioner, because he stated that New Mexico would ban banning on public lands. My question was going to be about private lands and how much public land versus private land is a New Mexico ban. So he won't get no response. But there's a lot of public land in New Mexico. And then he probably won't be able to ban public land. But if there's been a private land, or if there's just been a public land, or if you can use a camera in a rural land, it's part of New Mexico's public land. It's a private land. Absolutely. And New Mexico did its ban traffic. And what Dave said here, he said, I'm not hoping young and moving rockets, data code, he said, under the unwritten rules, always governing the actions of the alphabet. So that was the elusive. Just in terms of discussion, all were the vast resources of our department. And until they had an attention to this border, they asked by a very small group of people to legislate their morals. And I don't think that's our job. I think our job is to provide official wildlife training to everyone. And I feel a little resentful of it. You know, I get that entirely. And I get the frustration. I will say that I think in and amongst these petitions, there were some questions that we should answer. And I would say there were many, there were also ones that I didn't think were necessary to answer. But there were some that I think were worthy of an answer. And you saw the answer from the biologists on those. So I would say it's a mixed bag from my perspective, speaking only from myself. When they get the answers, if they ask the question that they put the petition out, if they ask the question, well, how will they get the answers? Well, they got the answers. The answers were off, which is the extent of what we can do. You also offered to work with them. Any further discussion? Emotion. There's a motion to not support the petition. Change of your one. Further discussion on that? Okay. Hearing anything, we're going to go through this. So yes would be to deny this petition to ban live action trail cameras. Brian Bain. Yes. Mike Bancroft. Yes. I'm a yes. Wendy Butler. Yes. Mike Coulson. Yes. Brian McCarthy. Yes. Jay Sweeney. Yes. Right in the mirror. Yes. Bill Pickens. Yes. Okay. Also, it was not passed. Before we move on, Commissioner May thanks again to everybody involved. It was obviously a big effort, so very appreciative. And as I always say, when discussion is short, that's usually because it was pretty definitive response. So I appreciate that very much. And your efforts were not wasted because I learned a lot. Great. We'll switch. Decision. Thank you. Thank you. Brief update for us. Moose permit deadline is June 30th. And we're playing a drawing in August. Sort of an internal note here that the Fish and Wildlife Department has a large number of vacancies right now and crucial vacancies. So to the extent that that interferes in your ability to get responses from us, answers from us in the public's ability to get answers and responses from us. I apologize. We're working as quickly as we can to fill them, but we have a number of crucial vacancies, including two of the three program directors and the program managers in the Wildlife Division. So Steve Perron and Adam Miller. Adam went to the Department of Environmental Conservation. Steve Perron retired. So two of the three, two of Mark's three lieutenants are vacant right now. In addition, there's several other important vacancies in the Wildlife Division and a couple in Education Outreach, a couple in the Warden Force. So we're a little bit short-handed right now, but working on filling those. And of course we have, you know, a pretty extensive and I think responsible but pretty exhaustive hiring process in the state government and particularly in the department. So that actually takes a lot more staff to engage in hiring committees to replace those positions. So I just wanted to mention that. Speaking of vacancies, two, one change in one vacancy, both of which I'm sorry to see, but also congratulate both of them. Forrest Hammond, Frosty is done this summer retiring. And to say it will be difficult to replace would be a vast understatement. It will be impossible to replace. The BEAR project has been the great beneficiary of his work. All of us as his colleagues have been a beneficiary of that and this board has been a beneficiary of his expertise and his dedication. And now we'll have to handle 10,000 nuisance bear complaints of the private citizens. But congratulations to Frosty. Do you want to say anything Frosty? I don't want to put you on the spot, but do it. Just how much I've enjoyed working for the department and very been proud to. Including been involved with the board the time I've come before the board, I've been impressed with a lot of the people there and a lot of folks have become friends through the years and working with that as well. So it's bittersweet leaving, but I'm looking forward to other chapters and a lot of things I want to do. So congratulations. Congratulations. Anything Mark, are you good? Man, his guy's not going to be replaceable. I'm sweating bullets right now. The others, we can fail that family. I'm putting myself, not Frost. Well, Frost will be greatly missed as a friend and a colleague and as a leader of the bear project, but we're excited for him. The other change is Will Dwayne, who's been my assistant for four, three years now, is going to go and replace Jane Lizorchek as the head of our land acquisitions effort. And so that'll be a new and exciting learning curve for Will. I literally cannot do anything without his help, so that'll be a bit of a challenge. I hope all of you bear with me, but Will, do you want to say anything? Just that it's been a pleasure getting to know all of you and understand the interplay between the important work that you do and how we support you here at the department. Looking really forward to getting out into the state more and perhaps as I come through your various counties I'm going to look some people up and maybe get into a stream or two. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure working with all of you and I'll be available for sure at going forward. Well, I have a break before they post it. And last, I just wanted to give my very, very heartfelt and sincere thanks to Kim and to Katie and to Chris and to Lieutenant Fowler and to all the others on the FUR team for preparing the responses to these petitions. Our folks in the department take their jobs and take their trust very seriously. I think you can see that in the very significant effort that went into those responses. And so I just wanted to say, even after seven years I am continually impressed with their science and their dedication. So thanks. Appreciate it, you guys. Thank you for all that. It was nothing. Nothing a few dozen hours for half a dozen people can't do. I know. I try not to think about that. Thank you. We should insert the pizza to after the presentation. Right. And that's it for me, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Let's go around the board. Dave. I just want to thank Kim. I've been on the board for maybe three years. And I'm not a trapper, but every time you're called to task I learn a lot. And I don't know when you're due to retire, but I'm sure it's going to be denied. So I'm sure you're on a long time. I just want to thank you. I enjoy wildlife. And again, I don't trap, but I learn a lot about some species that I don't really target. And it's just great. It's a great class to be a part of. You make it learning. Okay, that's it. As far as math goes, you're over my head a little bit. Okay, math to talk. But it's great because it's clear you know yourself and it's just... Yeah, it's too bad that you guys feel like you're on the mind. You just know that the rest of us... There's a lot of public that really did a lot of trust in you. We do appreciate what you do. Thank you very much. And that's about it. I did wildlife. I was successful during the first season. That was a lot of fun as it was. Now it's summer projects. Martin, I'll skip you this time. Okay. It was good to see Dustin. He's the ward that used to be down there in the area. Orin and I met the guy that comes up. Justin Turner. He was good to see him. He'd come to the shop with a good visit for about half an hour. He had a good turkey season. My wife and I did. We're seeing Les Landon on two-gallon railway right now with all the acquisition. That's kind of the topic a little bit. The guys are a little worried. And again, great presentation. I learned a lot. And I like science and agriculture. Thank you. Bill, good to have you. Good evening. Is there anything for us? I might get a haircut. It feels good. It's good to have you. I don't want him and the rest of the staff over there to know. I know you get hammered by the wildlife coalition and field menune. And there is respect for what you do. But you need to know that the sportsmen that I talk to have full respect for what you do and what you say. And it's for those of you that were around during the dough loaders just remember back then everybody they carried a gun was an expert on the earth. These people come into this state because they like it and they get here and find out what we're doing and they can't stand it anymore and they just try to force it on us and force it down and everybody else is broke. And as long as you're standing up here giving us the truth and the actual numbers that won't happen. Thank you. Sarah. Wendy. Yeah, I don't really have anything just to say thank you to you and preparing this. I always learn a lot and I'm always inspired by what I what I learned here and encouraged and I think that when you look at the survey that was done was it 2015 where the approval you know this is a small number of people who are being very very valid but the approval is there among the modders for what we do so we just have to remember that and keep going. Okay. I just want to say one of the orders to even be in the same room with all of you guys here in Elmonton and we all respect you for that and we talk about it and we're not. So thank you for doing what you do and supporting what we're doing. Katie and Kim, good job I'm 15 minutes past my bedtime. Like I told everybody the presentation tonight was fantastic. These petitions that say what I want to say to you I was glad to answer they start with this the gentleman from the wildlife coalition said he doesn't have any intention of banning hunting. I don't believe it. I think their ultimate goal is to ban the taking of wildlife from all together and to give an inch to all of these things and they're going to start coming down to their petitions and they're going to come back what's the next one? I think this is just the beginning and I'm going to keep after us and one of those petitions brought to us if they can't get to us can't change things through the department they're going to start legislating change because they're getting more and more support in them for their beliefs don't know how to combat that and we have to stay getting as many people involved as we possibly can and make our voices heard and our feelings known like probably you don't get to go back to be vigilant and where you get as many people involved and active and we deal with this a lot it's a very efficient game it's not going to go away anytime soon we have to stay active I also want to say it's often nice to get together and be able to see any of your questions not much of a computer person as much as we can I hate him this is much much better good to see you all, thank you I can see when these groups come in and approach us they're passionate about what they believe in and I commend them for that because they're passionate about modeling when you're that compassionate about some things sometimes you can take information and form it to support your belief even though the information isn't really accurate and I think when we continue to do these presentations like you guys did tonight and we'll continue to have to do we just reinforce the fact that we understand your position but your basis is wrong and we want to try to educate you and that's why I'm disappointed they left but maybe they get educated enough to realize that their ideals were flawed but whatever I don't think that changes their passion for their beliefs and that's fine as long as we walk out here tonight and I will knowing that we made decisions tonight based on information that we know is sound and solid and we know we'll have to change as time goes on because the world's changing and with the work you guys do every day and keeping up with what's going on today it's important what happened 50 years ago but what's happening today is as important if not more and I trust that you guys are doing that and I commend you for your presentation tonight and the work that you do every day thank you okay did I did that too? no, not that that's my good time but to all of you thank you I signed up right after you got that Katie for a math class I mean I've never seen such a boring subject covered so professionally I mean you just brought the house down and so thank you I have a whole new appreciation the way you guys formulated that was just perfect and if we could stay that course I think we'll keep our heads above water thank you it's a real bummer tell us more pretty good alright yeah thanks again everybody thank you all I am disappointed that the petitioner is left I think the petitioning process is an extremely important part of what we do and when petitions are not worked on together there's usually a disappointing outcome for the petitioner and hands have been outstretched many times I think to work together and they don't anyway that's all I say on that for us congratulations on your retirement our bear trip to the mountains was one of my favorite memories probably of my time on this board like we'll say I thought I was going to see some bear cubs and when everybody started talking about a bear named Tony we were going to see I thought I either need to go back to the birds and the bees class or we were going to do something different than what I was thinking anyway Tony was a very fun bear to see and that was a highlight of my time a major highlight so I appreciate that allowing me to tag along that's great it's actually still my my background picture on my Facebook page really and the amount of people that have made false assumptions on me that in that picture thinking I'm bear with a harvested bear because you know of course that's what we do and all we do is kill things only to find out that we were actually checking in on the bear to see how healthy he was but you kill your share too not a bear yeah I won't do any more detail on that that's it well I'll close with this the only harvest I had made this year was a tick I killed this morning with a titanium hammer and so it felt really really good so thanks again to the department wonderful evening an hour ahead of when I thought we were going to be done so testament to you all thank you very much is there a motion to adjourn? Jay second I second thank you