 Thank you, everyone. Thank you for coming. I think this is the largest crowd, or certainly one of the largest crowds that we've ever had, so I appreciate you all participating in that. My name is John Bauer. I used to be a president. We actually have three presidents here. Laurie Keve is here. She was, I think, the first president, and I came in second, and now Eric Chittenden is our current president. I'm going to run through just a few housekeeping things, so I want to let you know that there are exits where you came in and also at the far end of the building. Restrooms also on the other end of the bar, and there are two downstairs. Please turn off your phone so that you don't, well, wait, I'm going to do that too. There we go. Appreciate that. We have a raffle going on, and that's part of the way that we're differing the cost of holding this soiree. A lot of nice prizes. Encourage you at a dollar a ticket to buy some because, yeah, please participate in the raffle. We're going to try to do those drawings in between speakers, and items are donated by Jim's Pizza, the Reservoir Restaurant, Phil Bobrow, a photographer, it's a beautiful shot of the Reservoir, Vermont Paddle Pups, Umiak Outdoor Outfitters, and Lawrence Cheesecake, so thank you to all of them for donating the prizes. Also want to thank our sponsors, the Blush Hill Country Club, for letting us use their facility. How about a round of applause for those folks? Let them know we're here. Also thanks to Cold Hollow's Cider Mill for the cider and donuts, and WDEV for helping us to spread the word and let you know that this is happening. Let's see. Oh, the Agency of Natural Resources has been providing training and grant money for our Greeter program, which I believe we are doing all three, and it's certainly two of the two boat launches, but somebody else will carry that for you. Thanks for the Town of Waterbury and its residents for the appropriation and managing the pass-through grant that provides to our Greeter program. Town of Stowe and its residents for their support, and support from Lawson's Finest Liquids, Concept 2, and all of you individual donors, so thank you all very much. I think we have a website, which is actually Emma. Can you come up here for just a minute and tell us about all of our social media stuff? Emma Brownlee, she does all of this. Please give her a round of applause. That you can visit as well as social media. We have Instagram, Facebook, those ones we're most popular on. You can also find us on Twitter and TikTok, and I believe we may even have a Pinterest page as well. Thanks for all your hard work on that. We do have a couple of, well, we have a couple of openings on the board if you're interested. We're always looking for enthusiastic people to help us, not only to join the board, but also with different projects that we do throughout the year. Speaking of board, I'm a member of the board, of course, Sheila Goss, our vice president is here. She's over there. We've got Francine Chittenden, our treasurer. Mike Barrett is on the board as well as Steve Brownlee, Tyler Keefe, Walter Carpenter, and Emma Brownlee, who you just saw. So thank you to our board for all of your hard work. It's a very active board. So at this time, I'm going to turn it over to Eric Chittenden, our current president. Thank you, John. And I thank John for doing the show tonight. Anyway, I have a couple of comments. I got an email and a phone call from Benjamin Green, who is the dam engineer, safety engineer for the state of Vermont. He made a comment to me. I found it hard to believe he said that they're in charge of they oversee 900 to 1,000 dams. But the three in this area are the Winozki River Dam, the Eastbury Dam, and the Waterbury Reservoir Dam. So those are the three that he's focusing on here. A couple of notes about the cost of the dam. Just for historical sake, they had about 2,000 people during the CCC days and that took, you know, a year or two to build this thing. And with all of those employees and the complete dam from the bottom to the top cost three and a half million dollars. Just to replace these tainter gates that they want to do, they've had the lowest bid so far has been 100 million, but they're looking at trying to make it a 35 to 55 and get federal help on it. But that's why it's taking some years to do the, to make sure there's going to be a safe project to do. And he said, everybody's going to want to probably know when it's going to happen and whether they're going to lower the water to do it or not. He doesn't know the answer to that, whether they're going to lower it or leave it at the stable level of about 589.6 feet. But certainly the time frame is pushed out to, I think he said about five years, but it's all because of money. And that's really about all I have to say. I'm going to let John take over and he's much more entertaining than I am, by the way. So razz him a little bit. Keep him up. Thanks, Eric. All right. We have a brief financial report by our illustrious treasurer who I think she loses sleep about once a week so that she gets this done. So Francine Chitdan, please. Okay. So I am going to keep my part of this meeting brief. We do have a great lineup of speakers and I don't want to take time away from them. I just want to first thank everyone in this room who is supporting us and what we do for this wonderful resource that we have in Waterbury, the Waterbury Reservoir. And just also again to thank the Board of Directors because we're an unpaid board where all of our time is volunteer and people just put a lot of time in and it's just really appreciated. One of our programs that you probably have seen if you're an active voter on the reservoir is our greeter program and one of our greeters is here this evening to tell you a little bit about her summer this year. So I won't say a lot about that. But just so you know the grant we are somewhat supported by a grant from the Agency of Natural Resources and that's extremely valuable for us to be able to run this program but it doesn't pay for the whole thing. So part of what we do do is basically raise funds to run that program. It does mostly concentrate on stopping invasive species from migrating or hitchhiking from one lake to another and it's really important that we keep doing that. I just want you to know briefly that we or myself, I think the whole organization, we're very proud of our fiscal responsibility. We take, I certainly take it very seriously. I can certainly meet with anyone who wants to look at our fiscal records. They're wide open but I'm not going to go too deep into this right now but if you're one of those financial nerds that needs to know all the numbers please just give me a call. I'm easy to find. Just a brief. We run on a budget of about 15,000 a year which isn't very much. Most of that is going towards paying people to help us do the greeter program. But we also have other expenses like maintaining websites and those kinds of things. Insurance that's always there. And currently we've ended the season with some cash on hand. We have about $6,000 on hand to take us into next year which is very exciting for us. So thank you. That's it. Oh we're going to hear from Eric again. This is fun. Benjamin Green when he called me yesterday he said he also sent me an email with an attachment. I put it in here. There's kind of a history of what he's been doing for the past several years on the work on the dam to repair it. So next to the last page if you wanted to get more history on that. And I wanted a little footnote because some of us senioris citizens who better out there, a lot of us were here would be before we had invasive species of any great number. And when we'd finish hanging in the summertime back in the 1950s it'd be we'd go to a lot of the pods around the area of Heinsberg and so on. Heinsberg bombing one but mostly Lake Iroquois and and it was beautiful. Some years later my brother Taab and I blew up a car tire under tube and we swear at the whole leg of it. It was only but we got almost to the other end and we realized that you know there's what happens if there's a hole in this tube so there was but anyway it was full of the entire swim we had the invasive species are right to the surface. It was really uncomfortable so but we had we have one in the in the lake here it's brittle nyad and it was in the east side of the lake where the day use area is and for years we could go down there and pull and I would do this almost every day pull the weeds out brittle nyad and make like a pile five feet high. I had a massive pile that stuff by the end of the summer but when they stabilize the by law the level of the lake except when they have floods or potential floods they'll raise it but brittle nyad likes shallow water so it moved up to the north end and we don't have it down to send in any great amount anymore but there are so many invasive species in these ponds and lakes around even this region Lake Champlain everybody knows about that but it's since we've had this greeter program we have not had anything more and a lot of the people bring their boats the greeters could tell you this they they don't want to be waiting very long to get on the water so they've gotten used they know what has to be done so they clean the boat before they come the greeters get to know them and they do a quick look at the vital parts and so it seems to the program seems to be working for us and we have probably when they have a problem in and on Lake Champlain and they have the algae blooms the next day we get flooded with boats so we have a lot of boats coming from lakes that have a lot of invasive species so what we're doing seems to be working thank you Eric I think we're going to do our first raffle drawing what are we going to give away first anyone Bueller Bueller what's that where's Mike Mike Baird raffle king are those the tickets that we draw from well we'll need those thank you all right what are we going to give away Mike oh choice all right you want to draw the first ticket all right well if it's yours you don't win 820 085 come back and get it in a minute I do want to introduce Laurie Kevay she has an announcement that she'd like to make right my husband and I will match any gifts made tonight and received by the Friends of Waterbury reservoir by the end of this month up to $500 in addition to our annual gift boy if there was ever a time to give now is it all right ladies and gentlemen next we're going to hear from Sheila goss our vice president very briefly I'm the vice president of Friends of Waterbury reservoir couldn't do it without president Eric Chittenden and I'm essentially the amateur naturalist and amateur wildlife photographer for the reservoir the slideshow that was playing as you came in we're all pictures I took from my canoe this year between March of this year and three days ago of this year so it's a great spot for wildlife watching and my very amateur photography I'm also involved in the loon monitoring project with the great help of Eric Hansen and Eloise we monitor the loon raft that we built we had the first documented nesting loons on the reservoir in 2019 Eric came out and helped the board build the raft silly loons have yet to nest on the raft but this year they did nest again on a natural island and for the first time ever we had a documented egg being laid unfortunately a high water vent in the middle of June flooded out that nest but we were able to recover the egg so we may be able to find out if there was any effect a mercury effect or if the egg was in fact viable um had it um survived the flooding event so we're hoping um the rangers the floating rangers have been invaluable in our efforts to work on the loon raft getting it in position putting out the signs moving it when necessary so we have a project in mind for next year we're going to fool those silly loons into thinking that the raft is actually the little natural island that they like so that if the water goes up and down the loon raft will survive you all remember the flooding of July when the water was 16 feet above normal in the reservoir I paddled out and the whole cottonbrook end it looked like just this giant leg it looked like Lake Champlain but floating right in the middle was our loon raft unfortunately there were no loons and no eggs and no nest on it but it does prove that the rafts um work I also have worked very closely with Eric Chittenden we designed and built the fishing line recycling bins a few years ago three years ago we had to convince um state parks that the bins would be a useful addition and that they wouldn't be full of trash you can see in the bucket over there what we've collected this year from our our bins and very little trash and I say that I found no trash I monitor the cottonbrook bin no trash until two weeks ago he someone put two banana peels in the bin so if that's the worst we get we're lucky so anyway so thanks to the rangers thanks to the rest of the board thanks to VCE Eric Hanson and Louise for all their help thank you how many days I paddle every year well last year was 221 and I'm only up to 203 this year you better get to work Sheila uh Eric briefly touched on invasive species but one of our greeters has actually done a report um about the invasive species so uh please give it up for Jalen Davidson that means applaud all right can you all hear me okay so hi my name is Jalen Davidson and I was one of the aquatic invasive species greeters this past summer and you may have seen me stationed on the dam boat launch and before I begin I would like to thank um friends of Larbae Resvore and all of you guys for coming out tonight and letting me talk about invasive species so our team this year uh right there that's uh Emily and then that's me and then on the right we have Eric and then that's Phil and then we also had Francine so what are aquatic invasive species for those of you who don't know aquatic invasive species or AIS as I'm going to refer to them a lot in this um talk are non-native and a nuisance to a water body and its ecosystem and some examples include brittle niad, Eurasian water mill foil, water chestnut chestnut and others which are all found in Vermont currently and aquatic invasive species are induced either intentionally or not intentionally into a water body or on terrestrial land and they're brought outside of its native range and they're able to um be so successful because there's a lack of predators and pathogens that can cause them to go away. There's also a significant issue that threatened ecosystem function, water quality, natural resources, native plant species and recreation in Vermont and worldwide. So what is the Greeter program? So because of the threat AIS posed to the environment the Greeter program was started in 2002 and is now operating in 32 lakes and ponds across Vermont so as a boat access greeter what we would do is we would approach and interact with boaters inspect water crafts identify and handle suspicious specimens collect and report data and distribute educational material on AIS. So you may be asking yourself what can I do to stop the spread? I can tell you. So some of you may have been met by a greeter at other water bodies and allowing them to inspect your boat before and after launch is a great way to keep invasives out of the reservoir and any water body that you go into and additionally clean draining and drying your boat before and after entering a water body can help prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species. So by cleaning I mean clean off any mud plants and animals from the boat trailer motors or any other equipment that you have and discard removed material in the trash or in high dry ground where there's no danger of them being washed away into another water body and then for draining all you got to drain all the water from the boat the boat engines and other equipment away from the water and drying is drying anything that touched the water so drying boats trailers and equipment in the sun at for at least five days is advised if you don't have hot high pressure water. So these are some common invasive species that are currently found in Vermont. We have European frog bit, starry stonewort, Eurasian, a variable leaf water mill foil, brittle niad, Eurasian water mill foil, curly leaf pondweed and water chestnut. So brittle niad is currently the only aquatic invasive species found at the reservoir and it grows in alkaline water in streams, ponds and lakes and additionally it can resist eutrophic and turbid water conditions. So brittle niad is extremely brittle and breaks easy to the touch as said in the name at which helps it spread easily in a water body and it inhibits the growth of native plant species and that can also take in all the available dissolved oxygen and what it does that it creates an anoxic zone in the water which causes mass aquatic die-off events and it also produces a large amount of seed that help contribute to its spread and over winter success. So some common characteristics that can help you identify it is that it's submerged in the water and its leaves are in pairs along its stem that are about one to two inches long. It's stiff pointed and brittle and it easily fragments when it's picked up and it has visible serrated edges. It kind of feels like a brillo pad when you touch it. So this is a map that I created in ArcGIS and this is the distribution of brittle niad across the state of Vermont and it's currently found in 12 water bodies which include Lake Winona, Water Bay Reservoir, Sunset Lake, St. Catherine Lake, Spectacle Pond, Phillips, Lake Hortonia. Don't know if I'm saying that right. Horton Pond, Fern Lake, the Connecticut River, Lake Champlain but specifically in the South Lake and Lake Bombazine. So every summer the Department of Environmental Conservation asks all of us boat access greeters to use an app called Survey123 which is an extension of S3 which is it's also how I made the app they make ArcGIS and it asks us certain questions about the type of watercraft, if the boater was familiar with AIS and if there was any found along with a bunch of other questions and then the data gets sent off to them and we're able to see the data throughout the years for various various water bodies in Vermont. So this summer specifically at the between Blush Hill and the Dam there were 714 people greeted 296 watercrafts were inspected and one was decontaminated and the difference between the two numbers here is a lot of times if we came across a boat that came from the Waterbury Reservoir we don't normally check it. So in summer 2022 and 2023 the most common watercraft was a kayak and the outboard motorboat was the second most common scene. So this summer more people were familiar with AIS compared to last summer with a 5.59% in 2020 and only in 3.22% in 2023 were unfamiliar with AIS which is due to us being there all the time. I know this here we were there more and also the program's just getting older and people are seeing us more often. So next I looked at the purpose of the trip so in both 2022 and 2023 most boaters purpose of their trip was another form of recreation that varied from commercial fishing or governmental and the second most common and popular purpose of trip was fishing and in both years the data pretty much shows an even split between if people were doing other recreation governmental fishing or commercial. So then we looked at will boaters check for AIS in the future which this one was a little weird this year there was actually more people that said that they would not check for AIS and I'm not sure why that is but it went from 0.56% saying no they will not check to 1.08% saying that they will not check. So the next couple of slides are some new materials that I created this summer you can see them in the packets that were handed out. So specifically in this one I was looking at like the main AIS that we're looking out for at the Waterbury reservoir and I wrote about common characteristics that can help people identify them such as like I was looking at Eurasian water mill foil very belief water mill foil hydrilla which is on a serious watch list for all water bodies water chestnut and zebra mussels and then this next one on the left is I talked about brittle niad in this one and it also shows the distribution map and then on the right has not come out yet but it's a field guide which will be on the blog sometime in the near future and it talks about the invasives at the reservoir specifically just brittle niad the history of the reservoir what aquatic invasive species are the AIS founded Vermont the watch list and more so besides getting a lot of reading done this summer at the reservoir this season went well it was fairly productive even with the flooding events that happened in July and also the other excessive rain that kept us there from a few weekends and I got a lot of like the handouts done and all that but I do have one more story I do have a story there was this one person who came to the reservoir and he was kayaking along the entire edge of the reservoir in this kayak but what was so interesting about it was that you it was kind of like you could take it down and it lays flat you just kind of put it together like a puzzle and it was the it was the weirdest thing because it's like not something that you would commonly see on the reservoir and we see a lot of stuff like that which was pretty cool but I want to thank you all again for letting me talk about AIS and coming up any questions are you good questions going once going twice all right so next we get to hear from our floating ranger this is Ben Fulton is I think the the fellow who you're scaring me Duncan it's a little feedback I'm just going to give it to Ben I'm scared the starting picture okay all right my name is Ben Fulton I'm the ranger at Water Bay Reservoir and the park manager I'm not going to talk for too long but I'm just going to talk a little bit about the management of the park this year do I have it okay so this year I saw another major change in staffing in addition to myself and Cody Smith our assistant ranger we now have two attendants Kyle Page and Christy Pietro our biggest asset as always is the great staff that we get every year to help us out oh this is not supposed to be there you can skip that one all right so we found that the quality of campers has really improved ever since implementing the reservation system people are planning ahead to come out here and they really seem to care a lot more about the ecosystem and just our you know quiet peacefulness despite that there are a few incidents that we had to deal with a few of those examples are on the screen damage to trees fires where they shouldn't be things like that um our biggest project this year was taking down the about 50 trees that were marked by the forester at the end of last year we had the help of the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps and we teamed up with them to get them all down before camping started this year we also had these two improvement projects a new set of stairs and a repaired set of stairs at site 15 and this new punch and bridge bridge over the swampy area at site 24 this is the new parking lot as it was under construction last year it's now completed at Blush Hill boat launch it accommodates about 10 trailers and it really seems to be alleviating some of the traffic over there not as many people parking along the road so each year we map invasives I'm not going to talk too much about them because you already heard a lot but this year we were only really able to map the Japanese knot weed on the bottom there because the water was way too murky because of the rain and flooding to accurately map the Brilnyad the knot weed seems about the same this year a few new spots to the south and continuing to dominate the northern parts of the reservoir casually just casual observation it seems that the dyad this year is a lot less than it was last year and that might be a result of the cloudy water and cloudy conditions that we experienced this year they were just weren't getting enough light so we'll see how that turns out next year now this year of course was completely dominated by the flood that we got in July you can see the peak over there is when it was 15 feet over normal basically all of our campsites were underwater and the next few slides are some photos about just showing some of the damage and flooding that we found so here's waterbury center state park you might be familiar with their upper parking lot completely under and their lower lot right next to the bath house right there there's umie x jack on its side floating pretty much only held by that hose right there we've got our friends of waterbear reservoir fishing collector that's at blush hill boat launch and the kiosk there this is elephant rock just barely sticking out over the water here yeah it was pretty impressive to see that here's two of our campsites that's site seven and 27 they were among many of the sites to be completely underwater here's site 10 one of the more damaged sites a bunch of trees along the shore came down and we had to move that fire pit up about 15 feet here's our storage shed at little river luckily the damage is not as bad as it looks but you know all of our stuff is floating in wet minimal things that needed to be replaced aside from this no parking sign there were about a dozen signposts around the reservoir that went missing some of them showed up some of them needed to be replaced and we also fished out several picnic tables that had made their way around this is the dock at little river it needed some minor repairs but other than that it's back in action and on the left over there you're right that is the Moscow boat launch where the majority of the debris ended up finally I want to thank the friends of waterbear reservoir for their greeter program and for helping us acquire these the materials for these bear hang bags that they're about 50 feet of rope and a dry bag and we give them out to campers who don't have their own so that they could bear proof their food and put them up in a tree yeah any questions yeah did you ever figure out who the guy was that was breaking into the shack uh I don't know about that yeah yes yeah yes apparently yeah it seems to be stabilizing there's some vegetation growing on it I didn't hear from the geologists this year but last year they did say that it was still a landslide risk so we only had one report of a bear in a campsite at site 10 it didn't get any food it didn't have any real interactions with campers and we lent out the bear bags about 10 times um and hopefully as people learn that we have them they'll be more used yeah so I have a second question about parking at a dam it seems like people with trailers have a hard time parking in places where trailers belong because they're used by everybody and no policing and then the signage is ignored yeah is that going to change or is it just going to be something where it just this is a lot of people oh yeah I hear that um we plan to be in contact with the town of Waterbury and see what you know they can do um but I believe there's new signage in the plans yeah we're we don't we we can't you know give out citations or anything ourselves just just notice I mean people are everyone must park because it's busy and they just want to get on the water yeah people just everyone's got to be cool right yeah um I also believe that there's a plan for a sidewalk that leads to the overflow lot um and hopefully that'll um get people to use it more oh yeah right there if you're camping and you need or want a bear bag um so when we check in people we mention um to bear proof food and a lot of times will people say oh how do you do that and we'll offer to show them how to do it and to lend them the bags all right thank you Ben yeah well let's take a quick break and give away some raffle items let's see would you draw a ticket for me please thank you so much all right you got your numbers you got your tickets out oh this is good eight two zero zero one two last three digits zero one two all right you get to go and pick out a pick out a prize Michael Michael set you up Jalen would you draw a ticket for me please thank you mom says draw mine last three digits zero nine two zero nine two anybody got zero nine two hey we got another winner all right god let's do one more Eric draw a ticket you can't draw yours all right here we go last three digits zero one one zero one one zero one one all right all right i'm told that Kathy Webster is here from adaptive kayaking is that right thank you Sheila um so next we have uh Eric Hansen he's the director of the lune conservation project and a nationally recognized respected and recognized lune biologist welcome you want to pick me up or do you want to do this i can hook you sure i've done this professionally many times all right drop that your pocket perfect people hear that all right okay um really great to be here especially with such an amazing crowd um i'm really i love telling the story about the success of the lune project here in vermont um and i work for a group called vermont center for eco studies they're based down in norwich vermont it's a wildlife organization um that does birds songbirds insects vernal pools actually before i get into that the next slide i'll actually show some of those things um if anyone wants to get more information from vce that would include a lune newsletter and the vce field notes um put a name and address down here if you're interested in volunteering and helping Sheila gas help monitor loons um check off the volunteer box um or just make sure you get in touch with me um next spring or or now so i'm just going to pass these around before i forget okay so vce we used to be just six of us back 15 20 years ago we were with vermont institute of natural science back in the 90s before we kind of split off um and started our own project it's really taken off we now have almost 20 employees um and a lot of that is around this vermont atlas of life project so it's um which is uh just documenting all things out there um especially butterflies bees maws lady beetles you know just things that normally aren't documented and we're just looking at old records looking at new records using i naturalist using um a lot of data sharing crowdsourcing type things that people can get involved with and help submit all that data as well as professionals going out and doing much more intensive surveys um so definitely look us up a lot of things going on next so loons are one of those great species we you know you paddle out calm lake you hear that call quick and it's just like there's so many things that go into uh any species but it loons just make a really great story so i we partnered with vermont official wildlife department um i mainly work with game wardens when we got a bird reported in trouble um land on a pond too small land on a road something like that caught up in fishing gear but the main thing is all the people on the right especially the top right volunteers we have 400 active volunteers i have over 2000 people that have helped me at some point in the last 20 years um with this project it's just it's it's what makes this project go clean bloom is from um kurtis pond and she's the main person there she lives waterbury she's the main person there these guys become like the local loon experts and they're talking to so many more people than i know who are even aware of the project and that just that just goes from one person to another so that's part of the success but we also work with lots of professional agencies um tufts university with um necropsies uh unh um vet diagnostic lab for more necropsy analysis uh vins um helps us with rehab um bri uh does a lot of mercury and toxicology work uvm we're working with professor there on malaria issues um all the hydroelectric companies we we're in close contact with them for controlling water levels for nesting so lots and lots of people um to kind of have a little a little bit involved with loons next about 90 or 80 percent of our funding comes from individual donors so we're always looking for support um spread the word we get a little bit from vermont fish and wildlife department um but most of it we have to raise next almost every photograph you see tonight is from local photographers um i need to get sheila shots um i don't think i have many of her so um we'll add her in here but it's it's just really fun that people get to spend time on that lake they sit there quietly and those loons might come right in they can be very curious and then get some really good shots next uh and anything about volunteering is you can do as much or as little as you want you can go one day a summer for the annual count or even just one day in the summer checking another lake that might need checking or a really good survey of waterberry and report that in that counts is a really helps us understand what's going on um you can help with management the raft and the signs uh sheila will be organizing help with the raft that putting out at the north end the the rangers i think are taking care of the signs so thank you so much for helping with that um you become educators um you can help with rescues we'll go through a lot of that tonight and a little bit with the research so next all right so many of you might know ron kelly from green river reservoir another very active friends of group um anyway lake 30 years ago we were down to under 30 loons in the state seven nesting pairs um here's here was where they were back in 1983 um so we had some up on green river uh over uh thermindex reservoir of all places east long pond maybe over a made stone norton pond um and there was one pair down in southern vermont um and on the annual count we counted 29 there were probably more than that only about 70 or 80 of the lakes were surveyed during that time period but um there weren't that many next so why weren't there that many lots of things going on um started the redevelopment after world war two shoreline habitat nesting habitat disappeared fishing gear is still one of the biggest issues facing loons but currently about 40 percent of our mortalities are lead or fishing line so these tubes that would have been going up are a big part of it and i'll talk more about that in a minute recreation we just have so many people out there and just little things can happen but we probably don't see a lot of more in the way of mortalities but little disturbance issues especially around nest sites which are the most vulnerable next so we'll do a little natural history through the life of the loon a little bit of our management um and in talking with sheila about this program i'm going to share just a bunch of stories about some of our actions with both research and and rescues because they're they're always kind of fun um but we'll spend the first third of the program here just kind of going through some of the natural history and um what loons are up to at certain times a year so when ice goes out loons are coming back coming back from where the northeast coast so massachusetts Rhode Island long island um maybe southern new hampshire there are loons way down at Delaware Bay chesapeake florida gulf of mexico but those are all birds from more interior north america but they're coming back to set up their territories and they'll often come within an hour or two of the ice breaking up and they find a spot to land it's amazing um early ice outs maybe they don't show up quite so quick other times you'll hear a flyover lake is still iced they got to go back to somewhere might be a slow moving river like to connect get it um but they're a typical territory is 100 200 acres so a lake like this in this photograph might have one or two territories on it potentially even a third if there's another big water area on the right um next the male and female most of the time come back 80 percent of the time on average um and so but they don't make for life that was one of the things that people thought they did back in the 80s um but they are very made faithful when they're together um and defending that territory what happened to the other part or what happens mortality seven eight percent annually um they might have moved to a different lake we may not know why but then the most interesting is this eviction or territorial takeover and that's what's going on in this photograph there's a chase going on wing rowing we call it um we got a challenge male on male female on female um both male and female will defend from that intruder at first but if this if it gets serious um then the the other one's going to stir to step back and just sort of see what happens next so in a photograph like or in that picture in the upper right you got these two birds swimming around with their bills down that's not normal if they're relaxed and fishing and feeding and hanging out and preening there's something going on it could be courtship they might be in love but it could also be they're about to attack each other um it's sort of this angst moment definitely on the lower over on the left that is some serious discussion going on those chests are coming out the bills are down you might see a quick splash dive um and so usually it ends with that one bird will swim off the pair defense successfully and then the other one just goes away after 10 20 minutes this bottom pictures you'll see these especially mid summer late summer but you'll see it out on um all year round even on a on a waterbury reservoir bigger lakes these bigger groups we call them social gatherings a lot less aggression going on but they're still gathering information about who the pair is who the neighboring birds are who the youngsters are who the older breeders are they're all kind of vying for position and learning information from each other just in case there's down the road that they can find a spot in a territory next the so the average marriage only lasts four to five years and then you get a switch in one of the mates that might last only one or two years in some cases if it's a pair that's sort of undergoing lots of transitions but once that pair gets established then they might be able to last for a while there's one pair in michigan that um got together in 1997 they were together until last year they produced 31 chicks together and then last year she took a younger guy but he's still seen on some nearby ponds hanging out um doing their thing so they can live until their mid 30s even 40 plus um and i threw a few articles on the table out there from vermont digger did a great piece about unfortunately one of our oldest birds that we know about that i banded and my first year on the job in 98 up on newark pond that bird was at least six years old as an adult um it usually don't nest until they're six but it could have been 10 years old it could be you know mid mid 30s anyway it unfortunately it passed away this summer due to a boat hit um so we're trying to use that as an educational thing to add loons to as a something to watch out for so nesting is really the time that we focused our management and conservation work because that's when they like flush out that's when they'll get off a nest from um to feel safe in the water um they'll start nesting anywhere from mid may to late june takes about a month for incubation mom and dad switch in places every four to five hours four to six hours um and then they can nest at three but usually don't nest until three or four years after they've been scouting around as youngsters um trying to figure out where they can fit in where there's an empty spot where they can do a challenge next when they do get flushed off a nest that's when things happen to the eggs they cool off if they're off too long they might get knocked off if they're scared off the nest um or they just give up if it was a busy memorial day weekend and they just got repeatedly flushed off the nest they only lay one or two eggs so if you got disrupt that nesting cycle for four or five six seven years that means want you know no chicks for a period of time and that may have been what was happening back in the the 30s 40s and 50s they were just they just weren't enough getting through that period and then starting in the 90s with our management we really started helping them find a few successes and then now those chicks are coming back um and starting new territories nearby next to help with that we do put out nest warning signs around the high traffic areas so waterbury is one of those um this bird on the right is in hiding position so if you see that that bird knows you're there and it's just trying to like get out of bird shape predators are often focused on shape or movement and so now that bird is a stick and if there's any sort of grasses around that it's like a zebra camouflage it's really hard to see actually through those grasses i mean to this photographer it's like whoa what are you doing why are you putting your head down but it's it really is a hiding thing they'll sit like that you know motionless for 20 30 minutes if if that threat stays nearby and if it really keeps nearby or gets too close then it might jump into the water and leave the nest to get safe um but these signs do help um they sort of give an area where people go it also gives volunteers and lake residents and boaters hey to tell people or a chance to tell people hey move off from that side now that area just you know leave it be for a while what's great is that once they hatch after that month they all swim away with the chicks and everything so we can remove those signs right away and usually that's starting in mid june i'm till mid july and then so there's no more signs after after mid july yeah the other spot we've been able to help is rafts especially on reservoirs that go up and down and waterbury fits every criteria for where we need a raft because you know you get a one inch rainstorm on saturated soil that thing can go up quite a bit you get any big storm and obviously it can flood this one flooded in those first mid june storms this year and then 2019 was a bigger storm i think it was a two or three inch or that came in and that that water went up a foot during that storm um so we know a raft is going to be necessary we're going to want to watch southern part of waterbury for a potential second pair forming if we see a two some floating together from may until july and they repeatedly are seen in the same area maybe checking out if you see them cooing together going to shore together that's the thing to report to sheila report to me so we can watch that a little more closely um and do we want to consider a second raft that that was ever to happen waterbury is big enough to have four or five six pairs of loons on it um but we'd love to see just one gets get successful up at the north end and get started um and we'll just sort of see what happens in our philosophy right now is really to let loons make the first move usually with let them find a nest site is it going to work or is it not going to work waterbury is a little bit different because we know that any big rain with especially saturated soils that water is going to come up compared to most lakes in the area um yep i don't think the songs that are going to work on this because it's probably not connected to my computer so the the calls are the the mail does the yodel you can try clicking it there's a shadow and then repeat notes there's a whale call in the background so the yodel is only done by the mail it's a territorial call telling other birds that this place is occupied telling other birds to move on uh the researcher in wisconsin has spent 25 years just studying behaviors of loons walter pipers his name loonproject.org amazing blogs really fun to read but he was out there five a.m first light and a family out there male and female the chicks and here comes a loon flying no sounds nobody's making a move and here's flying flying you could see that the the birds on the water could see the bird coming and then all of a sudden the bird in the air just like stuck its wings out and stiffened them and that's a a sign that it's going to come in and for a landing once the bird hit that within a second the mail was yodeling and all of a sudden that bird started flapping again and kept going and it was just like conserve your energy only use the energy you need to defend as you need it don't waste it and that mail just hit it perfectly and the other one went away not had no interaction with that bird and just kept that territory established so yodels can also be used for float planes someone coming into a nest and bothering the nest most times are actually quiet when people get close to a nest okay we'll go to the whale this is more of a identification call like where's my mate who is that at the other end of the lake i've been on the nest for five six hours it's your turn looking for their chick they might do that it's much more passive there's not usually a whole lot of aggression when you first paddle into an area where like a loon family might be they might give a little bit of a whale just kind of a slight alert but nothing too too serious and then we go to the tremolo which is their sort of more agitated alert call this is definitely saying something's up and it's real alerting their their their mate their chicks what what's interesting is that you get one bird yodeling especially if there's other birds around it might get them i remember tremoloing it might get them all tremoloing it's like a bunch of kids in a room who all just start going nuts and i don't know what the reason is for that because they're really the initial thing was something else that set it off but it's definitely it's signed that something's up and it could be an eagle flying by it could be that boater who came a little bit too close or a sound that they don't recognize i mean they just reckon there's something's going on and you just kind of look around to see if it's you or if it's something else and then there's the hoot which is more of a quiet let's talk into each other or when they're in those social gatherings with four or five six loons they might be hooting to each other and then the chick does a little raspy whistle a little begging call or you know come here mom or dad you know whatever it is okay next the otles one of the most interesting because you they're unique to each bird you can record them look at their sonograms and you can tell which male is different from the other males and especially the loons can tell who's who so the deeper the the yodel the bigger the male and the more likely they can hold on to that territory and defend and less likely they're going to be attacked or gone after by another bird the repeat syllables at the end are more of a a sign of level of aggression or their motivation is one way to put it it sort of begs the question why would a small male every yodel to give you know you give himself a way that he's small but he can make up for it with the repeat syllables and definitely those those big birds are going to hold the territory better and less likely to get challenged so big males probably hold territories much longer than a small male they're going to get popped around a little bit more but all of these things are really to avoid fighting because loons will fight to the death especially the males if the battle gets serious but again most times it stops before it ever gets there and you know but it loons again they'll they're they're motivated to keep that territory and they will go into battle and and see what happens and they'll grab each other by the throats they'll actually come in from underneath if you see a lot of peering like looking down on the water looking up looking down looking up and then all of a sudden one pops there one pops there they're looking for that bird not to come in and nail it in the chest that's one of the ways they'll they'll wallop each other and so we're always looking for that when we're doing necropsies there was a an eagle a few years ago in Maine that killed a chick ate or grabbed the chick but then the eagle landed in the water and if anyone's seen an eagle go after a fish and end up in the water they kind of have to like row their selves to shoreline and and then climb out of the water they can't just take off like an osprey while it was in the water it got killed by a loon the loon hit it and pierced its heart um no one actually saw it but with when they sent it to a lab to do the work there was a perfect hole and it happened to just luckily hit the heart or unluckily um to spend your side but that one hit national media that like it was the canadiens versus the us and you know it was really kind of fun so so here's a total interaction going on we got a little wing growing display we got a male yodeling in the background we got the other one kind of in there um and to see this can be really terrifying and it can be really exciting and that's a really neat thing about loon behaviors we can really watch them 18 hours a day everything that goes on um from courtship to nesting to stuff like this and occasionally people witness it you know a chase and a killing or something happens or the chicks get killed in the in the as a side effect um anyway it's all pretty neat so some visual communication um they'll actually have little short dives when they're doing these little circles of three or four or five um or they'll just kind of like do some urges and come up and so you got young birds will be less aggressive in their diving they're not trying to challenge the male but they are females but they might be in there just trying to like socialize and get to know them so they'll they'll be probably show less aggression they don't they don't want to cause a a fight amongst themselves with a stronger bird um as a challenge um gets more serious you'll get some more big splash dives where they'll actually hit the water um the chest will come up and those the chest will come rearing way out and then they'll do a quick dive and hit the water um and if it gets really serious then you'll start seeing the chases in this penguin dance um people sometimes confuse that with the wing flap where they just do a gentle wing flap which is part of the preening and then they come back down again um here they're really like treading water and you know you'll see water splashing all over the place um and it'll sort of go from there so all right one or two chicks definitely the cute and fuzzy time when they do the back riding next yep get a little bit older they'll back ride until about three weeks of age um they can dive but they're not feeding themselves very much until they're probably seven or eight weeks of age they'll start catching stuff but not not very much um and then they'll get into their like six or yeah four or five weeks of age the gray fluff kind of the um clumsy adolescent stage um next um down in the upper or lower right that's more like six seven weeks you can see some flight feathers growing in sort of right behind here um and then as they get older they're going to look like that over on the far left um and then when they get to about 10 or 11 12 weeks of age they'll start seeing practice flights that's up on Zach Woods pond um these are not chicks these are adults in november who have already done a partial molt and so they look a lot alike in the winter time except the adults will still have a few dots on them um and they have to replace all their body feathers before they migrate to maintain that waterproof layer they're flying into waters that are in their 30 40 degrees and they got to maintain that all winter long um they can't afford to look molt their flight feathers like most birds do in the fall because parents are still rearing their chicks and they need all that energy to get food for their chicks um so they wait into a complete molt in february and um in early march they always have to preen again maintaining that waterproof barrier is essential if they can't do this it's the beginning of a the loon going downhill pretty fast um so they'll they'll fluff up their feathers they'll zip them together they have a gland that they can spread an oil powdery on um and it's all part of the preening next occasionally they'll do what i've i've labeled extreme preening or bathing um where they just go nuts and it looks like they're having a seizure it's my most common phone call people are sure it's wrapped up in fishing line um and they're trying to get it off they'll often work one spot part of the body for a long time which is what why people think it's some you know there's something hooked there um this bird is actually upside down this one like will plunge dive underwater and then come up and wing row across for a bit um that one is doing summer salts um they're they're flushing their feathers deeply with water to get mites and dirt out and then they'll finish with the gentle preening they don't do this very often they do it more probably in the fall when they're molting um to get those loose feathers out probably itches you can think about that next so our birds right now starting actually in september up until november december are headed to the coast um the arrows represent um satellite telemetry implants so worked with veterinarians actually did an implant with a telemetry unit with a little antenna sticking out um and each arrow represents a two-day window so all the single straight arrows probably is a single flight without stopping they're flying at 60 to 80 miles an hour and if they have a 50 mile an hour tailwind they're going even faster and they're off they can fly up to five six thousand feet um probably not our birds but over in new york over the finger lakes they've picked them up on satellite era way up high um pretty impressive the dots and the squares represent um banded birds that were banded probably where the circle is and then the square represents somewhere where they were seen in the winter time a lot of those were probably winter mortalities were winter um most mortalities occur in the winter it's just a tough life to live off the main coast through a uh a nor'easter i mean i would that's not where i'd want to be um but they can do it so we've had a few birds in vermont we've actually had three i need to update this photo um map that was a island pond may um female actually and unfortunately it was found dead at martha's vineyard um but we've had other birds on seen at off the tip of long island sound and another one up on the cape um from vermont so we're pretty sure that's where ours go next as you go again i mentioned this at the beginning as you go interior north america further into kevac ontario um manitoba minnesota they're heading further south and what's interesting is those birds are also a lot smaller they're up to 30 40 smaller so no viscose has had up to some 16 pound males in minnesota there's eight pound males so nine pound males same species but over 10 000 years they've evolved to be able to fly two and a half thousand miles or they've evolved that they only have to go a hundred miles um for their for their winter spot so it pays to be small to be able to have to fly two thousand miles to get that far south so and in the winter here's a complete malt so they're flightless for about a month um and then here's a bird off the coast um again looks a lot like a big chick with a white throat the gray head but then the the little white specks is what gives it away in the back which interesting is um i'll get into this a little bit in climate change when i have a slide about future research projects but we've had a a slew of birds in february in january yeah mainly in february late january who get caught on places like lake sunopee and lake george and lake winapasaki they state they're staying open all the way into february even parts of champlain um and then they go flightless and then the lakes freeze they're in trouble um and so it back 30 40 years ago those were freezing mostly all the way across by mid january they were still had their feathers they saw the ice come and they could get off and go but now they're kind of getting lazy it's like oh here it's pretty nice to stick around i don't have to go anywhere and then all of a sudden they're flightless and and then it freezes so i can get them into trouble next actually leads into this um so some of the things were really sort of shifting our project i'm going to say shifting but we're adding to our project we do all the management around nest sites we work with landowners we get the volunteer corps crews to go all over the state um and just maintain loons as a iconic species get people excited about their lakes get people excited about water quality through loons based on the food web type stuff um but there's a lot of things we can still learn um and one of the things that's through mortality is is lead aspergillosis and malaria are all still present with us especially um aspergillosis has increased a lot it's a fungal disease and it used to only be seen in winter birds and now we're seeing it in summer birds um malaria has shown up and a bunch of birds and we're working with ellen martensen at uvm um getting her blood samples to see how extensive is it has it always been here is it brand new um and one of the things that she's finding is there's um there's malaria in all sorts of birds that migrate um most of our crows and black birds they all carry malaria but it doesn't affect them they've sort of evolved with it whereas loons is a is a a jump loons have not evolved with malaria all of a sudden they got a new it's like an invasive species boom it's taken off the malaria is an invasive it's taking off in the birds um they've found 10 species of malaria in loons only one or two of them are the killer malaria the other ones are now just kind of their hosts they're just carrying it no big deal maybe a little immune suppress but not hurting them too badly at least we don't we can't tell yet but there are a few that it just when it takes off in those two or three speed or one or two species of malaria um it will kill the kill the loon um climate change some things we're watching um and it's a hard thing to monitor or figure out but you know what's going on in our ecosystems in the lakes algal blooms cyanobacteria increases again higher temperatures more stress aspergillosis can take off it's always in the environment but a stressed birds more likely to have it it's like to catch it or have it take off in their lungs it's like when you catch pneumonia you're already it's usually happening in people who are immune suppressed and already feeling weak the same thing with loons and aspergillosis um nest flooding events you know we get if that storm in july had happened two weeks earlier at the end of june we i bet we would have lost 40 or 50 nests we only lost six because it was in mid july so that's one of the things to watch upward but what's interesting is last year in the year before we had drought years we only lost one flooded nest in each year so you know flooding wasn't even an issue in those years heat stress while incubating you get above 80 degrees and loon spent a lot more time off the nest the eggs might be okay for a while but lots of things can happen whether it's a predator or just it's uneven heating because it's with the sun versus a bird sitting on it and then we already just mentioned late ice formation next so one of the ways we're studying um the um malaria and the aspergillosis as well as mercury another toxin that can build up in loons is through banding and sampling so we'll intentionally catch these loons this was my first job i spent two summers doing this back in 1992 and 93 so i've been at this for a while um and actually those two bottom photographs are from about that era we can probably tell but we see big spotlight that's what the guy standing up with is doing we have a big salmon dip net we'll tease them in with a loon call think make them think their third loon is around and we do it when there's chicks and so they stick around to defend the chick and we if we can get them within five ten feet of the boat we can put that net in and scoop them up put a towel over their head next um we'll take a a blood sample out of a vein in the leg um we'll put bands on them we'll take a wing sample um and then we'll release and we just we did some active banding back around two 1998 to 2003 and now we're starting up again last year and this year doing i don't know two three four nights a year um and this was last year up on holland pond so um another thing we're adding is pfas once we get some funding this is another indicator what's going on next for the mercury if we go from alaska to new england you can see the parts per million point five over by alaska and we're in new england the average about two parts per million you get above three and you start seeing behavioral effects mercury is you all heard the mad hatter alison wonderland makes them a little crazy in loon's case it makes them lazy they're with a chick they're not feeding the chick they're sitting next to the nest they're not on the nest a normal loon pair will be on the nest 96 to 99 of the time high mercury loons over four parts per million might be on 80 of the time so to the normal eye it would be oh they're just off the nest a little bit more but you would never detect that unless you spent thousands of hours watching all that um oops and then within new england vermont has the lowest levels compared to massachusetts and parts of main and part of that is our soils we have very um or less acidic more neutral soils compared um part of this are much of vermont is on old ocean bed um so it doesn't um higher ph whereas the higher acidic areas the bacteria that causes mercury to get into the um into the um system um is is more active at low ph acidic lakes so that's why you see higher spots where there's high acidity we have little hot spots on reservoirs and um southern vermont next so another thing we're watching closely and one of the things that keeps us really active is fishing gear so we we can help some the one on the left obviously we didn't get to it um the one on the right we actually were able to rescue that one it would beached itself we could cut caught it snipped it free but it broke up the pair bond this was a female part of a male up on joe's pond luckily the chick was about five or six weeks of age and the male took care of it the rest of the year by himself she he wouldn't allow her back in she was now a weakness um another interesting case where um the fishing gear didn't actually kill the bird was in 2018 we had um only the second year they've ever nested on lake raponda it's a great little site on the island but then one of them got caught up in fishing line they abandoned the nest um and we tried catching that bird three four times we tried daylight just to just by chance just to see if we could get close we didn't even get and that was the closest we ever got so we went out that night with the spotlights we didn't even see the bird it was so spooked for the spotlights and we did that twice three times um eventually we think the bird migrated um but we're almost absolutely sure she or he did not return the next year um because there was just the way the behavior was we didn't see any markings on the bill things like that um next oh i'm gonna pet back one i just want to give kudos to this guy on the left and driving the boat henry dan to know um he's worked for the engineer down on somerset reservoir but for his career when he retired he bought a boat so he could keep doing the loon work he puts in close to 300 hours and a thousand miles of driving to help with the project at least once a week he's going on an eight-hour venture to go to somerset reservoir where we have four pairs now and he also covers southern vermont and he's been doing this for 15 over 15 years and so vce is recognizing him as our as a lifetime achievement award um and we'll get him together with all the staff and the board in december so just an amazing person who's just gone way out of his way to just he got the bug so to speak next um about three years ago actually covid when that hit uh we uh tufts wasn't taking birds to do the analysis of why birds die so i picked up with um vermont institute of natural science got named brend lundberg down there great rehabber and so he loves trying to figure out why birds die so he's teaching me um we're also working with tufts in unh um and so myself and elowe's jarard my co-worker um we're starting to learn how to do all this and just try to figure out and we'll get 10 to 15 loons a year this year i was kind of a little bit overworked so we sent a bunch to unh to do brend has done a few um and so we're yeah just it's a tag team but it's really important work um to figure out again why why birds are dying because sometimes you would never know next you find a bird beached on shore why is it beached is it disease did it get hit in a fight um is it something else so anyway both of these were lead birds i call them they had both ingested lead both died from lead um and we wouldn't have known it had we knocked out an x-ray and then done the necropsy um aspergillosis a fungus we'd never know that unless we open them up and try to figure out what's going on so there's these necropsies are really important to help maybe guide hopefully conservation especially the lead part and um which we'll talk about in a minute next so 2007 a law was passed banning half ounce sinkers or less in vermont and you can see the pre-rate um of so almost one percent of the birds were getting caught up or dying from lead pre-2006 we had a lot fewer birds then less than 150 um then it went way down three four-fold decrease over the next decade which is awesome um so it seemed like the lead law was working but since 2019 we've doubled the loon population since then um but we've also the the numbers of birds dying from lead has increased a lot some of that is legal lead and some of that is illegal lead um and so i really want to give kudos to waterbury reservoir for starting this um the fishing line program um actually i have a slide of that in a second but right up there is a chunk of lead um we'll also do blood samples and other things to look at diseases malaria all that aspergillosis cases i mentioned earlier that's also gone way up so we're trying to work with some lake ecologists you know what's going on with that so um next so here's um eloise is spearing our efforts using waterbury as our model and coordinating with eric chitenden um and sheila to figure out the best design for a collection tube we've now put up 25 of these 26 of these around the entire state we're going to put up probably another 15 next year um come spring we're gonna do a big ad campaign and press release to anglers because that's really the community we're trying to reach um you know not so much the recreational kayaker but the people who are actually putting the rod out there who use their dads or grandfather's tackle box still has lead in it you know and i think these collection tubes are going to be much better than let's say the lead buyback program or the lead exchange program where you have to go somewhere to do it here they just like see the posters see the information they talk to the greeter we're going to hopefully get greeters to add that to their little mantra and if you fish and have any lead in your old tackle box you can put it right there thank you that's all you got to say so i don't know if you had a talking point about yeah it might be something to intentionally just add a note if you're if you're fishing and you have you know just make sure you don't have any lead and if you do just put it over there yeah non-aggressive um ava purdy's on the left she's a high school student from st johnsbury she helped us all summer um i got to know her because i coached the high school ski team and she was with me for three or four years and then you know now she's growing into this young lady and she's like i kind of like the lose because there's anything i can help with she tagged along with us two three days a week it was really fun so here's our new work pond bird um back on the left is a picture from 2002 that's the mail coming off the nest you can see the bands on its legs that bird was around for up till 2005 or or 10 or 11 and then it kind of disappeared for five six years we weren't actively looking for it so it may have still been there but it may have actually gotten kicked off the territory and then one it's placed back um and it's been nesting ever since until um this year um and again here one of these dots probably that bright one in the middle there is was the lead singer actually no it was not a lead singer sorry i got this x-ray back from hardwick vet a cat and dog vet and they do all my x-rays for me they love doing it because it's different than a cat and a dog um even though it's dead but uh anyway i'm like oh my gosh we got another lead bird well we've got the knee crops yeah i sent this one to mark pokrus who his knee crops eat over 2 000 birds in his career he's now retired but still does them with students um and he's like oh yeah it might be a lead it sure looks like it they did all the sampling and the testing of the blood no lead that's a non-lead sinker as which the bird can actually digest and pass through and live through it um ends up this bird had major contusions down the side of its body and that this was the boat hit almost always unintentional they just weren't looking the bird popped up right in front of the boat just bad timing um but at the same time it's just like adding loons to kayakers swimmers um smaller things on the water just to watch out for and i like to always promote you know uh loons to think about shoreline owners and how you take care of your habitat you know the base of the food web is what keeps loons going and if we have um unhealthy shorelines we're gonna have unhealthy lakes and so it's just a way to it's kind of hard to get excited about phosphorus and sedimentation and runoff but it's like oh i like the loons oh that really would help you know yeah let's let's do it again so yeah and also just try to think of shorelines as habitat not not as urban lawns next so loon habitat and recreate our human recreational habitat on lakes almost entirely overlap it's you know a little different than osprey different than eagles um and so you know just a lot more potential for conflict but there's also a lot of ways to reduce that conflict and and live together and people in vermont have just done an amazing job the productivity rate in vermont is higher than the north america average by far um and part of that is i think we just have such an awareness in our communities about what loons need oh there's a loon nesting i'll paddle over here i'll boat over here um you know don't don't cast your line right over toward them things like that so lots of things we can do and lots of things have been super successful next so this year 106 nests um but you can see our chick numbers are mellowing out a little bit and that part of that is um competition with our loons eagles um all okay things i mean they're just gonna it's actually good for the population to kind of um stabilize here and here's where loons are now and i'm really excited about central and southern vermont you know whether we had almost had no loons just 20 years ago and you can see we're actually waterberry um we got lake irikoi um up there is fairfield pond and metcalfe pond um and last this past summer we were starting to see two birds on colchester pond once in a while and um cedar lake or monkton pond so we're going to be watching those real closely next year so i'm going to just finish by going through a bunch of rescue stories um they're just kind of fun um they're always exciting um and you can just kind of see the i need to update this is from over five years ago but stuck in ice road crashes monofilament landing on ponds too small those are all kind of some of the major ones going over a dam like that chick did on ricker that was the one that um we're able to send to vans and get that going monofilament ingestion sometimes they can actually live through that um as long as the hook doesn't pierce something or there's not a lead sinker on it so um i'll actually talk about these as we go so next so this looks worse than it is that's a chick of the year that was learning how to fly and it landed on a little pond not much bigger than this room and a little narrow spit we went out there with spotlights at night at night that bird avoided us the entire i couldn't get close to it um it was freaked out by the lights sometimes they that happens they aren't mesmerized like sometimes they are so we went back to the net um a few days later with a gill net and strung it across the pond and i'm sitting in a canoe in the middle um with volunteers on the side and we just kind of went back and forth and all of a sudden the loon hit the net and we were able to pounce on it was within seconds and then extract it and then get it back to its lake where its parents were this was a road crash you know pretty easy to do deal with you just do an inspection to make sure there's nothing broken most of the time they're fine they might have a few bruises some scrapes on their feet but usually we can release those on a nearby water body next um this was a super exciting one um anyone recognize that shaw's williston taff's corners there's a big pool there right between there and friendlies i got to call may 22nd may 23rd we got a loon on this thing and we you know so we come down and look at it like geez the thing's pretty big it's like almost a hundred yards long and over a hundred feet wide and you know that bird is around osprey we're seeing catching fish cormorants we're seeing catching fish and i've seen you know loons could definitely take off from that but can they clear the fence duck under the power line miss that building we decided to give it a while just to kind of like practice and learn the because sometimes it's just a matter of time before they figure it out get the right wind and off they go well come two months later it was still there so we decided to do a capture attempt and um we uh that was a whole thing about liability insurance to go out there and all this other stuff it was kind of interesting and so this is the crew on the right that's looking over toward the um the friendlies restaurant i think and we get out there and we get the spotlight on it and it dives and i'm like oh man we're never gonna get close and i was playing a whale call and it's just sort of like another loon but it was kind of freaking him out a little bit well i went to the yodel call that male territorial call and all of a sudden that loon stayed on the surface and it kept staying on the surface and i think we were freaking the bird out because it hadn't seen a loon in two months and now he's got an angry male coming after it um and we nabbed it within five minutes after i started playing that call and i went to put a band on it and it slipped right off the leg and i'm like what's going on and then i realized this bird was in delayed migration to northern cobec he was coming through lake shamblain they don't they wait on the ocean until mid-may because it's still ice up in central northern cobec when our lakes are open and it doesn't pay to come here and hang out and get chased around by territorial and it's better to stay in the ocean until mid-may and then make a mad dash through all those territories and get your way north he just happened to land in the wrong spot um so that's where where he or she was going um the upper one was a bird caught in the fishing line on like willaby um we were able to put bands on that bird the next year the lady who helped us um a neighbor said that bird's back i see the bands in the water and she gave us a five hundred dollar donation um and then the next year it came back again and she you know we couldn't believe it she was seeing it in the same bay on lake willaby no nesting on lake willaby it's like is there a non breeding territory like is it a fishing territory is it a 25 year old who just doesn't want to go out and look for territories anymore i mean we don't really know and she gave us a three thousand dollar donation so we became her spiritual bird and my boss and i were like he's like who is this person i'm like i don't really know she like just tagged along when we caught this bird so we go up and um drive into her driveway there and she's like pulls out she says well he was here this morning i told him some very important people were coming are coming and you know we're both like oh my goodness um we weren't there five seconds and a bird swam around the corner came into the bay my boss puts his binocs on at chris rimmer it's the bird and we're like okay we're believers you know um anyway she's been yeah really fun and we she saw that bird for about eight years before she wasn't seeing it anymore and that's us releasing it right there so um next um this is a neat story of a chick that got i'm going to say orphaned but it also may have been it hatched we think on a pond that was about 10 acres way small um near a spectacle pond an island pond i can guess that sometimes when that happens the adults will go to a nearby big lake and call the chick through the woods we have two lakes that this has happened in vermont or actually one in no just one in vermont um and this would have been the second um anyway um it was on a 85 degree day on the pavement that's where it was found and the lady's like what do i do she couldn't get hold of me she couldn't you know the game board this couldn't get hold of anybody so finally after four hours she just threw it in spectacle pond where there was already a family and a chick but none of us knew this at the time we were like could this be the chick from spectacle pond and it wandered out of the water for some reason so i went up late day um scoured spectacle pond i found the family and a chick and i'm like well maybe that's the chick maybe it just got out of the water for some weird reason and i was 200 yards from the boat access on the other side coming back after spending an hour out there there's a chick stashed in the in the re not stashed but hiding in the reeds so i was able to grab it and um we went over to island pond just to look around to see are there any adults out there who would look like maybe these are the adults who could be the parents and so we decided to attempt a release let the bird go it gave a little hoot and all of a sudden there was a call from an adult they started coming toward each other and i'm with an 80 year old volunteer and the 65 year old volunteer who is helping all this and next thing we know that adult reared up and just whacked that chick full blast and i was like holy shit um i grabbed the kayak paddle out as fast as i can i forget my net and i'm just like breaking up the fight and the adults like what are you what's going on um you know that's not my chick and anyway that i was in four or five feet of water and i started to hover over the chick and all of a sudden i feel a little tap on the bottom bottom of the kayak and i just reach over and i happen to grab a leg um i brought it home that's it in my bathtub um i fed it fish actually that's not my bathtub that's that was its next stop um and i talked to a rehabber and she said you know feed it live minnows with our tweezers and hoot while you give the between the just give a whoo and all of a sudden it would nab it and if i didn't hoot it wouldn't grab it um pretty cool um and then i brought it to um a lady in main um but the feathers were all damaged probably from the truck through the woods and the heat and um she didn't have as good a pools as another late group called avian haven up in central main so it went there for the next six weeks and they raised the chick until it was attacking them when they keep brought in fish and they were like okay now it's time and that was its first dive it came up with a crab um off the main coast so that was that was a cool story all right so this was a shadow lake and conquered um followed this bird for about three weeks with fishing line you can see how thin it just looks emaciated well we caught it we banded it we released it and we saw it over the next month and um we saw that banded bird a few years later so it got through that period and was able to revive itself after we got that fishing line off um this was a chick of the year on lowlake down in london dairy i think it was the first time they'd had chicks and then it got totally caught up in what you're trying to clean up here on waterbury really unfortunate um and uh one on the left is a bird we actually was caught in fishing line a month earlier um on a pond about four miles or no about a mile away west hill pond we caught it got the fishing line off released it followed it for a few days it flew off was gone we're like oh my gosh okay success a month later i get a call about a bird swimming around like this um and this was that bird and obviously there was some it some impediment inside that caused problems and it we had to euthanize that one um next um this is this summer um down on lake rescue uh second time they've had a nest first time they had a chick and while the bird was incubating on the nest fishing line was seen on one of the the bird the adults were like you know what do we do do we like go get the bird on the nest and try it it seems to be going back and forth it seems to be sharing the duty so let's just kind of let things play they had the chick and then when the chick got to be about 10 weeks 10 days old we decided let's go for it it's the chick is there the chances of catching it are much higher without the chick then without it so here we are as an approach i just gave my camera to ava the high school kid and she just just taken photographs um and luckily the adult there was only one adult there and it was the fishing line adult um so we got really lucky first approach we were able to nab it with a net bring it in and so you can kind of see the fishing line right here luckily it wasn't going down the throat so next um so here's the bill with eric griggs uvm phd student holding it elowe's holding the bird me going in with the the cutters and we're able to snip that all free next um while we're doing it we took um put on bands took blood and feather samples we're taking a feather sample right here with a wing extended out um we just held on to the chick we didn't really do anything with him except get get cute shots with it next and then we were able to release them so yeah really cool that we could do both the research project with the blood and feather samples banding it as well as rescue it from the fishing line next um this is a few years ago in lake st catherine that was bad four inch treble hook hooks on either side both of them totally impaling both feet it was swimming like a back you know a crawl swimmer with both feet it actually out swam the game wardens the day before it had that much energy even though it couldn't it couldn't do a normal paddle with its feet um i took it to vins after we got it it was beach the next day um and you can see it's really infected um and so we're like do we euthanize the bird um and um some folks at avian haven said well we actually had a lady who's done work on um web feet um you know cutting it for cutting out dead tissue and then um figuring out how to deal with it so there's after surgery they kept it for about three weeks i think next kept it in their pool got you know swimming almost normally i mean we can't probably tell the 10 difference compared to a normal in a an inhibited bird without smaller web feet um but they put a band on it um bri came up the group in main and then they released it and then here's the bird that kind of got you know a little shock reared back at the person releasing it um on the ocean um we don't always get common loons we get actually red-throated loons um that usually come through in migration starting now um they they nest up hudson's bay either side over toward labrador and they'll come through here to the mid-atlantic coast where they spend the winters beautiful birds they're half a quarter of a size of a common loon um and uh this guy just picked one up on the side of the road the one on the left was i think um yeah no that was another road one and we've had a third one that landed on a pond really small that we were able to catch um next um sometimes we get the iced in birds i try to wait for the bird the water to freeze over and then we'll go out when the ice is safe uh in this case uh woodbury fire department just got their airboat and so the warden thought oh let's let's see if they want to practice run and they were all in for it and so the it went out on the 911 beeper ice rescue lake rest lake elligo they didn't say it was a bird 20 trucks a rescue vehicle and they're like what anyway once they fired it up it was uh all fun and people were having a good time figuring out and they actually learned a lot because they were getting stuck on the ice in this thing and how to gun the engine right and not do it right you know anyway they were able to pick it up um and then um i actually had we knew this bird this was actually i think a chick of the year that was swimming around with a wing kind of weird it was just not right it was uh pointed up a little so we think it maybe it had a wing injury um and and could eat it could preen it could do everything except fly and so it just needed a trip to the ocean so earlier in the week i joked with some friends do you want to take a bird to main if we catch it or new hampshire and they were all up for it and so i called them that night are you serious would you do it and so the next day it was new year's eve they went to portland main deliver the bird at dusk and or dawn or dusk and went out for dinner next um and then the most dramatic ice rescue we did as lake shamp plain where there were some long distance ice skaters found nine loons in this hole in february um so we put together a team first day we went out we caught one of them we didn't have this tarp or anything it was just swimming around um all of them swimming around and just avoiding us no problem so we put the tarp in a 20 by 30 tarp over it there were still swimming all over the place and we got six more that day um a little bit of luck and a little bit of practice um and we're just putting them in boxes and putting them in a sled and off we went to sit and then eventually got them down to southern part of lake shamp plain um and this is in august this is norah um a friend of mine in craftsbury his daughter who's totally into the natural world and we were about to go look for this bird that went over the dam at rick or pond um and i said hey norah you want what are you doing tomorrow you want to come along and so she jumped in the truck with us and the bird was pretty docile so i let her do the release um we put it back in a week later did the same thing it went over the dam we're like what's going on so we went back caught it again but this time i'm like the bird was so weak it was supposed to 10 week old bird should have been probably like six seven pounds and it was probably like four or five pounds maybe three pounds under weight and i'm its feathers were all weird you know just not doing well and so i didn't give it much chance we got it to vins um they put it in their new eight by eight foot by eight foot two foot deep pool and just started feeding it dead fish frozen fish would could force feed it but it wasn't grabbing them they finally worked with bri this biodiversity research institute to get a bait truck to come up and give them a whole slew of bait to keep cool and that bird just started gobbling them up and started within a week had gone up a pound but its feathers were still matted and um after another week it was finally preening itself it got gained another pound um and so then the bird was delivered to um a facility in mass where biodiversity research institute was doing a translocation project of releasing older chicks and hoping that they zone in on that in the future as a new it's a spot where loons haven't been since the 1800s um and we were using this this is a rehab facility but also a part of this translocation and so they had veterinarians and staff to watch really closely so this bird was directly released with another chick on a small pond followed for a week or two and then they disappeared and the hope was that they flew just five days ago i got an email that the bird was spotted 10 miles away on another pond oh here's the holding facility in western mass there's a chick in the holding facility this would have been for a younger chick not this one um and then this is the it's not this bird but it was another chick that was going through the same process from harbys lake that was a photograph taken at the center for wildlife underwater it's such a cool photograph so and now that chick from rickers pond is eating some fish and getting ready to go to the oceans two more slides three more slides so again any support you can give us that'd be great um go through our website uh we'll send you more materials if you get your name on that that sheet and then the last photograph anyone hear about this story from three years ago this is in wisconsin the the parent loons lost their chick the chick just chicks usually disappear in the first week or two you know predators um something goes wrong with the feathers and for whatever reason there was a way laid duck away from its family and the the adult loons just sort of like took to it and off the duck went with the adult loons for the next six weeks these these these loons raised this duckling um there's a picture of the duck full size still back riding um really funny this the duck was seen coming up with snails in six feet of water if you know anything about mallards they're not divers they're dabblers this they were this bird was learning how to be a predator and it probably has the highest protein diet of any mallard ever so it was like is this going to become super duck you know then mid august they they weren't seen together again and we can only hope that the duckling found a family of mallards and wasn't beating them all up because he was stronger with all this protein but anyway thank you very much and we'll take some questions if we do want to take questions that's fine um it is at three o'clock so we did plan on this to end the day to fly today as long as you want just want to let you know i'll take two or three and then i'll hang out one of the primary fish species that uh there's some studies in canada from 20 30 years ago where they had some controlled lakes and it seemed like perch was the most dramatic ice rescue we did as lakeshamp plane where there were some long-distance ice skaters found nine loons in this hole in february so we put together a team first day we went out we caught one of them we didn't have this tarp or anything it was just swimming around all of them swimming around and just avoiding us no problem so we put the tarp in a 20 by 30 tarp over it they were still swimming all over the place and we got six more that day a little bit of luck and a little bit of practice and we're just putting them in boxes and putting them in a sled and off we went to and then eventually got them down to southern part of lake champlain and this is in august this is norah um a friend of mine and craft's very daughter who's totally into the natural world and we were about to go look for this bird that went over the dam at rick or pond um and i said hey norah you want what are you doing tomorrow you want to come along and so she jumped in the truck with us and the bird was pretty docile so i let her do the release um we put it back in a week later did the same thing it went over the dam we're like what's going on so we went back caught it again but this time i'm like the bird was so weak it was supposed to 10 week old bird should have been probably like six seven pounds and it was probably like four or five pounds maybe three pounds under weight and i'm its feathers were all weird you know just not doing well and so i didn't give it much chance we got it to bins um they put it in their new eight by eight foot by eight foot two foot deep pool and just started feeding it dead fish frozen fish would could force feed it but it wasn't grabbing them they finally worked with bri this biodiversity research institute to get a bait truck to come up and give them a whole slew of bait to keep cool and that bird just started gobbling them up and started within a week had gone up a pound but its feathers were still matted and um after another week it was finally preening itself it got gained another pound um and so then the bird was delivered to um a facility in mass where by biodiversity research institute was doing a translocation project of releasing older chicks and hoping that they zone in on that in the future as a new it's a spot where loons haven't been since the 1800s um and we were using this this is a rehab facility but also a part of this translocation and so they had veterinarians and staff to watch really closely so this bird was directly released with another chick on a small pond followed for a week or two and then they disappeared and the hope was that they flew just five days ago i got an email that the bird was spotted 10 miles away on another pond oh here's the holding facility in western mass there's a chick in the holding facility this would have been for a younger chick not this one um and then this is the it's not this bird but it was another chick that was going through the same process from harbys lake that was a photograph taken at the center for wildlife underwater it's such a cool photograph so and now that chick from rickers pond is eating some fish and getting ready to go to the ocean two more slides three more slides so again any support you can give us that'd be great um go through our website uh we'll send you more materials if you get your name on that that sheet and then the last photograph anyone hear about this story from three years ago this is in wisconsin the the parent loons lost their chick the chick just chicks usually disappear in the first week or two you know predators um something goes wrong with the feathers and for whatever reason there was a way laid duck away from its family and the adult loons just sort of like took to it and off the duck went with the adult loons for the next six weeks these these these loons raised this duckling um there's a picture of the duck full size still back riding um really funny this the duck was seen coming up with snails in six feet of water if you know anything about mallards they're not divers they're dabblers they were this bird was learning how to be a predator and it probably has the highest protein diet of any mallard ever so it was like is this going to become super duck you know then mid august they they weren't seen together again and we can only hope that the duckling found a family of mallards and wasn't beating them all up because he was stronger with all his protein but anyway thank you very much and we'll take some questions so if we do want to take questions that's fine um it is after eight o'clock so as we did plan on this to end the day to clock today as long as you want just want to let you know i'll take two or three and then i'll hang out what are the primary fish species there's some studies in canada from 20 30 years ago where they had some controlled lakes and it seemed like perch was if they if that was available they would that was uh the one they wanted went after and it's a good thing because they're they're a high reproductive fish um compared to some other species but they will eat trout they'll eat anything um crayfish crabs um yep shiners um leeches um yeah so we used to say 100 to 200 um feet to at least get airborne and then the feet still kind of hit in the water and that's still kind of what they need plus another you know quarter mile before they can make the turn and get around the lake but i've now seen them get off from a 15 to 20 foot hole with ice all around it obviously there's no impediment going across there's nothing no elevation going across a frozen lake so they can take off from 20 feet of open water um and we've had three witnesses of that i saw one once otherwise i would have said you know no they're stuck there they're not going to get off and they can't walk on land um but really they need a good quarter mile stretch to get airborne enough lift and then enough to be able to maneuver um some of the ponds that they've landed on that are like farm ponds and they just kind of crash landed on them they've been able to get off if there's like a field right next to them and they can sort of still have that for lift if they're surrounded by trees then we'll have to see if we can get them or wait till they crash land on shore and then we get them then yes dad just wanted to comment about the first balloons because in back in the 1990s there were some issues on the on water barriers of water but there were an effort to protect the pair of the dolphins and the looms and leaving the blue herons and uh i have a little bumper sticker that i put like this and uh water barrier as a war for looms not limiters but the other thing was when the sealer brought up that one of our meetings of the these bins um i have to admit that i was very skeptical if the sealer has a way how to make me feel comfortable about something so i i started building them and the first one i put up was at the you know bus shelf right down the road here and the first day i paid back to check and see if anybody used it there was a guy putting in some stuff and so it but at the time i didn't get enough thought but uh the reason you can't really just put these in a trash is that if you see the trash truck dumping uh hundreds of birds are behind this thing trying to eat scraps and stuff and they get tangled with this not just birds but other wildlife you know otters and so on so i realized the percentage you mentioned in one of your articles was something like 40 or 50 percent of the that you find so yeah 40 percent of our mortality is in Vermont fishing line or life related so yep we can make a difference so thank you so much all right do you have any other things just come on up and uh i don't want to email me i'm always available although i work at crossroads our center