 All right, so a lot of this is sort of centered up near where I live. I lead a week or two of programs in late September, early October for the Road Scholar Program. It used to be called Elder Hostel, and that's sort of where I developed this whole sort of land use history. We go paddling and hiking for a week, and this is kind of my intro version. I did actually spend an hour today on a really neat site called the Vermont Landscape Change Program website, because you can look at old photos that people have uplifted. There weren't a lot, but I actually found a few from about 100 years ago for Brookfield, so I'll throw those in just for you guys to look at. And I've already done my plug for Vermont Center for Eco Studies, but lots of neat work. So there's a listing of a lot of the different things that we do, and I've already talked about most of those, at least touched on them, so I won't spend any more time on that. All right, we're going to jump back 500 million years. Is that right? Something like that, yeah. We were underwater, so what was over to New York State was actually a, was a mountain and became sort of some mountains, and they say was larger than the Himalayas, and I say they, it's geologists from, who knows why, how do they figure that out, that there was that much material and it was that high up? I have no idea. I'm no geologist, so I'm really, this is a cursory thing of a personal interest of just like, okay, how does our landscape sort of become what it is? And so over the next 50 million years, we kind of have these series of continental plates coming in together, and a lot of potential beginning of the uplifting. This is actually pre-uplifting, and there was actually a recession, so you got some, as the plates open apart, you often get molten lava coming up, which is what that long red symbol is, and sort of set the base of some of the granitic, of the future greens. And what were happening is during this whole time is you got tons of erosion coming off these monster mountains, laying sediment after sediment, metamorphic rock, sedimentary rock turning into metamorphic rock, and a lot of that is a mix of different materials. Places where the ocean is shallow, lots of ocean life, even, I don't know what the exactly amphibolites or whatever was like one of the main creatures from hundreds of millions of years ago, but then other places, it was very inert, there wasn't really much life going on at all, and so you get what we call mudstones, and there's just more silty stuff, but not a lot of calcium in it. And those rift zones, again, that's where the calcium would come in. And then we had our sort of most recent big mountain building event, the tachonic erogyny they call it, was where the tachonics were formed, but also the northern green mountains were formed, and it just sort of lifted it up very linear, I mean it's so obvious if you drive the state to see that linear ridge, especially if you're on the Champlain Valley side, and so places that were a little more rich, you get these limestones, other places just less rich, more, you know, more like what you see in the Adirondacks or the the White Mountains. What's pretty interesting about the the tachonic mountains is that you actually got what's called a clip formation where older rock got pushed over younger rock, and this was a massive movement that happened, and you know, there's places in the world that happens, but this is one of the biggest ones, and so it's actually in the textbooks for geology to explain this. Part of it's, you know, it's in a country with universities, and it's very easy to study compared to some places that are more exotic in the world, but yeah, a really neat, we over on this side of the state were still under water, so we're in this place called the Iapetus Ocean, some Greek god, but there was another sort of continental drift kind of coming in over time, and I kind of searched the web, I couldn't find it in geology textbooks, and I'm like, what does this actually look like? And so you get these sort of series of movements as these these plates come together, and so you can kind of see on the upper left the tachonic TAC, sort of where we are currently in the ocean, and then the sort of other ridge sort of coming in that's going to reach this and collide 50 to 60 million years later. But it, again, this is very slow time, very big geologic time, but that Iapetus Ocean was fairly shallow, and that meant this whole area of the state of Vermont, and it kind of stopped come New Hampshire area, current New Hampshire, was very shallow and rich. So some of the most rich soils in New England are in Vermont, and that essentially is going to become our future soil. Rich soils means farmland, and green mountains, white mountains. It's one reason Vermont has stayed a little more agrarian, then, you know, they tried for, you know, for a long, long time, many generations in New Hampshire to keep farming, and only in a few places where you got isolated rich soils, we didn't really maintain viability, whereas in Vermont it's been able to kind of keep going in most places, especially on this eastern half, maybe not quite along the spine of the greens, but then again over in the some shallow seas over in the Champlain Valley. So then you have this sort of quieter period, you know, I don't remember all the terms, but this is what it's called, Silurian Devonian, and again this is that shallow sea, and lots of rich soils, sedimentary layers being built up there, and then over the next hundred million years you get the Akkadian Arrogany, which built the eastern half of Vermont and into New Hampshire, and this is all being under huge pressure, lots of heat, and that sort of taking that sedimentary rock, turning it into metamorphic rock, and all of our shales, and slates, and then shists, and phylites, those are all kind of gradations of pressure and heat getting harder and harder and harder, and forming what we see today, and then some of the circles on the right was where there was actually sort of molten activity under the earth that came up and monad knocks were all formed this way, but it's one of my favorite SAT words, Pluton, and that's where you get these granitic formations coming up superheating the metamorphic rock on top, and that actually in some cases made it harder than the granite rocks, and a really good example of that is up northeast in Kingdom with the Nullhagen Basin, Victory Basin, those basins are all granitic based underneath, the mountain tops are metamorphic and harder, and they're eroding less fast than the granitic stuff, and so you get these very granite low pH acidic environments which makes it very boreal like of northern Canada, so that makes sort of that whole area quite unique compared to here. It's also formed the basis for the berry granites, the wood berry granite, and the quarries, and I'm sure there's some quarries, I think there's some quarries right around here, and so that's where that those granites came from is these little Pluton formations they're very non-linear, so you look at the grottin hills compared to the green mountains, you know you get these scattering of hilltops, so it's kind of neat to see these like think of these almost volcanoes coming up but not quite. I don't know if they ever would have gone into volcanic type activity, or if it would have just sort of been spewing out if it ever kind of reached the surface, but in most cases I don't think it ever did, and again I'm not the the geologist to get into the details there. There's a, I think in berry and craft berry, you can find a few of these things called bullseye granite, which is a special type of granite that has these little round discs, size of marbles and big marbles, and they're called orbicules, and they're essentially, they were these gas bubbles that were in the the molten rising up toward the top of the chamber, and it would pick up mica as it went and harden, and so they kind of hardened into the granite, and so the the foundation of my 1834 house is made with this stuff that was quarried right nearby. In fact you go to the black river at the bridge in town and look down you can see this special bullseye granite in the riverbed, kind of neat. And then more recent, if you call 250 million years recent, the mountains have sort of built the rest of the Appalachians, sort of came in, and what's kind of amazing is this is kind of like proto-Africa colliding with North America and creating the the large mountain range that we see up and down the east coast for the most part. This is very simplistic. The other really neat thing is all of this is happening down near the equator. Another thing kind of hard to fathom that is this is not up where we are at 45 degrees latitude. So yeah just really kind of neat. More pluton activity down in southern New Hampshire Vermont, and this was also the time of Pangea where all the continents are kind of together before they started separating out again over time. So and essentially this is an old geological map that I found and each of the colors kind of represents a distinct type of bedrock base. And you can just kind of see by the different colors. The light tan ones in the middle are the calcium rich soils and then you get to the greens and it's more inert soils, mudstones and some granites mixed in, non-calcareous things. It's kind of interesting cedar trees will grow in these calcium rich soils and up in Craftsbury you go across the route 14 to the west up into Eden and Lowell and cedar trees disappear. And so we got we got a tree farmer over there who says my taxes really should be lower because I don't have any cedar trees because they're such a useful tree for for farmers and woodwork and things like that. We build all of our ski trail bridges up at the outdoor center with with cedar just because it's a little more rock resistant. And now in more recent 50, 60 million years we got glaciers coming through and the most especially in the last two million years I don't know how many we've had several. The most recent being 20,000 years ago we were under a mile of ice and you just kind of mix all that up. And so you get rich soils where you normally wouldn't think of it based on the geology before but at the same time you just got to think of is it a potpourri of pushing and moving and shoving and sort of making a nice layer of conglomerate rock some good soil, some not so good soil, some exposed bedrock, things like that. As those glaciers receded we had some other neat things that influenced what we have on our landscape today and it's the lakes that were formed by those receding glaciers blocking all that water all that melting water. So Lake Champlain was really high at that time 500 feet higher than what it is today. We had a lake meant for Magog. I don't actually know the name of that formation but the Connecticut River was also blocked. They called that Lake Hitchcock. And then when the glaciers finally receded enough to allow the St. Lawrence Seaway to come spilling in that's when some whales were actually came in and some sea life and saltwater into Lake Champlain. And so there's actually some beach pea plant that is still growing on the shores of Lake Champlain which really is an ocean plant. Charlotte they found that whale skeleton so again kind of neat to see this sort of mishmash of things happening but where those lakes or where the glaciers stopped and those lakes sort of stalled you would get huge amounts of erosion coming off those glaciers leaving all these sediments. The lake beds would sort of allow it to drift out over a long period whereas right at the shore you might get real dense layers built up. There's a spot in the Black River Valley where I live you can see a one year deposit of clay literally six to seven inches thick. That's one year of deposit and you see the line and then the next one. This was going out with some geologists who were doing some mapping and you know it's just incredible that you know I guess it doesn't make sense that you think your gravel driveway and a rainstorm we just had and you see all these stuff going down. Well you think of that as a multitude with the glacier melting and how much sediment it can carry and it's pretty phenomenal of the power of water in making that landscape. So you get these little shelves and then you'll get other areas of real gravelly stuff you'll get other areas of just silt and so all that's going to influence 10,000 years to the current what can actually grow in there what can thrive or and what can't grow in there depending on that. So as things receded even more it opened up the landscape. These are some photos taken from a trip I got to do almost 10 years ago now up in the Northwest Territories. It probably looked a lot more like this you know spruce fir forests, boggies, Fagnum, lichens you know slowly making its way but what's interesting is that four to six thousand years ago we had a warm spell. Our climate here was more like Rhode Island, southern Connecticut even New Jersey and we had lots of oaks and this is when beach trees came north and then it got colder again. So we you know climate change has been happening all the time but we're talking years of thousands of years tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years that things have sort of moved about. And some examples of this glacial debris and I was talking about those little pockets of different types of soils sand deltas you'll get that's where you see pine, oaks, the clays. You get this thing called a clay plain forest. It was probably one of the most common forests in the Champlain Valley and the whole place was covered with oak and hickory, white pine, red maple. There's less than like one or two percent of that forest type left because it's all been turned to agriculture land. You get these gravels along the edges of the glaciers and this is where you in the north where it's colder and wet. You'll see the spruce and balsam fir in the south where actually it's actually well drained in spots. You'll get the white pine, red oak, black oak which you don't get into the north. And that transition zone is kind of in this area from the north to the south. And when you start to add all those factors up and we're going to go through the details of the factors geology, the climate, climate being temperature and water, topography. How quickly does things drain off? How long does it hold? And then sort of underground hydrology and other water movement, you get what we they've been divided out into eight biophysical regions of Vermont. And so it's those white lines decide that those areas are more similar and more different than the ones surrounding them. And I'm going to go through some of those different areas in a minute. But just to give some examples of the climate part, Champlain Valley, only averages 30 inches of rain. It's actually pretty dry up there. At least that doesn't seem like a lot to me for this area. Pretty good growing season. The lake effect, so it helps keep things warmer into the fall and keeps it cooler right away in the spring. Down in the teconics, quite a bit more precipitation where the hills take off. A mix of good growing season, but it's still in the higher areas. It's shorter than the Champlain Valley. And then I'm doing some of the extremes in the state, Northeast Highlands. Moderate precipitation, much lower growing season. I was just up there, my father, who's now 78, was traveling with me yesterday as we went through. And you don't even feel it, but all of a sudden we're at 1800, 2000 feet. And that's kind of the landscape with these 1000 foot mountains around or 500 foot mountains, but only to 2500 feet, but the whole area is elevated in this way. And much, much colder for that average temperature. Another factor is disturbance. And this is one we often forget about, and it's become a much major part of forestry and ecology and sort of understanding our landscape compared to 30, 40 years ago. We used to always think of things going to a climax community and kind of staying there. Nothing ever stays in that climax community of big trees and shade. There's always some disturbance. Some are going to happen more frequently or more widespread than others. In New England, wind, ice and snow are kind of our big disturbance factors. So the ice storm of 1999, was it? 98. Really pruned our trees big time in a lot of places and some places more than others. These wind shears, the picture on the lower left is not actually Vermont, it's Minnesota. A wind shear came through and pretty much took 50% of the trees down in a 50 by 100 mile swath. In the middle of the boundary waters canary in mid summer when there's hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people out there camping by canoe travel. And people were isolated for weeks. They had to do food drops and things like that. You're not talking hurricane Harvey as far as numbers of people that were affected, but people who couldn't get help anywhere else. But luckily they were all there to have their camping gear with them. So they just, we're going to run out of food would be the problem. And then other disturbances can also have huge effects. And as you go out west, fire becomes the main disturbance factor. Flooding is a big one, but it's very isolated to wherever that flooding is happening. So in Vermont, it's really our just our river channels. You get a flat area like Texas, it can be broad and huge. The one we forget about is disease and insects. This was actually a big year for I'm always forgetting the name of it because I'm always forget names, but a beetle bug up in the Northeast or Northern Vermont and up in New Hampshire that was having a big effect and just decimating maple forest just turning them all brown. And they were actually doing aerial spraying and everything else. I was talking to the forester up there and he goes, Yeah, you know, it's might help that patch of 3000 acres to do some aerial spraying and cut back on the critters. But in the grand scheme, you know, this stuff is moving around all the time. It's always happening. It's just hard when it's your sugargrove or your your backyard that's getting affected by these natural disturbances. But things naturally go up cycle like this. And then there's another thing called downslope movement as we're just there's just shifts. But fire can be very enriching. As forest managers have learned, it's always hard though when there's more settlement, more houses, more people, and how do you deal with the balance? Then there's succession. Anyone who's done some basic biology is learned a little bit about this that things are always changing and things change so much more dramatically in the East than they do out West as far as growth rate. I'm always amazed at how quickly things grow back around here. And all of this provides a huge diversity for wildlife. And all these are necessary. You have birds, songbird warblers that are very dependent on a very dense forest. They nest on the ground. They don't want predators that are often found in more fields and shrubby habitats. But those same warblers actually will travel a quarter mile to go find that patch that has the certain insect or the whatever that they want that they need for for feeding their young or what something like that. So they need these patches to have just a huge climax community for miles and miles isn't always the healthiest forest as far as all the wildlife. So when I talk to landowners often say, you know, what is your 10 acres, your 100 acres, your 1000 acres? What is it like in terms of the other three or 4000 acres around you? What are you providing as far as that diversity in the mix of habitat types? And so, you know, you can kind of guide your management plans on how in thinking of a scale like that, three or 4000 acres, two, you know, one or two miles in an area. So, you know, if you have a 10 acre plot, well, if your surrounding area is already totally wooded, but you want a little opening area, you know, it's great, you know, to have that. And it's actually logging can mimic natural disturbance. And so that's actually one of the ways we do it now. Big commercial companies in Maine are actually working with wildlife folks to provide balsam fur and spruce habitat that promote the the right growth, the 10 to 20 year growth patterns that snowshoe hair are dependent upon. That's where snowshoe hair thrive, which is where the links will thrive as the links have started to come back. And so with a little tweaking of their rotation planning and their sizes of their cuts and all of that, they are now providing a bigger mosaic that can benefit some of the big predators and do pretty well that way. You know, it's not happening everywhere, but again, it's just a little shift. There's a great songbird study or songbird work by Audubon Vermont. Forestry for birds. And essentially it's taking silviculture practices and just tweaking them a little bit. Just just think of the, you know, 10 or 15 species of warblers that you might be able to help increase, that especially some of the ones that are in decline that the VCE has pointed out through our some of our long term monitoring programs. So, you know, it's kind of neat of how that can all kind of mix together. And then here's a neat little diagram I just put together of soils and then all these other things that are affecting your landscape, the climate, topography, bedrock, and then you add in time and natural disturbance and that's going to promote what actually is going to thrive, what plant community is going to thrive there. And then we call these natural communities. And then the last little triple asterisk down there is the influence of people on the landscape, usually from a disturbance standpoint. But so this is what a natural community has formed. We have identified or we, Thompson and Sorenson wrote an amazing book and this probably should be in the library hopefully called Wetlands, Woodlands and Wildlands. It's referenced there at the bottom where they go through all of these different things. We're most a lot of this information is coming from but they recognize 90 natural communities in Vermont. Some of them are huge. The hardwood forest is 60% of Vermont, the northern hardwood forest. Others are very tiny. There's a thing called a boreal acidic cliff. It might be the size of this table, you know, literally, but it's a community type because of the all those factors that we've been describing. And then some of them are just rare. There might be one or two in the entire state. Serpentine outcrops, lakes, just sort of where these things show up in the landscape. Others are rare because we've decimated them through our land use history. Valley Clay Plain Forest, the Pine O'Keeffe Forest. So we'll just go through a few of them just to give you a kind of a sense of what they are. Up top, high, montane spruce fir dominated by red spruce and balsam firs. You get a few little hardwoods mixed in there. Tend to be smaller, very thin soils, cold. You might get a lot of rain, but that rain is running off usually really, really fast. It's not staying around too long, so the dry spells can be hard if it stays dry for too long. If we drop down to 500 to 1,000 feet, you'll start getting more hardwoods coming in, but you still get a lot of spruce and fir, but mixed in with red maple and aspen, things like that. Understory starts becoming a little more dense. Hobble Bush, Mountain Maple, Straight Maple. Great moose habitat in the winter time. Moose thrive on that shrub layer. So that's where they actually often go up from the wetlands in the winter time. Moose actually require a certain percentage of their diet to be underwater plants in the summertime, which helps with the antler growth and the breeding season and all of that. And then these soil, again, a mixture of hydrology or slopes, depending on where you are to see what becomes super wet, what becomes dry, and that'll influence, again, what trees are going to be able to do well there or not do well. And then you drop down to what most of Vermont is, and this is really the mainstay of what we see around. If you get a little richer soil, you might start seeing some basswood. As you get a little further south, you might start seeing some oak. And then if you get into the lowlands, where, again, it becomes wet in the north, it often becomes colder. These cold hollows, where these other species just don't do as well with a certain number of cold days, you get some species like spruce and fir that are the only things that can grow there. It's too harsh for any other other. So these guys are sort of there by default. They're the ones who can get enough nutrients. They can tolerate that cold, and they can kind of make it through that tough environment, boggy habitat, stuff you'll find further north a lot of the time. I should just point out the kid on the left is my son probably at least 10 years ago. We dropped him off at college last week. First time. It's kind of fun. And the other kid is up at UVM starting up there this week or last week. Kind of fun. So I'm just going to go through, I think, three eight different zones just to kind of give you an idea of what goes into sort of defining what these zones are. So Champlain Valley, it's actually more similar to the Great Lake habitat than it is to the rest of Vermont. So it's kind of, in one sense, it is a mini Great Lake in that regard, because it's similar elevation, similar soils as you wrap around Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, some of those areas, you get the lake effect. Similar things happen in the glaciation period. So that's kind of what's sort of driven a lot of what's happened there. And just depending on where those low seas were, you'll get the really super fertile soils. But then you also get some places that are less fertile and more gravelly. And that's where the pines and the oaks can do fairly well at times. It's also been one of the most altered landscapes just because it's easy to travel. It's flat, easier to farm. Although clay, I wouldn't say is easy to farm, but it's nutrient rich and will last year after a year of planting corn and other crops. The matrix community, the big community types would be the clay plain forest. But again, those are mostly gone, except in some a few isolated spots and some of the conserved land or a farmer's edge of their field or something like that. And then as you get up into the uplands, you'll get into the northern hardwoods. A little more well-drained, more sandy gravelly stuff going on up there. Some of the unique type of communities that you won't really see elsewhere is limestone bluff cedar. So just north of Burlington, you get some really neat sort of cliffy areas that you can go explore and check out. You'll get these beaches along the shorelines with different species. And you get some critters that aren't really found too many other places, rattlesnakes, skinks, and then a neat species, the spiny softshell turtle. They're going to do the Vermont Public Radio piece on spiny softshell turtles in October. I just got wind of that. And my intern this year is working with the state biologist whose specialty is this turtle. Because they're just really rare. And just trying to work on the minimal nesting and overwintering spots that are out there to try to help these guys out. Lake Champlain with a lake, especially being north-south, major migration route. And so it's a neat flyway. In New England, we don't see as many flyways as you do out in the Midwest. But this is one of them. So kind of neat that way. As we move into the east, we get higher up. And this just blows me away. 72 inches of rain, or wetness, up on Mount Mansfield. Whereas it was 30 inches in Burlington. Just the elevation effect and how that squeezes that moisture out as those systems come is really neat. 20 degrees cooler than the Champlain Valley. More of these mudstones with the underlying granitic rocks down there. You'll get spots of calcareous, rich soils. But it's just spots here and there, most likely mixed up by all the glaciation. Obviously, much less traveled, much harder, tougher life up there. And then some photos from that area. This is actually the Stoskey Resort. That's my boss on the left, Chris Rimmer. He's holding a big-nose thrush, which thrives up in this habitat. That's where it does well. I did a little hike to the north up in Eden, and there was a basswood tree. So that's a calcium-rich tree, but there it was. There's a bird called the black pole warbler. It's another species that tends to nest up in the spruce and fur. And black pole warblers are a little more ubiquitous, a little lower elevation than the bicknells. And they actually go all the way across Canada. And they're kind of a neat species in its migration route. After the last glaciation, they were found in the east. And over time, they started spreading across the boreal habitat of central and northern Canada, but in the forested areas. Those birds that are way over in Western Canada, and maybe even into Alaska, almost all of them migrate back to the east coast and down the east coast to go down to South America. That's what they learned. And that's what they've kept in their genetic wiring. The other thing that these black pole warblers do is not all of them, but they finally confirmed it, because it was always speculated based on them showing up on some islands in the Atlantic, on ships in the Atlantic. But our group put some little what called geolocators, a little device that can measure sunlight and daylight. And it was taped onto a feather, on their tail feather, and up on Mount Mansfield. These guys went down to the Cape. They would spend weeks just feeding and gorging themselves. And they actually call them just like fat blobs. I mean, it was just like they were full. And then the right winds hit, and they're gone. And a year later, they were recaptured up on Mount Mansfield. You had to recapture them to get the geolocator back. You plug that into a computer, and you can figure out their latitude and longitude via daylight. And they've finally confirmed that these guys fly out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hit a trade wind, and end up in Brazil 80 hours later. This is a little few ounce bird, absolutely phenomenal. I think it's the most impressive migration, just because of their size, I mean, so tiny. Others do the more traditional route, head down to Florida, just the 30-hour crossing across the Gulf, and then hit South America. Much easier. Jump down to Southern, or southeastern Vermont. We got the Southern Piedmont. We're kind of in the middle right here, with the Northern Piedmont and the South Piedmont. There's a lot of similarities, but the big one being temperature is what really changes between the North and the South. Major travel corridor, intensive farming, just along the river systems, primarily, because the hills become much steeper down in this part of the state. And so that actually is influenced what type of soils, especially the runoff and the erosion and all of that, what's happened over tens of thousands of years. Natural communities that we're finding, the unique ones are mostly northern hardwoods, but then the unique ones. Pitch pine, which is a species you'll find down in the Cape of Massachusetts, but you won't really find it anywhere else in Vermont. You get these silver maple flood plain forests, lot more gray squirrels. Up where I live in Crasberry, it's hard to find a gray squirrel unless you're in a town where they planted oaks. There are no oaks around naturally. They're slowly moving around that have been brought in, but otherwise you don't find them. And then there's a bunch of rare species that live in the riverbeds and other places. But highly influenced by, especially the rivers with dams and hydro down in this way. So a little canoe trip I had down the Connecticut River over three days, just kind of fun to see. And then the last one I'll just mention is the Northeast Highlands. Just kind of a unique part of Vermont. It's actually more like New Hampshire than it is the rest of Vermont in soil types. Just you have a lot more granitic base. You still got some metamorphic mudstones, but a lot of that is thinner and not as rich. And so you just don't get the rich soils like you do in the rest of the state. Lots of exposed granite here and there. You got these, I talked about these granite basins in the Alhegan and the Victory Basin and the surrounding mountains that were heated up, the metamorphic rock, which is harder than those granitic basins. And a much more difficult way of life. Boom and bust industry with the logging up there. And this is up Little Avril Lake. This is a great little hike called Brusso Mountain. So if anyone wants a great hike, look this one up. It's only a kilometer long to get up there and then you get a great overlook of just, you know, really undisturbed forest land. It's still paper company land right near the Conti National Wildlife Refuge. And you've got Black Spruce Forest in these swamps, bogs, really neat to see. You get minkfrog up there, gray jays, spruce grouse. Other species you don't find anywhere else in, almost New England, except for northern Maine. So pretty neat. You get a lot of birders who are looking for unique species up there. And yeah, just a whole different assemblage of animals that you don't find anywhere else as well. The lynx have actually are breeding up there now. You get more moose, although the moose have definitely spread around. They've all taken a little bit of a decline in the last few years. A lot of that due to potential climate change things, winters less hard and ticks and other things getting into their coats and causing problems where they're just not as healthy and they're more prone to other diseases and all of that. And this was kind of a neat thing. A guy who wrote a book on the floor of Vermont back in 1969. This is kind of a neat statement for a small state. I mean, ecology does not know political boundaries, but if we have to recognize those political boundaries, it's kind of neat that Vermont was kind of at a crossroads of all of these different great, the great lakes, this down Connecticut, Massachusetts type to the boreal type. So just a lot of neat stuff going on in Vermont. So you picked a good place to be. And so yeah. All right, well, I think we're about to shift gears. So we just have a lot out our door to explore. And I guess one of the things I want you to think about is you kind of explore this area and go other places in the state, go out of state is kind of looking at what it was the geological influence here. What is the landscape like and why do my seeing plant wise? Learn some of your most common plants and how does that compare to when you travel? And with the internet now, it's very easy to sort of check different plant landscapes and what's going on. So it's just, what's out your back door is really fun and it makes it a little more special and understanding of what's there. So we'll shift gears. Now we'll look at kind of the influence of people on this landscape. And we're gonna look at the overall settlement of Vermont. Again, I got some of these old pictures. Most of it's from Crosbury, but I got a few from Brookfield this afternoon, which was kind of fun. And then we'll kind of look at what is the impact on that on our natural landscape, especially the animal life as we go. It was a nomadic foot people moving around way back when, four, five, six hundred longer. I'm not sure I haven't gotten into all the detail of how long do they think human settlement have been around, but it's been a long, long time. And then 400 years ago, our first European settlers coming in, the big deal with the Champlain anniversary, 400th anniversary, not too long ago. Starting for the Europeans to understand, I love looking at these old maps. This was, I think, a Dutch map. And I'm still kind of, you know, they got Long Island Sound, they got the Cape, but I'm still trying to figure out what that big lake is up there. Is that Winnipesaki? Did they get Lake Champlain in the totally wrong spot? I mean, you can see where Lake Champlain should be over to the left there. So they got the river going up the Hudson, but then it kind of petered out. No one had actually gone through yet. So yeah, lots of fun to kind of, I mean, and this wasn't that long ago. We could actually count the number of grandfathers back of who was here at this time. And so now it's not, we're not talking 100 million years. And then the period of settlement in the early 1700s, especially Southern New England, not so much up here yet. And the French up to the north, the British down this way, French Indian wars, settlements on Lake Champlain, Lake Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen doing his famous takeover without firing a shot supposedly. Some of you probably know that story a lot better than I do. But then it was sort of post-revolutionary war that we saw the settlement, especially of northern Vermont. And a lot of the military were given tracks of land as a payment for their service. So in Craftsbury, it was a guy named Ebenezer Crafts. And he went up there with about 20 guys around 1790. Well, well, right afterwards, but he didn't really go up there and settle into about 1790. And he built the pictures on the right, or the creek where he settled. And then a mill, it wasn't his first, this was a mill about 100 years later on the lower right. But that was a mill site that he got going. And Brookfield, actually just I just Googled Brookfield history and found a little PDF of a bunch of historical facts. I'm not sure if it's from the Zurin Active Historical Society here. So one of the first settlers was this guy, Captain Schubel. He actually built a grist in the sawmill. He also was a trapper, a major part of income, selling that far away. He wasn't here very long. We moved away in 1790. And then this guy, Colonel Nathaniel Wheatley, in the note, it said his family has still been here for generations and generations. And anyone heard of that name? Okay. Good, I'm not totally off face. What's really sad though is Schubel Cross, they said he fell in a creek, caught a cold and died suddenly in 1795. It's like, oh, you know, he's led this great life of really checking things out. One of the other earlier settlers was this Oliver Durkey. Does anyone recognize that name? So it was one of the earlier names I came across in this. And he was an early blacksmith. And he talked about some of their descendants. But anyway, just send us some neat things. So in a general broader landscape, we'll jump back to, well, early 1800s. And there was a Vermonter who got to go to Spain as sort of a US delegation. And the king of Spain gave him a merino sheep that was totally forbidden. But somehow he gave him a sheep and he got it over to Vermont and started breeding them like crazy. Because those sheep just produced so much denser wool and thicker wool. And it really started the wool boom for 30 to 40 years here in Vermont. Part of it helped was there was a tariff so people could make some more money. But it's this typical sort of boom and bust type industry. Those tariffs were relaxed. At the same time, railroads opened west. And the land was a little more fertile in places in the west. And things sort of off they went. We also realized there was some overgrazing. I think that one and a half 1.6, I think one with the number was million sheep covering Vermont landscape. It's a lot of sheep for not that actually biggest base. And then to replace that, there was logging going on the entire time but logging increased in certain areas. And then cow daring, which was actually probably a good thing for Vermont because it was a more sustainable, you're actually making a product that you're gonna use to maintain yourself. You're not just selling something to somebody else. You're actually using it to support your family and your community through food and milk products and things like that. That was kind of a cool picture from around 1900 up on Lake Memphis Magog in Newport. Huge logging operations going down these rivers and out these lakes and up into Canada. Here's the Black River up in Irisburg. You can't even see the water. And then mills, another major, major part of Vermont were all the mills and the power coming from them to make little economies. The most common being grist mills and sawmills but there were all sorts of things being water powered to make. And what's interesting is I've gone to several of these sites and you're like, is there any sign of anything? And once in a while you see a series of something that's been mined out boulder wise and created these little channels or the foundation more likely for the building. The actual places for the waterways though were usually made out of wood. And so those are long gone. Whether it was the 1927 flood, whether it was just rot, it's just gonna disappear over time if they're not maintained. So this is an all wood mill up in Coventry that obviously is no longer there. The building might be. Here's some of that bullseye granite and what's amazing, look at the ingenuity to heave those rocks around. It was just posts and levers and just the engineering behind that and the simplicity but at the same time very complicated. It's some really tough work to do all of that. And there's still some mills that were around right up till not too long ago. This is Main Street and Crassbury. It was a mill that probably turned to electric, I don't know, 20s or 30s or something like that. And they were still making wooden dowels in the same little building up until the 60s. Obviously not using water anymore. Here's a map of Crassbury. And the main reason I throw this up there is that all those colored dots are mill locations. They were at 19, I think it's 19 mills. I'm not sure if I wrote it down in there or not. But again, sawmills, gristmills, blind factory, blacksmiths, tin shops, woollen, lots of things going on. And some of these are places I would never ever think that there could be enough running water to support a mill. But again, they probably dammed it up, probably got a pool the size of this room. And then when they need to run the mill, they just open up the sluice way, drain this down a foot or two, and then get several hours of operation and then shut it up again, especially before the next drain, fill it up again, and then they can continually just kind of keep operating the mill when they want it. So really fascinating. Another guy who grew up in Crassbury, actually he grew up in Irisburg, sorry, but his parents ran a mill. And he still remembers it, water-based, and then being very jealous of the mill owners at the outlet of Little Hosmer Pond. Because they controlled the lake. They controlled what was coming downriver. So yeah, you could have your little ponds along the way and your little sluice ways, but it was the folks at the lake output that really had the control. There were no rules, who did what. So really kind of neat that way. But thriving community up at that time. I throw this in, just sort of a look at the difference in vegetation. Look at the trees in 1910 compared to the trees, same spot in 2000. Anyone recognize those trees from 1910? Yeah, all over. So Dutch Elm disease, took most of them out. There's actually still a few big guys growing that were a little bit resistant, but much different way. Neat old buildings, the round barns. And then just sort of a look at how things have changed from the 1930s up until just about six or seven years ago. This is sort of the same location looking at lower Crassbury Village. You could see the elementary school or actually an old former church turned into the elementary school way up upper top right, the village down here in the left. And then you can still see the school way up to the right. But yeah, it's just within 50, 60 years, whoosh, it's grown back pretty dramatically. This is the oldest shot that I could find in that landscape change program for Brookfield. Pretty open, I mean, it doesn't really show any of the landscape but it was just kind of a neat photograph and early, early photograph techniques. But look at that stone wall. I mean, oh, I'd love to know where that is. Your historical society probably provided this, so it's just a matter of going in. Here was an older sort of landscape shot that I could find. Probably early, oh, 1895 is what it was labeled. And you can see that actually a lot of the landscape was not deforested. We'll go into that in just a minute but the details, but at one point people would say Vermont was 80% open land in the mid 1800s, late 1800s. And there were probably towns that were like that or regions, but it probably was not statewide by any means. And there were a lot of forests got maybe cut and logged but then they were growing back right away. They weren't necessarily turned into ag land or anything. And so this, you know, there were definitely some good forested areas still around here. Here's the old, the bridge. 1915 on the upper left. And then a nice kind of neat shot from 1925 of the village as a whole. And, you know, I'd love to take, I wish I would have more time, was thunder and lightning when I came. So I was gonna go cruise around, but I ended up not to see what these fields look like today. Is some of this growing back? Is some of this still open? Yeah. And then here's just down the street. It hasn't changed a bit. So yeah, 1915 to 2000. So, I was looking, I think at this corner, there's a fairly big fir tree, or mid-sized fir tree growing in now. But the most of those look like maples from 1915. Those don't really look like elms. I'm not sure what this near one is, or the near one to the left, upper left. And then here's two shots that were only eight years apart on the left when it was a gravel road and then converted into a paved road with a little bit of straightening. You know, not a big change in the vegetation type in just eight years. Anyone recognize where that, I have no idea where that is in Brookfield, but they'll say it's from Brookfield. So someone's got to go find this spot, take a picture, and then find this picture on the landscape change program, and then you can upload the photograph from 2017 of the same location. And that's kind of a neat thing. Some of these, like these two pictures where I found together. And, but, so anyway, someone should go find that picture and just, I was always waiting for some comparison pictures because those are always fun. And then obviously one that probably filled half the landscape change program was pictures of building the interstate. And someone documenting that and uploading tons and tons of photographs. So that was 1970, somewhere here in town. Down in Harvard Museum, they did kind of a, there's a neat series of huge dioramas, big, big, big paintings that just kind of document the whole sort of settlement process. And so they came up with, a lot of history, a lot of research going into this pre-European settlement. And then the early settlers opening up these patches. And then 1830s, especially this would have been more Southern New England, a lot more clearing back then for Vermont. It was a little bit more later. And I throw this picture in, including me drinking a beer, from Bar Hill. It's a nature conservancy preserve. It's actually the first TNC preserve in Vermont. And it looks like World Ward one. This is, and people were up there for a picnic. That's what this is, this picture. And it's one of my favorite, my wife's favorite spot. She grew up in Hardwick, Greensboro area. And now it's kind of all grown back, but all those trees are less than 50 to 60 years old for the most part. But you still get amazing growth of some of these guys in that short of time span. You get other places that are gonna continually change that all came back spruce and fir with some pine mixed in. Why did it do that? We're right next door. There's a ton of maple and other hardwoods. And it had to do with farming practices, where the cows were and where the cows weren't, or sheep up there. And so the grazing would often keep the hardwoods down and allow the conifers to really take off because it wasn't a preferred food choice. So, and then you can see where the old fences were that probably caused that or which ones were kept into pasture longer. So, lots of neat things going on there. And then 1930s, things really grown back throughout Vermont. But what was the impacts of a lot of that clearing and land use, intensive grazing? And oftentimes just poor farming practices, not because they meant to, but they just didn't know any better. And all these mills and dams building up sediments in our streams and then flooding it out, moving it around in our valleys. Well, anyway, lots of erosion, sedimentation, lots of habitat. It was a big one, not just over hunting, but that was part of it. And here's where that forest cover percent, a study looking at New England as a whole got down to maybe 60% forest cover, 40% D. But then you get towns, certain areas where really the whole area got wiped out for logging practices, for ag lands, things like that. But again, it was kind of hit or miss or what work got hit more often. But over that time of the 1800s, early 1900s, the species on the left were pretty much all gone from Vermont and much to New England. What happened to the people? Well, a lot of those farmers had to move on just because they couldn't produce stuff on those soils anymore. Burlington was importing lumber by the mid-1800s from Canada. As someone pointed out though, that could have been just because it's easier to float them down the lake on a barge, but that means that there's still lumber coming in from somewhere. There wasn't a lot of fish in wildlife to hunt. In fact, they started the fish hatcheries in the late 1800s because there weren't enough fish. We were either overfished or sedimentation of our waters. The civil war happened during that time. And then the rush out to move out west. So lots of things. Population changes. It ends up that the Brookfield population change almost exactly mimics Crosbury. So I just took a few of the highs and lows for Brookfield from where I found the numbers. So 1790, they had 421 people. And Crosbury, there were 20. So people hadn't settled that far north yet. By 1840, this was the peak of Brookfield's population. 1789. For Crosbury, it was about 18, what, 1870. So 30 years later, we got up to about 1400 people. And then not too long ago, 50 years ago, you guys were under 600 here. 597. And Crosbury did the same thing. Down 1970, we were down just above 600. And now things have been going back up again as far as numbers. As Vermont, though, the population actually never really did the big drop overall because people moved to the cities during when a lot of the farms were crashing and not doing well. So Burlington was much bigger, much more steady and increasing. But over the last 50 years, 100 years, farming's been more focused onto the fertile soils, letting the less fertile ones grow. Smaller scale forestry, you know, there's still some large scale here and there, but creating that matrix of community types and habitat types. We've obviously had some regulations. The forests are back, but they're different than what they used to be. But the wildlife's returned. And it just shows you the resiliency of the natural world, especially places where we have enough water and good soils. So things have definitely made a difference. A lot more awareness, a lot more education. And it's just, it's been, I think a real success story of what, I don't know who termed it, but the working landscape, which I think Vermont truly is, where we can really, I've seen it with the Lune program where we have super developed lakes, but we can still have Lunes. We've learned to kind of coexist. It's not always easy. It's not always black and white as far as making our issues. But as far as you start thinking about, okay, how can we keep this going into the future as develop, we see more development, we see more houses, we see things parceling up. And one of the thoughts is again, is developing these corridors, whether this is for wildlife or whether it's through climate change and plants moving up and down, but how are things gonna move from one place to another? And so this is again, how does your 10 acres fit in? How does your 100 acres fit in to the larger landscape around you? And you'll get these areas of core areas around us. It's the Eden Mountains and these black hills over in Glover. And then you get larger blocks of core areas up in the main part of the Greens and then up in the Northeast Kingdom. But you can have this developed busy landscape of people and still allow for all of this to happen and allow the big animals to move, allow the small critters to have what they need and do pretty well. So again, yeah, it's a working landscape. It's changing all the time, but it's, I think it's kind of neat that for the most part, it's changed for the better over the not too recent past. And then I just throw this one in for fun. Yeah, what do you think? This is paving your, or plowing your road, packing your road. So I showed this slide show to an Amish friend of mine who was growing up with horses and he just looked at those horses and he could tell by just the ear moosh motion and other things. These horses are pretty stressed. I felt a little bad. I was like, oh, maybe there's lounging in the snow. He goes, no, those guys are really tough or having a hard time. But anyways, my great-grandfather-in-law, my wife's grandfather did this for the town of Greensboro in Walden. So anyway, any comments, questions? Fun to share the story. Yeah, I should research more of that because again, yeah, I'm wondering if there were still like handfuls here and there because it was on some list that I saw, but again, it could easily be. Like the fisher was reintroduced because of the porcupine. They're one of the few animals that'll actually kill a porcupine. I don't know if they've really made a difference in porcupine populations, but the forester sure hopes so. And the porcupines probably really didn't damage that number of trees, but they saw enough that it was like, ah, those are my trees, but that's the personal nature of making a living that way. All right, well thanks, and for coming out on this stormy night. Glad it's not so stormy anymore. Until next year.