 friends asking, you know, what we should do for BirdFest this year, you know, a lot of what folks wanted to hear about was, all right, how are Vermont's birds doing in particular? And what's the status, what's going on in terms of research and conservation right here in the state? And I thought, well, who better would it be to ask to invite to come and talk about that than Margaret, with all of them Vermont. Though I've just met Margaret, I feel like I've been orbiting you for years admiring your work. And, you know, Audubon-Vermont is really an amazing friend of birds here in Vermont. Everything from common turn of research to peregrine falcons, to Christmas bird counts, to all the other things you've been hearing about today. And so we're really delighted to be able to partner with Audubon-Vermont and with Margaret today to learn about our birds and serving our birds here in Vermont. So, with that lackluster introduction, I turn it over to a spectacular, the DeMarco Falcons attack. Thanks for coming inside on such a nice day. So what I thought I would do, we do a lot of bird conservation work at Audubon. And I can't really talk about everything, but I'm going to highlight some of the work that I do. Some of it reads from single species conservation efforts, endangered species, decline species, to kind of more habitat-focused work where we're working with forests and different age classes and grasses and things like that. So that was my hoping that in the time that I have, I don't like rush through too much, but I want to be able to give you a sense of kind of the large range of things that we're doing in Vermont and how some of the other species that we're working on are doing. So I worked for Audubon-Vermont, which is a state office of the National Audubon Society. So we're part of national, we, and because of that we think, we're thinking big. We're thinking about conservation on a large scale. So we're thinking about it in terms of migration roots, wintering grounds, and breeding grounds. And obviously in Vermont, we've really focused on breeding grounds, but we're trying to put everything in the larger context of some of the flyways, especially here in Vermont. We're focused on the Atlantic flyway and different groups of efforts that are categorized into working lands, coasts, which is really applicable in Vermont. Bird-friendly communities, we're talking about homes and urban areas and things like that. So we've got a number of focuses at National in Vermont as a piece of, has a piece of all of those focuses, except for really close. So some of the critical species that I've been working on, I've been working on some of these for a really long time, and I've just started working on one. So I, since 1997, I've been working with Peregrine Falcon Recovery, and that was before my time at Audubon. And same within Balagos, and now we're just starting a chimneyswift project, which is really exciting to see the chimneyswift tower that's being decorated outside so that we can start putting one, or the plan is to put it out in the field and maybe attract chimneyswifts to use this next season, next breeding season. So I thought I'd start by talking about some of these birds and what we've done in the past and where they are now, or where we think they're going. Starting with Peregrines and Eagles, I'm going to kind of do these at tandem because it's a very similar story. Peregrine Falcons and Eagles are both these iconic species, they're successful reintroduction recovery stories throughout their range, not just in Vermont. So in the case of Peregrines, they were listed as endangered federally from 1970 to 1999. They were taken off federal list in 1999, but we had them on our state list until 2005. So we had our own set of recovery goals that we wanted to meet. We did a lot of work to meet those goals, and now we're considering them to be a recovered species in the state, although we still do a lot of monitoring and we still do a lot of protection of some of the messing clips. Similarly for Eagles, another great success story. They were listed as endangered federally until 1995, but they got back to this extra step of being taken down a notch to threaten status federally. So they weren't taken off the list until 2007. And in the state here, they are still officially listed as a state endangered species, but they have been proposed to be downlisted to threaten, but it has to go through a formal rulemaking process in the legislature. I'm guessing that by the time that rulemaking process actually happens, that we may be at the point where we can take them off our state list. So they're pretty close here in Vermont. We've got goals that we're trying to meet, and we're really close to meeting those. So in both cases, these birds really climbed in the middle of the 1900s, primarily due to the pesticide DUT, which caused them to lay eggs, and had such thin shells that when they incubated those eggs, the eggs cracked, and no young were hatched during that time. They're both listed right around the same time that the endangered species act was passed, and both went through reintroduction efforts to bring them back. So those efforts included what we call a process called hacky, which is putting them in their native habitat in an enclosure where they can imprint on their surroundings, let them learn how to fly and hunt on their own, even works without adults around. And in both cases that happened here in Vermont. So we think we had about 32 pairs of parabens in the state of Vermont before the decline. The reason why we had pretty accurate information on that is because there were egg collectors and falconers out there scaling the cliffs where the birds nest, collecting eggs, and documenting where they were. So we have great documentation. We know about 60 cliffs that were used historically. And so when it came time to putting together this recovery efforts for the species, there's a lot of information about where they should be, where they have been. And so three sites were chosen for the release of the captive raised birds. Those were, one was Marshfield, so not too far from near Marshfield Mountain. The other was White Rocks, which is down in Wallingburn near Rutland. And the third one was Brandon Gap, Mount Fordham. So those three sites were the police young birds, and they did about 90 birds over the course of five or six years from the early to mid-80s. And during that time, the first pair came back to Vermont to set up a territory. And that first site was in 1984 at Mount Pisgah, which is a historic site hugely in the Northeast Kingdom. And that pair raised young for the first time in 1985. So since then, we've seen this great long trajectory of increases to be at least 56 pairs in the state right now. So above our historic levels, they're still producing enough young to expand the population, we're finding them in the middle of the spectrum, like on a roadtouch or in a quarry on the Vermont Yankee smokestack. So we're finding them in places where we wouldn't have predicted some of the sites where we knew they used to nest historically are no longer suitable. Like forests have grown up and they're no longer exposed, not cliffs, if that's their primary nesting habitat. So they're doing really well, but they're not doing well. They're doing well with help. And so we've now moved from when I first started to work on the project, we moved from a time when we had a biologist or two really monitoring every site very closely, going out every week, determining what the birds were doing, if they were nesting, protecting those birds from disturbance, to really engaging communities in helping monitor those species. So this has become a huge community oriented project. We now have got almost every site covered by volunteers who go out about once a month, but they can go as often as they want. And they sit for, in the case of peregrines, it's a bit like watching paint dry. You sit and you monitor the activities of the birds for a period of time to determine what they're doing. So whether they're there, whether they're nesting, if they are nesting, whether that nest is successful and then eventually counting the number of young that make it to fledgling age. In addition to that, I do a lot of coordinating with volunteers, but I also work a lot with the landowners and recreation groups, especially the rock climbing community, to determine where on the cliff we can keep open for our climbing group, where it needs to be closed, what needs to be closed. This is an overlook. Birds are most sensitive to people above them on the cliff or rock climbing like right near the nest site. So those are the two things that I tend to focus my efforts on now is really working with the people who either owner manage the cliffs to protect the birds. And in doing that, I also do as much outreach and education as I can. So this is just a typical nest site. It's down on the Buckner Preserve in West Haven. Pretty sheer cliff. They always want a great view of the surroundings so that they tend to be in places where they, if they're on the cliff, they can see pretty well because they're so territorial. They want to be able to chase off any intruder that they think is an intruder. So it could be a vulture, it could be a hawk or anything. So that's kind of... And this, I don't have the 2019 data finalized yet, but this shows you the trend. So the purple, we'll start with the red line. The red line is the number of pairs, territorial pairs. The green line is the number of nesting pairs. So there's always a few pairs that don't actually nest. One year next could be related to the fact that you've got a young pair, a new pair, a new site, an experience, something like that. And then the purple is the number of fledglings, which tends to fluctuate quite a bit because there are so many factors that go into whether they're successful. Whether it's related, it could be predators, nests. What's the nest success rate? And what are perhaps the greatest causations of nest growth? Well, we don't really know the causations, but generally the nest success rate is about 75%, but we've had some years where it's been as low as 60-something percent, and this high is almost 100%. That's a very high rate, so they're very successful nests. If the nest fails, will they re-nest? They will if it fails early enough from season. They think they bake the eggs for about a month, and then it takes six weeks for the young to reach fledgling age. Once the young are flying, it takes about a month, and that's when they come in and fed it. So they really don't have that much time. So if the nest fails and you've been in the first couple of weeks, they will re-nest. I'm sorry, I said that was the last question. Will nest be reused? Yes, so it's actually not a nest. When I say nest, it's what you call it. It's usually a lead on a cliff. They will steal a raven nest, so they will use an old nest from some other species, but they still actually build a nest themselves. They find a little ledge, which hopefully has cover and protected from weather and predators and things like that, and they'll scrape a little depression in the substrate on that ledge and then lay their eggs there. Thank you. So as far as what causes failure, we don't monitor them closely enough to really know. It could be a predator, like a raccoon can scale a cliff. It could be a raven. It could be another. It could be human disturbance. It could be weather really. It could be, you know, some nasty weather like we had this spring. Some of the heavy downpours might have caused the nest to fail, whether because the eggs got browned in the water or the chicks got hyperthermic or something like that. But in general, doing really well. We're kind of at the point now where we're determining where we go from here. It's such a great community project and we've got so much engagement from the people who do the monitoring. There's no reason to stop monitoring those sites or we have people who are engaged. But we may be there are some sites where we know it's really remote. It's never going to be served. We can't find a volunteer to monitor. Maybe we can just let us go and not count those sites every year. So we're sort of in the process of determining what's our minimum amount of monitoring that we want to do. It's really keeping the nest site protection piece as an important piece and then also keeping the engagement piece important as well. So eagles, we're just sort of starting the process of engaging the community in a way that we did with peregrines, which I can talk about a little bit more. We don't have great records on eagles. I don't really know why this is. The only known record of a breeding pair is on Lake Bonacine in the last of 1940s. We know we have so much habitat here in the state that the assumption is is that we must have had more than one pair of eagles at some time. But we just don't know. And we were, Vermont was the last state in the lower 48 to get a pair of breeding eagles. We were sort of the last holdout. We don't really know why that is either, but eagles are slow to pioneer new areas that tend to saturate an area before they move into a new one. So we knew we had pairs of hamper. We had them in New York. We had them in along the Massachusetts, and we had them along the Longwoods and the river. But we didn't have any of them on. You know what's going to happen? We just didn't know when. And Senator Jeffords, when he was in office, really wanted to kind of do something for Native species in wildlife. We were able to allocate funding to do a release hacking program, a release program. And so when I was at National Wildlife Federation, we did that release program. We released 29 birds at Dead Creek. Kind of as a way to sort of loose the process, get these eagles here in Vermont so that we could say we had eagles. During that time, we got our first pair of eagles, and we didn't nest successfully until 2006. And now what we're seeing is kind of this existential growth of pairs of eagles in the state. Don't really know if our relocation reintroduction project was what caused that to happen. But we went from one pair in 2003 to now this year. I think we had about 30 pairs. So again, very similar. And this is the first year where we brought these scientists in on a formal way to monitor eagles. Most of the effort has been in the Champlain Valley just because the River Valley's got a seasonal person who does the work for the state. Again, going out, finding nests doesn't take as long as it does for peregrines to figure out what's going on. Documenting what's happening, whether the pair is there, whether they're using that nest, young hatch, and if so, how many. We also do a winter survey to kind of track where the important wintering areas are that volunteers help us with, and also general public that can usually just put out a call for report your sightings during this period of time and try to track how many eagles are spending the winter here. And again, doing as much education as possible, but some of these species, like eagles and peregrines, it's really not hard to get people excited about them. They're kind of charismatic megafauna, so it's easy. People care about these birds. Yeah. They do. They tend to congregate where there's open water, so you'll see them at dams or along the lake. They do feed their opportunistic feeders in the winter especially, so they're roping down a carcass, so people see them on the other side and things like that as well. Yeah, they do. So, this is our threshold for me. Down the scene, if we had to, we wanted to meet that threshold of nine pairs in the state over the course of five years, and as you can see, been above the breeding pairs is great. We've been above that now for a number of years, and this year will be a continuation of that. We also have goals for a number of young produce per nest, which is one per nest, and we've been above that, too, for a number of years. So, we definitely have met our goals for D-list. Down the scene, threatened. Once we have the final numbers of zero, we'll have to see if we're at that point where we can take them down to, or take them off the list as well. But again, a great success story. They're becoming a sort of common bird now, which they never worked before. So, this is obviously a quick overview. This is a new effort that we're doing in the Vermont Fish and Wildlife. Vermont Fish and Wildlife supports our work with eagles and herons and churns, common churns, which I don't do, so I didn't bring that one up. And now, chimneyswifts. So, chimneys are listed, swifts are listed as a species of special concern in the state. We know they're declining range wide, and we know that people really care about chimneyswifts. So, the state wanted us to kind of get a sense of where they are, what parts, what urban areas are using, where in those areas they're using for nesting and nursing. And so, just this year, we started out kind of an effort to get people out looking for chimneyswifts and documenting on eagles. So, we put a call out, and I think I got almost 400 reports. Some of those were repeat locations of, you know, there's a place in St. John'sbury where I've probably got 20 reports of the same location, but some, and that's important too to know that they're always there. Having analyzed the data, I've now convinced the UVM students who are going to analyze it for me to figure out kind of where the key areas are. And they're going to also help me talk to people in Burlington about some of the towers or the chimneys that we know these birds are using and how they can be protected, as well as doing what's happening here, because I mean, it's building a chimneyswift tower which we know works. For chimneyswifts to use a tower that's been put in an area, they will use that for roosting and nesting. I don't really know. I guess you guys will have to document what the use is when you put yours out. Yeah, we'll see. And I think we're a little late, but we're trying to find key roosting sites in Burlington and we are going to have this week go over to the various parking garages, the tops of the parking garages and up by UVM. Do you scan the sky as a dusk to see if we can see any chimneyswifts? Yeah. Is there any way we can know whether or not historically there are more wind in these future forests with more dead trees? I don't know. These kids are going to help you do a lot of that research and figure out kind of the background. Yeah, historically these birds use snags and the forests for nesting, but they learn to use chimneys when the forests are cut down and now the chimneys are an important part of their habitat. Okay, so I'll just shift gears a bit here and talk a little bit about kind of our habitat-focused work. So I work with two other biologists on staff, Mark LaVar and Steve Hagamoo. Steve is kind of our forest guy expert, so I'm only going to be able to brush over some of his stuff. Mark and I work on kind of the young forests, early successional habitat, which includes grasslands and shrublands. So some of the icons of these areas for the shrublands, it's Goldwing Warbler, for the forests, Scarlet Tanniter, and this is a maple sugaring forest, which I'll talk about, and then the grasslands, it's Bob Link. So to start with, the forest or the grassland and shrubland work focuses mostly on the Champlain Valley, where Goldwing Warblers are the only really breeding in Champlain Valley, and that's kind of our poster child of this work. It's also just a place where we've got a lot of agland that's been abandoned and is reverting back to forest, and it's kind of in this transitional stage of shrubby habitat. Grasslands are also most numerous in Champlain Valley. So that's where we focused our efforts, and then Steve, his mature forest work, has been focusing all over the state, although we now have a funding to help him work with us in the Champlain Valley, where if we're working with a landowner who's got all those habitats, then Steve can come in and help us give recommendations for how you can manage your habitats in these different stages, how you can improve them for birds, and so this project is really kind of a landowner engagement project, working with people who own land. In my case, mostly the Champlain Valley and helping them think about how to manage their land for birds. The bobbling project is kind of the name of the grassland work that we do. It's a separate project, but it's all kind of part of the larger effort to work with grassland birds, and it started initially as an economic experiment where to see if they could do, and I don't understand economics at all, but a reverse auction process where landowners and farmers could say, this is what I can afford to forgo a hay cut or two, and if you pay me this, I can do that. And so during that process, landowners and farmers have put in bids for what they can afford each year, and it's now housed by Mass Audubon. Mass Audubon determines what rate they can pay based on donations they've gotten from people, and then a certain number of landowners have chosen every year to receive the payment if they fall through. So that's the nature of that, and I go out and I count the bobbling on the fields that have been enrolled. So there are two scenarios. One is where a farmer can have the hay cut before May 31st, but then they need to wait 65 days in order to cut again. That gives the birds enough time to come back into the fields, re-nest and get young off, or the other option is to not cut the field until August 1. Unfortunately, what we're discovering with that second option is that some of the Champlain Valley are getting infested living-based species, especially wild parsnip, which is just nasty for everybody, but it also makes me feel unsettling, too. So we're trying to figure out now maybe there's a limit as to how many years the field can get enrolled and do the wait-cut. We're also trying to partner and get the same message out and figure out ways to appreciate and recognize all the people who are doing this kind of effort for no money, because there are a lot of men who are not there who are delayed, but not necessarily getting recognized or paid for doing it. Again, I don't have the 19 data. This is the time here when all those numbers are coming in, but you can see there's been a pretty steady increase of numbers of acres protected in Vermont. Most of it, even though MassAutomon is doing the sort of managing this project, still most of the land enrolled every year is in Vermont. It's just a little bit of Massachusetts, a little bit of Connecticut, maybe one field in New Hampshire this year, but it really seems to be a Vermont-centric project right now. Is there a noticeable increase to the number of species that you know? That's what's really hard to track, because we're seeing, we can really only say that the acres have increased. We count the bottlenecks every year, we extrapolate how many young we think are produced, but we don't really know what that impact is on the population, because there's so many other fields that aren't being tracked. We don't know how many are being managed. Could you just select some control fields? Yeah, there are people, like UVM is doing a lot of work and we're hoping that they're engaged in how the population is doing. That's not our property to offer us today, but along the number of fledglings that are coming, I think this last year we had about 600 fledglings that we think got off 6 to 700, and this year will probably be a similar number, maybe 600 or so. We had a few, a little bit of a dip in the number of acres enrolled this year, but the bottleneck numbers were similar. Some of the fields that I know is that some of the fields that are really great are getting more of those and more concentrated birds from one year to the next, but then they're also getting started as a person. We're going to have to figure out how it keeps that field from a bottleneck. It's getting complicated. It seems like a really easy fix, straightforward fix, and it's getting more and more complicated. So the Young Forest Shrubland work focuses really on these two species, but there are a number of other priority birds that we work with, Goldwing and Bluing Warblers, and these two hybridize with each other, so there's this whole range of Goldwing, Bluing and everything in between in the state. But it's some interesting info on the two species. What we're seeing is a decrease in Goldwings in Vermont and then generally decreases in Goldwings in the north and Bluings we're seeing increases in Bluings and generally decreases in the south and increases in the north. So we're seeing this kind of merging of the two in Vermont especially, and we're really in the hot bed zone hybridization of these two. It's complicated because there's a lot of genetic information that we know and then there's some that we don't know. But in general, the theory is that this is pretty much the same species. There's only six loci on the genome that are different and those loci are just based on collusion. So based on what they look like rather than anything else. And so the fact that we're in this hybridization zone may just be that we're on this sort of timeline where the species that's kind of diverged over time come back together, diverge and come back together. And we're in that come back together time. And we have a joke that we could put together a calendar of all Vermont birds we've seen anywhere from one spectrum to the other and everything in between. We've had a different one showing the hybrids. I've got a couple pictures of the named hybrids. So there's Lawrence's warblark and Rooster's warblers. But he's got the chin marking that the golden wing has and then the Brewster's is really kind of like the golden wing but doesn't have the deeper eye line or the chin marking and the wing markings are different. But because we have so many hybrids in Vermont you see all different ranges of these colorations. There is a group, a natural group that put together a conservation for golden wing warblers. It's called the Golden Wing Warbler Working Group and they chose some targeted areas to work in in our area here in Vermont. I'm sorry, I dislocated my fingers. I can't use this one. It's really right here in the Champaign Valley and what we've learned over time with all of our surveys in our work is that this area which they call could be the whole valley and so we're hoping that they're going to expand that area of focus to the whole valley. We've had a number of things we've done over the years. Surveys, we've had a student work develop a model for us where the habitat is. We've even done some geolocator work and we've discovered that they're all over the Champaign Valley. We don't know so much about the northern part of the valley but certainly from Burlington to Westview there are a lot more than we originally thought. The Goldway Morgan Working Group thought we should aim for 20 pairs and we know that we have at least 200 pairs in this area. So this is kind of their typical habitat and when I meet with a landowner I ask them to manage if they're interested I would ask them if they have this habitat I would talk to them about how they could because it's an ephemeral habitat so it's going to change how they can manage it to improve it or how they can manage it to set it back if it's starting to get a little too overgrown. So they tend to like this what we call clumpy patches of shrubs like dogwoods or byburnums patches of herbaceous stuff so that could be goldenrod or grasses that type of thing. A few overstory trees and then they also want or seem to care about having forests next to that habitat. So in the case of someone who's maybe got a shrubby edge that's leading up to forests and it's infested with invasives we might come in and ask and help them either find funding or give them guidance as to how they could manage in a way to improve the habitat and most of the time it's just telling asking them to take the invasives out. Take the invasives out to create that clumpy those openings in that clumpiness we're asking for. Invasive species are you know or not great in the case of birds like the golden wing and some of the other birds we work with they create the structure but they don't have the same nutritious nutrient value that the native species have. So the host caterpillars or bugs that use a honeysuckle are more like jumping to a golden wing than a dog wing. So taking those invasives out tends to really help us get that work done and we often work with Vermont Fish and Wildlife and NRCS natural resources conservation service to secure funding to make that happen. And then afterwards we'll go back in and this is just a year of regrowth it comes back really fast and almost within a year every time there is one of these birds there. Here's one of the weird kinds it's kind of I don't know what the problem is Lawrence is without the black chin or a blue wing with a big wide eye stripe. Some of the other birds that benefit and animals that benefit from this habitat work are Woodcock, Prairie Wardler Toei, Fields Barrow Fisher and then there's plenty of mammals and plenty of other bean species too like grouse and turkey that benefit. So the landowners are really interested in hunting that might be a quack for her to manage her property for some of these things. So what Steve does with the mature forest is very similar he works talks with landowners who have a mature forest on their property they could improve the diversity of birds on their land as well in a very similar way if a property has a current use or a forest management plan he might recommend certain activities that would increase the diversity of the structure for the forest in a way to benefit birds. So here's a site where they're just not making like huge patch cuts or huge patch cuts or really doing selective cutting in a way that increases diversity of the birds. Another aspect of forest work that he does is work with nature producers so he's got a number of people who agree to manage their maple forests in a similar way where there's a lot of structural diversity in the trees not just maples and if they agree to do that they get a sticker on their syrup that says it's produced in bird friendly habitats and what we're finding is that people are starting to buy that syrup that's produced in bird friendly habitats and there are other states now looking into it. And Green Mountain Autonomous Center is the model. We do have demonstration sites for both the syrup production and forest management and so you can go and look at how we've managed forests on that site for a lot of time. So this is becoming something that could really expand in a major way and we now got Vermont Center for Pico Studies actually studying the bird impacts of some of this management so that we can hopefully get to a point where people can get certified or some kind of stamp of approval. Just an example of some people if they agree to do it they also get a nice metal thing that they can put on their sugar shack. And then one last thing I thought I just kind of touch on was work we're doing in communities because some I know a lot of not everybody has a big forest or big shrubland or grassland so we're doing a lot of work in communities where people can just work in their backyards or in their neighborhoods to plant native plants that attract birds and help birds in urban and suburban areas. So this is actually a named national project it's called Plants for Birds and the basic premise is to plant native species not invasives and attract insects and birds and everything that can use your backyard think about insects you can think about berries and fruit you can think about nectar nuts and seeds and so it kind of covers pollinators as well as birds and you can actually go on the Audubon website plug in where you live and come out and it'll feed out a list of plants that are good for your yard so just quickly you know a couple things that people can do if you're interested if you have land that you want to manage come talk to me or send us an email you can look at the plants for birds website to see if you want to this is a great time of year to do plantings for birds go see a list of plants you can try to find you can if you're interested join our list community scientists whether it's paragon monitoring or eco monitoring one thing I didn't really talk about as large as saying it's just the whole concept of climate change and how that's really the biggest threat the birds are facing right now so anything we can do to get our policy makers to do something for climate change that's going to I'll take questions if there are any more and I'm happy to talk to people after this sure yep thanks for having issues with wind energy siding in Vermont if the eagle is on with other groups definitely some of the sites are very close to paragon sites there's a lot of bonds and interface in the siding process in the state really we have a new director now for you know you know you're certainly right how about the state the state there's not a lot of wind there's not a lot of wind there's been one bird that's been killed that's been developed but I think that all there's been a lot of tape each year I haven't ever heard of it before you know now whether they're coming on there's a bat migration but they're not doing that how do you speak but yeah I think it's a bigger issue out west for here it's going to be a bat issue out west I've seen bull eagles in the water barrier the nesting in the Lewinsky Valley you know I keep hearing about them in the the library reservoir but I don't know there could be one you just don't know about it I've seen a lot of them I know they start reading in winter so how would we set up a meeting to have you come visit Lala a second are you going to talk to me now or yes I'm going to talk to you I'm going to talk to you about our areas of focus and if not could you do a site visit even though we're not looking right here on Berlin Ponds Berlin Ponds how much well we have 20 acres but there's this particular field we didn't pay this year and my sister-in-law also said a lot of people walk around the pond I mean she uses it she comes here early to say where we are and she was there a few weeks ago the most lush habit that we want to urge she's always just in our field so we didn't pay it for the newest reasons it's a small field but the habit that is such the birdseed the better the field versus the year before we get it so it's a problem but it's just very right but that's what we're going to do with this one I'm not sure if you're back here or if you're not here but the field this year is just pretty incredible and we didn't touch it I was thinking it's our kind of early hay or early pet food we can make and then leave it until maybe September yeah really from the last week they've done that quite a bit activity in the field is noticeably other than the sparrows it's pretty quiet but first of all I'm trying to also I was just wondering as far as the buffer and the zones we should let a few things I'm always reluctant to let trees invade if you want to reach out to me I can at least look at it every village should make a promise to us it's not an art because you're not an art focus area Steve's been out to help us with the town for us yeah we walked up all the land we require thanks to you and the other side you can hear it this is just the pride of it yeah okay I'll give you another one I've got my card