 Good morning. It is Friday morning, January 22nd, and this is the Vermont Legislatures Committee on House, House Committee on Natural Resources Fish and Wildlife. And this morning we are going to delve into the second part of our title Fish and Wildlife with getting a lot of information and background on the status of our game and non-game species from the department's perspective. So thank you for being here, Commissioner Porter and your team who work on this. And we look forward to hearing from you. Great. Thank you for the invitation. I have with me Eric Palmer, who's the head of our Fish Division. Mark Scott, who's the head of our Wildlife Division. And Steve Perrin, who's the head of our non-game natural heritage program. So I'm going to ask each of them to go to their areas. And there may very well be specific pieces of the wildlife world that the committee wants to hear from the more deeply down into the department from the experts who work on those particular areas or particular species. Happy to bring them in, of course, at any time that works for you. Eric and Mark oversee the two divisions within our department, which manage the wildlife and lands on one side and the fisheries, fish hatcheries and access areas and waters on the other side. So they're really the heads of those two efforts. Beneath each of them are several program managers who do different aspects of the work of the higher divisions. And Steve Perrin is the head of one of those programs, which addresses threatened and endangered species, ecology, a lot of work on habitats and protections for those non-game species. And so I just wanted to give the committee a little bit of a roadmap of who the folks are who are on with us today. I'll just give a brief overview of where I think we are in terms of wildlife and fish in the state of Vermont, where the department is. I'll be pretty brief because I really want you to hear from the three experts in my department who are with us today. Does that sound like a reasonable game plan and outline, Madam Chair? It does. Thank you. Great, thank you. So I just want to take a step back and look at the history of Vermont and wildlife in Vermont and remind the committee, many of whom know this very well, but some of whom are new and may not, that at one point in the state of Vermont, we had wiped out virtually all of the wildlife species and fish species that we think of as sort of iconic Vermont species. And then we all think of when we think of wildlife in Vermont. And those species were almost all either entirely extirpated from the state or close to, functionally extirpated. And that includes everything from deer and bear and moose to a number of fish species that were extremely damaged by landscape changes to the state and development in the state, in industrialization of the state. And we have, to a great extent, to bring back most of those species to healthy and abundant populations or many of them. There are some that we have not restored or do not have the habitat to be restored anymore within the state of Vermont. And there are some we're struggling to either restore or protect at this point. And the folks who are with me will go into some of those. But I do think it's important and it was in part due to the work of our predecessors in this department, but largely due to others within the state of Vermont. And Vermont has a very, I guess, unpleasant or shameful record of destroying many of those species, but a very proud record of being among the early parts of the country to recognize that what we do is as people on the landscape is responsible for what happened to those species and that only by amending how we live on the landscape, how we deal with the landscape, would we be able to restore those. And just as one brief example, which I've said to the veteran members of this committee before, but I think there's noting Stephen Perkins Marsh, maybe one of the earliest American environmentalists was a Vermonner. He was very aware of the industrial ravages and impacts on the landscape. And he was also a board of fish commissioners member, which is the predecessor to our current Fish and Wildlife Board. And I just say that as one signpost of the role that Vermont has had in leading and exemplifying the kind of landscape scale restoration that was necessary to bring many of these species back. I don't want to be too polyanish and act like everything's great. There are species in Vermont that are under significant threat right now, primarily from habitat loss and climate change. And some that are those big iconic species, including moose, that have declined significantly in the last few years for reasons that we can get into in more detail if you'd like. But related to climate change, ultimately, we believe, and to parasitic loads of ticks, which are population density dependent parasites. And that's been a story across northern New England. In terms of moose, I think what Vermont is going to see, I should add that we are at the northern edge or southern edge of the moose range. And that range may be moving to the north as climate change has an impact on our landscape. So what I suspect we'll end up seeing with moose is healthy populations in the northeast kingdom, a scattering of moose across the rest of the state, but probably not the densities that had developed there in the mid to late 2000s. So we can go in more into those species details with those folks that are joining us on the call today. But I did want to say one more thing before I turn it over to them, which is that our department is undergoing a significant change and a significant shift in focus, which has been going on for a few years now, but I think is continuing. And essentially what we are coming to is that we're not going to be able to manage the 20 or 30,000 species within the state of Vermont on an individual basis. We're going to need to manage the landscape to provide a habitat and connect connected habitat for those species and manage them largely at a habitat level and at a grander scale. That doesn't mean that we're ever going to go without a bare biologist or biologists who work on particular species that for various reasons are of particular interest to the state of Vermont and to the people in it. We will continue to do that. But the emphasis, our emphasis has really been on landscape scale connectivity and functional landscapes both on the wildlife side and the terrestrial side and also with Eric's folks work on dam removal, on regulations, on riparian protections, on runoff. And I think you see that that theme through our work, our engagement recently and wetland acquisition and restoration using EPA funds is an example of that. Our work on Vermont conservation design is an example of that. And I think Eric's folks work on stream habitat restoration and connected riparian and waterway habitats is I think an example of that. So I'll pause for any questions on what I said so far but I'm really eager to turn it over to Eric and Mark and Steve for their thoughts on the state of wildlife in Vermont and what we're doing, challenges we're facing. But any questions for me on the first part of that? I'm not seeing any. I think we'll get into the details and I'm sure there'll be lots of questions. Sounds great. Well, I'd like to turn it over to Eric for his view of the fish side and the water side and then to Mark and Steve on the wildlife side. So if I could, I'd turn it over to Eric for an overview and go from there. All right. Thanks, Commissioner. My name is Eric Palmer. I'm the director of the Fish Division for Vermont Fish and Wildlife. And similar to Lewis, I'll try and start at the higher level. And we can certainly get down into the details with individual species and trends to the extent that the committee is interested in that. But sort of at the overarching level, I look at our work as largely trying to improve the relationship between people in the natural world. And one way that we build that relationship is through fishing. And that's been a really important part. I think anglers have been really key conservationists in part because they have that connection to populations to habitat to the natural world. So when we look at fish in Vermont and that distinction that people often make between game and non-game fish, we've really been trying to blur that. We don't want folks to think of fish just in one category. And part of what we've been doing is expanding what we think of as fish that people may want to go out and fish for. Through our master angler program, we've added a whole suite of fish species that are not considered traditional sport fish. And part of the master angler program encourages people to catch a certain number of fish. They get certificates. They get a nice ceramic pin if they catch enough of them in a year. And to learn how to catch species that they may never have fished for before, like red horse sucker, they need to learn something about their habitat and their life history and their biology. And we think that making those connections, again, is really important for conservation. As as commissioner said, habitat is really the key for all of the fish in Vermont. We work on habitat on multiple different levels. We've got a large aquatic organism passage program, not just focus on dam removal, but also all the road crossings and culverts that are literally everywhere in the state. And we don't just call it fish passage, we call it a aquatic organism passage because by improving the alignment, the slope, the size of those crossings, it allows all sorts of species to use those and improves connectivity across the landscape. We also participate in Act 250 review section 248, stream alteration review. All of the fish biologists participate in doing that sort of habitat protection, as well as habitat restoration. We're out deliberately trying to recreate some of the natural processes that have been lost over time. For example, just through logging, there aren't that many trees in Vermont right now that are large enough, old enough, mature enough to fall into the streams naturally and create some of the pool habitat, some of the structural diversity that was there historically. And so we're going out and actually adding large trees to streams, pulling them up by their roots sometimes or cutting them down nearby and moving them into the streams. And that type of habitat improvement work, it's expensive, it's not something that we can do everywhere. But it helps, again, make that connection for folks that the trees in the river are actually a good thing for aquatic biota, for insects, for fish, and so on. So we're working on habitat protection and habitat restoration statewide in a whole variety of ways. And this all basically goes back to our department mission of conserving fish wildlife plants and their habitats for the people of Vermont. For resources, as far as looking at what we're doing for various fish species, I hope folks already know about our state wildlife action plan that identify species of greatest conservation need. We've identified quite a number of fish species that we feel are species of greatest conservation need. Some of those are our traditional game species like brook trout. A lot of them are species that folks would consider non-gain. We do a lot of assessment of fish populations, both traditional sport fish species, larger community inventories, and then some focused work on threatening and endangered fish species, such as sturgeon, stone cat, eastern sand darter, channel darter, trying to get a better assessment of their abundance distribution and trends. And then just for an overarching look at all fish in Vermont, hopefully folks have already seen the fishes of Vermont book that goes through species by species, identifies, again, habitat, life history, abundance, distribution, what we know about every species in Vermont throughout the state. We can get into trends. Overall, I think Vermont is really good. We've actually improved over the years. Water quality has improved. The forested riparian areas have improved. Trends are stable for most of our fish species, but we do have a few species that we know are in decline. Some of those are in decline across their range, like sauger, and others, we're seeing them disappear from some water bodies in Vermont where they historically occurred, such as round whitefish, and we're trying to figure out why that's happening. So I'd be happy to go into more details or talk about individual species as folks are interested. I'll stop there. Sure. Thank you. I have a couple of questions, and then we'll get to committee questions. Can you speak to the successes in water quality improvements that you mentioned, some examples to be helpful? Sure. Yeah. I think it's been pretty dramatic since the Clean Water Act was passed in the 70s as far as improvements in water quality. A lot of fish species in Vermont were really impacted by some of the historic colonial development. A lot of dams were built. There was a lot of mill waste going down the rivers. Large clearing of landscapes, and we've really seen some improvements throughout Vermont as the Clean Water Act and other regulatory approaches, and some non-regulatory things, just Vermont getting reforested again. So many of the species that were considered declining are now backed up to healthy numbers. Some of them we're still supporting through fish talking like salmon and lake trout in Lake Champlain. But even there, we're seeing natural reproduction of lake trout for the first time in probably over a century in Lake Champlain in significant numbers. So I don't know if there's some specific species or locations you're interested in, but overall I feel like we have really good protection now for species in terms of state water quality. There's still some larger challenges. Climate change is one of the big ones, which not only affects water temperature, but it affects the periodicity of runoff. So we're seeing more extreme storm events, higher flood flows, lower drought flows, and those sort of habitat impacts can definitely impact fish species, impact water quality on a broader scale. But when it comes to sort of the more local impacts, I think we have a pretty good handle on them. I'm going to ask one more and then send it off to members. But I'm curious, sometimes we hear from witness people about Creole limits and kind of like maybe they're too high in certain places. And if you could talk about how we're managing the number of fish that individual people can take on a daily basis, that would be really helpful. Sure. Yeah. It's something that it is in some ways counter-intuitive. We've just gave a vision to the Fish and Wildlife Board members on how fishing regulations work, what they do biologically, what they do socially. And bag limits are or sometimes called Creole limits are a limit on the number of a particular species that an angler can keep in any given day. And people oftentimes think that those have some real biological significance that if you reduce that bag limit, you're going to protect the species more. And scientifically bag limits are more about spreading the harvest around, allowing folks to have an opportunity to catch species, but not catch them in egregious numbers. It's more of a social regulation. And part of the reason for that is that, for example, our brook trout creole limit is the one that people bring up the most frequently. You know, 12 is too many. How can you support 12? When we go out and do angler surveys, the average angler catches somewhere between zero and one fish. And so the harvest that's going on, we rarely, if ever, see people with six brook trout in their creole. Not that it doesn't happen, but when we go out and do large angler surveys interviewing hundreds or thousands of anglers, most people are keeping one or two brook trout. The real limit is not limiting harvest. And we also don't limit the number of people who can go fishing. So if you could keep six fish instead of 12, but twice as many people go fishing, the creole limit really isn't regulating harvest. What regulates harvest biologically is more length limits. We can set a limit and say, this is going to protect species that are below this size or above this size. Sometimes we use slot limits, which protect species in a particular size when they need to grow more quickly. Seasons have some biological effect when fish are congregated and what we call the gear restrictions definitely have a biological impact, not allowing people to use gillnets, for example, limiting folks to the number of lines they can fish with, not allowing snagging. Those types of gear restrictions definitely have a biological effect. We understand the social nature of regulating fisheries and the fact that we are dealing with, oftentimes, a recreational sport. So we've listened to anglers and we actually have a proposal in front of the Fish and Wildlife Board that they just first vote on Wednesday to reduce the brook trout creole limit from 12 to 8. We understand, again, it's social, but we've heard from enough anglers that we're making that proposal and then we'll get public input to see if that has brought public support or not. If I could just add briefly to that, Madam Chair, I think there's two arguments, two complaints about the brook trout creole limit and that I think both of which are true, one of which I have some sympathy with and the other ones I don't. The one I have sympathy with is the idea that it's not showing respect to our native fish, the brook trout, to have such a high creole limit and to have a higher creole limit than other states. I get that and I understand that. I think that has some validity. The other one is somebody goes out with $500 worth of fly fishing gear and they don't catch anything and they see a kid come up over the brook with a worm and ate fish in a stringer and they get ticked off. That one I don't have much sympathy with but we are proposing, as Eric says, to reduce that creole limit for a brook trout to 8 from 12. Thanks. All right, thank you. Representative Sapkiewicz. Thanks. Eric, you spoke about this a bit in response to Chair Sheldon's question, but I was just wondering if you go into a little more detail about the relationship between the impacts of fishing and fish populations. You indicated that the way things are set up now that it doesn't that there's not a biological impact, but I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about what you actually know about that in terms of the data and how you actually come to that decision and that understanding. Yeah, just to clarify, I was saying that the bag limits don't tend to have a biological effect on fish populations. Fishing can have a biological effect. It's rare to see overfishing occurring with hook and line fishing. Most overfishing that we hear about occurs in large commercial fisheries where they're using gill net, sains, trawls primarily in the open ocean. But fishing can have an effect on fish populations, which is why we have the diversity of fishing regulations that we do. The bag limits, the size limits, the seasons, the gear restrictions, and so on. With those regulations in place, we feel that the Vermont's fish populations are very well protected. We're still concerned about some behavior that frankly is illegal. We know that as sturgeon numbers are increasing in some of the tributaries to Lake Champlain, some anglers are going and targeting them. They're going out, they're catching a sturgeon, they're getting excited, bringing their friends. And so we're having to take some steps with species like Lake sturgeon that are endangered. We really want to protect them and we want to make sure that they're not harassed by anglers intentionally or unintentionally. And we can see changes in fish population dynamics. One example is Berlin pond, which was closed to fishing for decades. I won't go into all the details, but it was closed to fishing, was opened up clearly through the Supreme Court decision saying this is open to public access. And as anglers started fishing Berlin pond more heavily, we saw that the size structure of the fish populations changed. It's not that the fish disappeared by any means, but some of the really large bass were thinned out and some of the large old yellow perch, which are a real popular target for anglers, were reduced in abundance. We did do some special regulations to reduce that harvest, putting a reduced bag limit on perch. In that case, it wasn't because we felt that it would again have a long-term biological effect, but we wanted to spread the harvest out. And we especially didn't want to have commercial fishing because there is hook and line commercial fishing allowed in Vermont. And we didn't want that to have too big of an effect in fishing down those large old perch. So fishing can affect fish populations definitely. We feel that the regulations that are in place really are lending themselves to having long-term stable, sustainable fish populations in Vermont. All right, Representative McCullough. Yes, good morning, Eric. My question is actually about stream restoration more than egregious creole limits that don't appear to affect the fish population. So we do recall there were 72, maybe 77 miles of streams that got destroyed as a result of Irene. And they are, I think, fairly systematically being, well, I hope systematically, but at least they are being restored to function again as streams instead of ditches. You mentioned the work that your department is doing to help streams make better habitat for fish. And, of course, at the same time, they help make them better streams. And the question really is, are you working in tandem with the rest of the agency? And is this specifically on the restoration project for these Irene damaged storms? Or do you have a different method of action? Yeah, great question. We definitely work with other departments within our agency, primarily with DEC and their watershed division, their rivers management program. We also work with the VTRANS. VTRANS does a lot of work in rivers in terms of protecting roads, bridges, culverts. We work with U.S. Forest Service. We work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So we're definitely working with other state and federal partners as well as a lot of NGOs, the White River Partnership and VNRC to improve river habitat. I feel like a lot of the damage that occurred from tropical storm Irene wasn't necessarily from the storm. It was from the recovery efforts, getting out big yellow machines in the rivers, trying to, oftentimes, trying to re-establish road connectivity to their town or get the river out from under their house. I understand that it was an emergency situation. And in that situation, a lot of the normal regulatory protections were suspended. We worked really hard to get those protections back in place. Also to use it as a learning experience, part of the discussion was that rivers in their natural state, when they're really healthy, look messy. They've got log jams in them. They've got channel bars and they move around and trying to raise awareness of the fact that having kind of a straight trapezoidal channel just isn't natural. It's not good for rivers. It's not good for fish. It's not really good in the long term for having that river stay in that course. Rivers, they want to be sinuous. They want to move. So some good stuff came out of the aftermath of tropical storm Irene. I feel like we're in a much better position to talk about why some of those actions shouldn't happen again. And the rivers management program has started looking at rivers and how do we allow them to move? How do we not just go in and fix individual problem points? But how do we kind of pull infrastructure back? To the extent we can. Vermont's got a lot of built environment. But how do we pull infrastructure back so that the river is able to move a bit more? And over time, a lot of those rivers are recovering naturally. Some of them we are working to go in and do sort of structural fixes to undo some of the damage that was done. Some of that, we still see the remnants of the 1927 flood and the channelization that happened after that. Some of this is going to take a long time to recover. Thank you very much, Eric. If I could add briefly to that, it's not specifically related to damage from tropical storm Irene. But one of the things that the department has taken on, which I'm very proud of, is our wetland restoration work. There's a pot of about $1.5 million a year as part of the clean water effort to acquiring mostly farm fields that are candidates for restoration as wetlands and then paying for the purchase and restoration of those areas. And we went to the Secretary of Natural Resources and asked her for that money as a block grant to us and we are putting it out on the ground. And when we can do such things, I would love to take the committee by van to a couple of those projects and see the progress we're making there. We're having tremendous success finding farmers who are interested in selling those parcels to us and having a really, I think, strong network of partnerships to restore them as wetlands. Obviously, that allows those rivers to move in those areas as they should and be restored to rivers. It prevents erosion and stream bank damage. It prevents nutrients going to the water. It reduces flood risk and it can provide wildlife habitat and wildlife recreation access. So it's one of the things we took on. It was kind of a big, it was kind of a big bite to take for a department with the same staff that we've had, but I think it's going very well and I would be eager to show the committee some of those projects at some point. Thank you. That's a great heads up, Commissioner. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks. Representative LeFave. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning, Eric. I was brought up in an age when brook trout pretty much was to a first man, what white-tailed deer was to a hunter. It was there. That's why you went fishing was to catch brook trout. And somehow that seems to have diminished, especially in the screens. And I'm wondering if you have any kind of working approximation of what the conditions are of brook trout in our streams and brooks. Sure. Yeah, we do actually. We recently went and resampled a huge number of streams and rivers around Vermont that had been sampled in the 1950s by biologist Gio McMartin. He had done a real comprehensive look at brook brown and rainbow trout throughout the state of Vermont. And we went and repeated his sampling locations. And the good news is that the brook trout numbers were just as good when we did this about five years ago as they were in the 1950s. So brook trout populations are still stable, you know, vibrant, abundant. Most of these are locations that don't stock. Vermont has great natural reproduction of brook trout and great brook trout habitat throughout much of the state. And brook trout still is one of the most sought after fish beaches. We do a large statewide angler survey every 10 years where we survey about 6,000 anglers and ask them where they fished, what they fished for, what they think of the fishing regulations. And brook trout continues to be the number one sought after species for open water fishing. Well, that's good news. I'm glad to hear it. And I have just one other question. It's not related to the first one, but if you exceed a creel limit, are you criminally prosecuted or do you go more through the civil courts like a crack traffic fine? I'm not sure. Commissioner, do you know the answer to that? Yeah, I'll double check, Representative LeFave, but I believe it's a criminal ticket. So it goes through the Judicial Bureau tracking system like a traffic ticket, but I believe it is a criminal ticket. So it would be as a criminal offense, it would be classified either as a misdemeanor or a felony? I believe it would be a misdemeanor as a criminal ticket. It would be a criminal misdemeanor. I expect that it's one of those Fish and Wildlife Laws that we can charge either under a criminal or civil process, but I will double check for you. Thanks. And when you're at it, would you consider what happens if you're a repeat offender? If it's someone who keeps on exceeding the creel limit and is caught and ticketed, does the felonies go up? Certainly. I'll find that out for you. And I will just add that with the help of the legislature a few years ago, we changed our search and seizure laws so we could seize either hunting equipment or fishing equipment used in those multiple time offenses for the very purpose of getting at some of the habitual or repeat offenders. Thank you. All right, Representative Dolan. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair. And good to see you all and thank you for coming in today. I first want to preface my question with an acknowledgement and appreciation for your recognition and hard work on habitat function. Obviously, we're interested in self-sustaining populations of our fisheries and having healthy habitat can only help to support that long-term goal of having sustainable fish populations, both from non-game and game. My question related to that is can you speak a little bit to the value of riparian areas to the health of our fishery populations? That's my first question. Sure, riparian areas, riparian zones we think are critical. It's one of the things that we advocate for in regulatory processes. The agency has some riparian buffer guidelines that we follow. Those have been up for revision recently but haven't made it through the process. But the existing buffer guidance is really helpful. In fact, we think it's great. And it looks at the function of these riparian zones, not just as filter strips. They're not just meant to kind of catch pollution before it reaches the river. But they're really where a lot of species live. They're the food source for most small upland streams. Most upland streams get the base of the food chain is the leaf litter and woody material that falls into the stream, that then is the base of the food chain for the insects, for the shredders and gatherers, and other insects that then form the food for fish and other species that live in those rivers. So having those healthy riparian zones is really critical to the health of the rivers, the aquatic biota. And frankly, it helps with reducing erosion, reducing lateral movement of streams, the rut systems help stabilize the stream channels. There's a whole host of functions that healthy riparian zones provide that improve water quality, aquatic habitat, and benefit aquatic biota. Thank you. And we look for any recommendations you may have and what we can do to help support that effort to improve the riparian areas. My second question though is getting back to the brick trout that Mr. Lefebvre had talked about and obviously being our iconic trout species. I do note that when I look at creel limits, though, even at 12 and even moving into eight fish per species, it will still be substantially higher than our neighboring states. I think they have a creel limit of five, such many of our states do that are adjacent to us. And some states have actually articulated the creel limits in a bit more refined or nuanced manner where they look at creel limits by type of water body, lake versus river, they look at location, they look at season, and they look at size. So have you been able to kind of evaluate? You mentioned that relying on creel limits alone may not be what it takes to sustain our fisheries, but I still think it's an important element and it's certainly important for educational purposes. But do you anticipate looking at the creel limits in a much more refined manner to ensure that our overall objective is achieved in having a sustainable fisheries? Sure, yeah. And we do look at what other states are doing. New York recently changed their trout limits and their trout management plan. A number of states, Vermont is in a really favorable position in that our brook trout populations are so healthy. Maine is similar, but throughout most of the eastern brook trout native range, the species is in decline through basically habitat loss and climate change. Just for perspective, we have tried a whole variety of regulations for brook trout. We've tried lower bag limits, getting down to six and lower in streams. We've tried size limits, saying that any brook trout cap needed to be six inches or larger. We've used control streams to compare those more restrictive regulations to the waters that are under the current 12 fish, no length limit regulation. And there hasn't been any difference. And that's been repeated by Pennsylvania, by New York. It's habitat that sets brook trout sizes and numbers in Vermont streams. That even if you had no fishing pressure, regulations that allowed zero harvest of brook trout, we still don't see increases in biomass in size structure or in numbers because it's the habitat that's limiting it. It's the water temperature. It's the number of deeper pools. And so again, the bag limit, we understand the social implications. And as the commissioner said, we understand sort of the reflection on do we value native brook trout and in people feeling that if the bag limit is too high, that represents that we don't value the fish, especially when bag limits for per rainbow trout and brown trout are lower. It's like, why are you protecting the non-native species more than the native species? So biologically, we don't feel that there's any difference between a 12 brook trout limit, an 8 brook trout limit, a 6 brook trout limit, 15, that really until you get down to 1 or 0, you're not having much effect at all on harvest of brook trout. And brook trout populations in Vermont are really controlled by habitat, by pool-riffle ratios and things like that. But we've discussed this a number of times and what it's come down to as far as public input and fish and wildlife board decisions is Vermonters saying, if I'm not having a biological effect, why are you going to regulate me? Why are you going to tell me I have to catch fewer fish if it doesn't have any biological significance? And that's been compelling for the board. And they kept the 12 brook trout limit when they reviewed this a number of times. Our proposal this round is to reduce the brook trout limit to 8 and increase the brown trout and rainbow trout limit in streams up to 8 from 6 and balance them out so that anglers have a reduction on one side and increase on the other side where we're making it simpler. That's our overarching goal is to make the fish regulations simpler for anglers to understand and not every angler can tell a brook trout from a brown trout or a rainbow trout. So again, we don't think it's biologically significant to change those bag limits, but we think that this might be simpler for anglers to understand and frankly, you know, kind of better align the social aspects of protecting our native fish species similar to what we're doing for non-native species. So I hope that answers it, but yeah, we do look at what other states are doing and pay attention to their regulations as well. And some states get very nuanced in their regulations. We feel that there's a downside from making our regulations too complicated and we're actually trying to, you know, make things simpler to the extent we can. Can I ask one more follow-up question? We're bumping up against time limits. So you can and then we need to, I think there's, do you have two more presenters, commissioner? Yes, yes, please. Thank you. Yeah, so we need to wrap it up on fish. Okay, thanks and representative Lefebvre. It is. Yes, thank you. Just a quick question. Has there any science been brought to bear on the relationship between beaver and brook trout? I know that we used to always look for beaver ponds to catch brook trout in because they were invariably bigger, way more. And I'm just wondering if we have a diminished beaver population, does that have any impact on the quality of brook trout? Yeah, so there's been a lot of research on the relationship of beaver dams, beaver ponds and brook trout. It's a little bit of a mixed bag. A new beaver dam floods an area that has a lot of vegetation, can increase productivity, create that deeper pool habitat, can be good for growing some larger fish. Just like you said, you go and you find those new beaver ponds and you can catch bigger brook trout than what you would in the stream above and below it. Does have some impact on warming water. So if you get a lot of beaver dams and ponding, it can actually increase water temperatures, sometimes to the point where brook trout can't survive. But in most areas in Vermont, that's not a problem. And as far as abundance of brook trout on the landscape, I think that's another success story where the abundance of beaver on the landscape, I should say, beaver were extirpated, have been reintroduced and are now fairly abundant again. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much, Mr. Palmer. Obviously, we could probably talk on morning about just fish, but we're going to have to move on. I have 1103. I'd like to take a five minute break. Come back at 1108, team, and move on to our next witness. Thank you. All right. Commissioner Porter, are you back with us? Yes. Great. Thanks. I sure am. I'd like to turn it over to Mark Scott and then have him introduce Steve Perron next if I could and just do the same thing on the wildlife side as with fish and happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Sure. Thanks. Welcome, Mr. Scott. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Commissioner. I've got to tell you in all honesty, I really didn't know how to prepare for this short briefing with you. The teacher side of me that I've had that the luxury of training teachers on wildlife management and ecology for a good part of my career. And I really got thinking about this in terms of dealing with teachers and kids throughout the state of Vermont and educational efforts when I get this question. And I think what's really important is actually what I sat here and listened to the commissioner and the director of fisheries, Eric Palmer. I think they really hit some real key highlights. We get trained as wildlife biologists and ecologists academically at some of many of the land-grant universities around the country. And the discipline is really similar between fisheries and wildlife biologists. And our work is really similar until we have to end up specializes in certain fields when we decide to put on the hat as a fishery scientist or a wildlife scientist in our work. And when you look at Vermont and you take the big view, we're kind of blessed. And I look at the class as really half full for our wildlife abundance that we have in the state. A lot of it is due to the things that the commissioner and the fisheries director already talked about, where we put our focus and energy. We're Vermont, we're blessed that we're between two major biomes in the world, the northern boreal forest as we go north into Canada and further. And as you go south, we are in the deciduous, what they consider the deciduous biome dominated by hardwoods of whether it's popple or oak or sugar maple or whatever, birch. Because of that, we've got a rich diversity of different wildlife in our state and we can manage for it. But we're also dealing with a strong influence of humans on the landscape. And that started as the commissioner alluded to when you look at pictures in 1850, we were 80% of open land. We'd lost all of our basically all of our wildlife resources that time. And we had no law enforcement, no regulated honey. So when they said habitat is the key, I can't emphasize that more. And also it probably rings through the work that we do in our work. When I look at wildlife management right now in the state of Vermont, and I think this is true throughout, at least I could say speak on all the Northeast, because I work with all my regional counterparts regularly in the Northeast on all these issues. Are we talking about critter management or people management? It's really, it's a big factor and our staff deals with both, to be honest with you. And we try to be transparent and we try to work for wildlife one, not that we're going to walk away, we want wildlife to be sustainable, healthy. And there's always different measurements. How do you measure the health of a, of a white tail deer versus moose for a black cat chickadee. But also being abundant and relative and also the human aspect of it, which is huge in the state of Vermont. I'm using the term, you know, wildlife biologists, wildlife ecologists. We don't have in our division, what I would call a game biologist. That training probably went out the picture back in the 1970s and 1980s at the universities. Now it's basically looking at ecology, wildlife in the broader context to do that. And I think back of most of you, you know, we're all familiar with moose and we all think of, you know, Cedric Alexander, who was basically our first moose project leader that we had in this state, saw us through our first hunt that started in 1993. And, and he just retired just recently. Well, Cedric was our leading authority and expert on spruce grouse or Arctic three tall woodpecker. Or how do we manage for our forest when we have a spruce budworm outbreak that we had when I started with the department of the 1980s, huge impacts to our forest, not only from a wildlife perspective, but also to people who rely on that forest and to cut the cut the balsam ferns, bruce or pulp and so forth. So and I think back as a student and then as a teacher with my students over the years and teachers is the father who's credited the person is all the leopold. There's a book that I encourage you if you've never looked at it, sand county almanac. There's a few other great readings, but but what an incredible poet and author and writer at that time. And when I need to probably get re energized a little bit, I dig that book out and read it. But although leopold wrote the first book on game management and taught at university started the whole field of wildlife management to do that. But he also was probably more of a forster by training. And he had his own property. That's where he wrote a lot of his stories from up in the state of Wisconsin. It was called sand county almanac because of the sands and the soils were basically a lot of sand. He used to deal a lot with fire, trying to manage the property up there. But one of the key things messages when you read any of his writings is he always told us and this was back in the 1930s which was just phenomenal think that somebody had that forward thinking to where we are today is that everything's related. You do you know whether we tinker with one little part of the world out there on the landscape, whether it's one small wildlife or a large animal like a moose or a deer, they're all interconnected. And that's the message that we have to constantly be wearing the hat on when we do our work. I say that to you because I think it's really important when we sit down and decide how many moose hunting permits we're going to issue, how many antlers permits a deer, what the bear season length is going to be, what the bag limit is going to be on wood ducks, Canada geese, what the trapping seasons are going to be on bobcat otter, all these things interplay with our staff bringing different expertise together to try to management recommendations to how we're going to keep everything healthy on the landscape and people. They're a big part of the big part of the picture. We don't have successful wildlife management if we don't have strong law enforcement and we don't have strong outreach effort and there's been a lot of case studies done on this that people could dig into the literature that you got to have your outreach, you got to have your law enforcement, you got to have sound science to move forward. So that's kind of the big picture that we operate when we're trying to manage wildlife in the state of Vermont, whether it's a black pack, backwood packer, a chickadee, a wild turkey or a white-tailed deer. I'm going to just cover to give you a quick visual when we talk about those species that are hunted or trapped in the state of Vermont, what are they? The biggies that we refer to as big gain, that's because of legal definitions and statutes and regulations why we use those words to do that but we're talking about deer, moose, bear, and wild turkey. All of those species. And Atlantic salmon, Mark, don't forget. Thank you for the fish world, you're right. Thank you, Commissioner. I should know that. I would love to catch a wild Atlantic salmon someday in my life in the ocean but that's, I don't think I'm going to see that day. I've tried but we, those, the how we manage those is actually kind of a contract with the state of Vermont, the people, hunters, landowners, people have an interest. We'd managed by a 10-year big game plan. We're on our third set of that right now. We've got the final draft. It's just about done. I hopefully be able to share that with the committee here the next week or two. We had well over 500 people participating in different virtual meetings, writing in, sending letters on how we manage those. Staff invested a lot of time. That's not just the project leaders of those four species but our land ecologists, our same people who are out there trying to manage for, for wood frogs and turtles are also involved in the construction of that big game plan. The other guiding documents Steve Perrin's going to talk about is our state wildlife action plan that covers a lot of the other species. So those are the four. I can tell you right now, those species they're doing really well. Do they have threats? They sure do. And, and we're quite concerned about it. We put our focus trying to study those threats. When you look at that plan, I hope the, the key factors that you want to keep in mind, we probably spent more time trying to study and identify what the threats are for the long time survival and sustainability of those four species we refer to as big game habitat loss. You've already heard a lot about that. I can't say that enough. Declining hunter numbers that we're seeing over on the state this year was a blip. We love it. Thank you, COVID. To that, the one plus that I can say that I've got people outdoors. Right now we're actually a little bit concerned of the long term implications of too many people may be coming to some areas. That's a great, that's a great challenge for us to deal with human wildlife conflicts, access to land, impacts of suburbanization on public attitudes towards wildlife, a huge one. A lot of wildlife research has been done that climate change, real biggie, collection of biological data with our, with our staff. What do we collect for data? Where do we do it? How do we engage our university research people in helping us collect the data that's needed, not only to take care of these species now, but long term in the future and promoting utilization. That's a really important aspect when you can try to manage the species like a white-tailed deer or moose, which can be one of the more destructive animals out there to the forest. If you're a black-throated blue, which is a little warbler, one of my favorites that loves to nest in the understory of a forest, they are usually in hobble bush or some similar real thick brush that you and I wouldn't want to walk through in the summertime because it's very thick in the understory. It's not a park like for us. They can be heavily impacted by heavy moose browsing or white today. We saw that evidence happening when we had large numbers of moose in the state of the month. Jump over to two animals that we considered legally small game, species like grouse, American woodcock, snowshoe hare, gray squirrels, cottontail rabbits. We principally have taken the approach to manage those through the habitat. Again, going back to the premise that the commissioner talked about an error that if we have the habitat, we haven't in enough different places, those animals will be on the landscape for a long time. I can only say that for you with full confidence as people, scientists are studying this all the time to make sure that you have the habitat for that. It works. It comes through to do that. The other group of species we have is waterfall migratory birds such as woodcock and snite that are hunted in the state of Vermont. We have about nine different waterfall species ranging from geese to wood ducks to black ducks, mallards, and so forth that nest to the state of Vermont. We have an awful lot of other birds that come in here and are hunted under heavily regulated seasons in October and November, partly in December. Those species are unique in the management and that it's not the sole responsibility of Vermont. We work within federal guidelines that are developed with 17 states. We're one of those 17 and the Canadian provinces working together in concert with the U.S. Fisher Wildlife Service to manage for those species. The regulations are much different than many of other species that we regulate in the state because they're set every year. We've got to look at the scientific data that's collected on an annual basis from all the states and including the Canadian provinces before we deerset regulations to allow people to participate in the hunting of those. The other category I would vote for you probably is the fur bear species. We have 13 different species that are trapped or hunted for their fur in the state of Vermont. We have mandatory reporting right now of all those species. We've had fur bear reports that have been coming in for a long time. When we look at that data that's been collected for years and years, I just looked at the last 10 years of that data before I joined you here this morning. I can tell you right now our fur bear species are doing well in the state of Vermont. They're healthy. Their numbers are good. Do we have certain concerns on some? We do, but the concerns is beyond us. An example, the muskrat. It's an animal that's quite abundant in the state. It thrives in wetland habitat, particular wetland habitat that has different aquatic plants that it likes to eat. We're seeing probably an overall decline in those numbers throughout the entire eastern continent here. We don't know what, but not to the extent where they're not still common to have them out there. And we also got four fur bears from the state of Vermont that we can argue whether they're going to be here long-term or not. One I can tell you really will be the American Martin, which is protected through Undangered Species Law. They're doing well. They're increasing numbers through some reintroduction efforts by our department staff working with the Forest Service. We're seeing young Martin now being produced from those in the southern part of the state. We're seeing an awful lot more pine martins showing up in what we call the Northeast Kingdom, that boreal forest type habitat I was talking about in the beginning. We feel they're coming in from New Hampshire and Maine, where pine martin are a lot more common against the habitat. We got the habitat there. We keep it there. We protect it management in the future. Then we're going to have them there. We also spend an awful lot of effort trying to make sure monitoring whenever we get a sighting or report that we think is legitimate for lengths. I will tell you right now, I don't think we're ever going to have lengths having a sustained population in the state of Vermont. Why? If you think my early remarks were on that southern part of boreal forest, they're an animal that needs spruce for habitat. They need the habitat that's like Christmas tree habitat where you and I got to put our hands up for our face to walk through because that's where their prey is going to be the snowshoe here. They're one of those incredible animals that spends its whole lifetime sustained itself on snowshoe hair abundance. Kind of like the American Woodcock. If you don't have earthworms, you don't have young forest habitat. You're not going to have American Woodcock. That's just the reality of some species that evolve for very specific types of diets that they have. The other species that we try to monitor if it shows up is the wolf in the mountain line in the state of Vermont, which I can tell you we don't have any of those species currently with credited documentation that they are in the state of Vermont. I just gave you a real snapshot, a real broad view of these species. But I can tell you, thanks to our monitoring efforts, thanks to certain legal requirements that hunters have to turn in their carcasses or furburs, we have to examine them. That many of these species I talked to you is they're doing well. Are we worried about them? We sure are. And that worry is the bigger picture. Climate change, development on the landscape, not having the habitat long term and in places large enough for these species to survive. A chickadee only needs a few acres for its needs to lay its eggs and raise its young. Where you talk about a black bear and we're talking of several square miles in order to survive. So I know we can go on and on with all these different discussions. Happy to talk with you and answer questions more. And some of these I think we hope to come back in and dig in a little more deeper, especially on the moose and the effects that ticks are having and brainworm as we move southern and habitat. So I'm happy to take questions, commissioner, or if you want to have Steve and parents jump in and talk about all those other wildlife species that are not hunted or trapped. I really want to make sure Steve has a chance. So why don't we go to him next if that suits the chair and then we'll happy for any of us to take questions at the end. Yeah, I think that's that's a good plan. Okay, well thank you for having me today. My name is Steve Perron. I'm the Wildlife Diversity Program Manager. There's 10 staff in our program and we are responsible for native plants, animals, natural communities in the landscapes in Vermont. We can't do it all ourselves. Our other staff in the department help out a tremendous amount and then we have a wide diversity of partners. And those partners have also helped us draft our wildlife action plan, which is a required document that Congress mandates every 10 years. And so our most recent one was the 2015. And we'll update that again in 2025. I approached this from looking at trends and Vermont doesn't exist alone. So the global and continental trends have an impact on us. And so I just pulled together a little bit of information. In North America, there's been a 30% decline in birds overall since the 1970s. There's been a 41% global decline in insects, which is very concerning. So we're also responsible for invertebrate animals. In Thibians worldwide, there's been a there's 32% that are considered threatened in another 43 that are declining. In the US, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 10% of the American reptiles are threatened or endangered. We have five listed in Vermont. In worldwide, it's even worse. There's 20%. And so it does impact Vermont. It's a global society. We move animals. We move diseases, obviously when we're existing with COVID right now. And so this has an impact. And it wasn't that many years ago that we suffered what I consider to be our most significant wildlife disaster. And that was the introduction of white nose syndrome to our bat populations in two previously common species, the little brown bat in the northern long year that declined 90%. And so we've been struggling. We have one biologist, Elissa Bennett, who's dedicated to bats and doing a great job. We try to mitigate for other impacts like wind facilities and, you know, demolition of buildings that might have colony use of bats. But it's pretty grim. We may never see the restoration of bats to their current levels. And some people believe that something similar to this happened in Europe before recorded history because Europe has many fewer bats less abundance than we have here in Vermont in the US prior to white nose syndrome. So I want to focus on Vermont. We have had some successes. We've had species that we've been able to remove from the endangered and threatened species list, the loon, the falcon and the osprey were all delisted in 2005. I don't think it's by accident that those three all had recovery plans that we drafted here in Vermont. We've got 11 recovery plans in place right now. We're currently proposing to do list the bald eagle in Vermont, which is just incredible. That was a quick recovery compared to the loon that took 30 years of effort, 30 plus years. This past year, we had 37 pairs of bald eagles. They fledged 64 young. So that's, that's the good news. Not all the birds are doing well. The metal arc has declined 95% over the last 40 years. We're lucky in Vermont to have done two breeding bird atlases, the first one in the 1980s, and we completed the second one in 2007. Just looking at the distribution of metal arc in Vermont, it's declined 55%. So, you know, regardless of the taxonomic group, there's winners and losers. So over the last 25 years, Canada geese, turkey, titmice, Carolina wrens, cardinals, Cooper's hawk, and barred owls have all done better. But things like thrasher in the metal arc, towhees, Canada warbler, all the side of flight catchers have seriously declined. So we have to monitor species. There's no one tool in the toolbox that solves all the problems. You know, we have the Vermont conservation design, which I think is absolutely essential to the preservation of what makes Vermont so special. But when you have a disease like white nose syndrome or winter ticks in the moose population, you have to deal with those direct threats. So in Vermont, we have a rich freshwater muscle population. We've got about a dozen species. But many of those have been impacted by the introduction of zebra mussels in Lake Champlain and the lower tributaries. So we currently have 10 listed freshwater mussels. And the biggest single threat has been zebra mussels. We have concerns about pollinators. And we're right now proposing our fourth bumblebee to be added to the list of endangered and threatened species. We've been doing a lot of work with our partners on even gathering the baseline information we need on pollinators. We've done a butterfly atlas. We're working on a bee atlas. We've done surveys and work on dragonflies. But insects are a huge group. And I won't pretend that we're covering all the bases. Something I've worked on personally is trying to restore the spiny sawshell turtle. I think we're making headway with that. It takes years to recover a species. This past year, we documented 73 successful nests in almost a thousand hatchlings that survived the nesting period. It doesn't get talked about much. But the number of medium-sized predators out there on Vermont's landscape is incredible. The number of raccoons just in Burlington is overwhelming. And it's it's hard sometimes for me to imagine how a ground-nesting songbird or a turtle successfully raises young in the Champlain Valley. They're that abundant. So I'm going to stop there. You've had a lot of information. We also work with plants. And in some cases, the plants decline because the habitat declines. And Burlington and Wienewski are right on top of what had been 15,000 acre patch of sand plain forest, which were delta sands that were deposited. Only 4% of that sand plain habitat persists today. And so there's a whole host of plants that are very rare in Vermont because the habitat's largely gone. Let me answer questions if you have any. Thanks. Thank you. I just want to give both the witnesses and the committee just a heads up that this afternoon we will be getting kind of reports from some of the partners who work with the department. So we will have an opportunity to learn a little bit more about specific projects and species. And then next. Sorry. Madam Chair, just to that, I would be happy to join you for this afternoon or not whatever your purpose is. Okay. Thank you for that offer. And I just also want the group to know that next week we will be diving into land conservation and Vermont conservation design and what the state is doing to address some of the themes here that we're hearing about habitat loss and the larger place that we find ourselves in as Vermont. So with that said, Representative Bongarts has a question. Hi. I was just wondering about the doors of bat caves in particular. Have the bats in any numbers at all been able to return and survive? Bat caves, as you know, were bats that I guess for 10,000 years and all of a sudden virtually wiped out by White Nose Syndrome. So I'm wondering what kind of progress we're making with that. I was actually pleased to hear you say that a couple of those pieces have only declined by 90% because I thought I had been under the impression that we're virtually wiped out. So I was actually glad to hear that there's still 10%. And so the question is, I'm asking specifically about the doors of bat cave, but then beyond that, are we seeing a return or is there any kind of hope for dealing with that? And then the second one, just to put it out there so you can make a note, let's just talk a little bit about bobbling because I never heard you mention them. So this is getting down into the weeds a little bit, but I'm just curious about those two things. Thanks. I'll start with Dorset Bat Cave. It's the largest, most important bat wintering site in all of New England. Pass records have shown bats coming from as far away as Cape Cod to overwinter in the caves. We're fortunate we had some really good information gathered in the 1940s by a gentleman named Hal Hitchcock from Middlebury College. At that time, the estimate of the bats in that cave system, and it's a huge cave system. It's quite large and luckily you can't squeeze a person through some of the passages, which is probably really good for the bats. It's protected, it's owned by the Nature Conservancy, and we're currently proposing to designate that cave system as critical habitat for the bats. It's declined from 300,000 bats to about 70,000 bats, so that's largely due to the effects of the white-nosed syndrome. We think there's been some uptick in the little brown bats, maybe not the long-eared bats. It gets a little bit hard to be sure because we think there could also be some consolidation of bats. They're social, and so some of the smaller overwintering sites, they have maybe have moved to some of the more established. They're really sensitive to humidity and temperature, and it's the fluctuation in temperature that's the most disturbing. And so we've got the dorsi back cave gated, but done in a way where we don't disturb the airflow. Part of the critical habitat designation is so that you can't disturb the actual cave system, say drilling a well and actually punch in a hole. And sometimes people who want to find go-caving, they punch their own holes. And then there was, in the past, there's been direct persecution, so we've mitigated for those sorts of things. And we also think that the above-ground habitat needs to be protected because bats do fall swarming, and that's really important for breeding cycle. And sometimes the bats that come to say a fall swarm associated with a cave system, they may not spend the winter there, but that's where they go to breed. So we're doing a lot, I think, for bats, but it's pretty grim what's happened. And we aren't sure, we were encouraged that at least the little brown has stabilized and maybe increased slightly. I'll turn to the bobble ink. So the whole suite of grassland birds are of concern. The bobble ink, luckily, is doing better than some of the others. Probably the one that's done the least well was the upland sandpiper, and that's because of its larger area requirements. And that's largely a function of what's happened to the farms, the break-up in farms, I think, like up in driving from St. Albans to Swan, that a lot of that landscape is more fragmented now, not forest fragmentation, but the open landscape has been fragmented. So we think that has an effect. Bobble Inks people love, but if you're making a living off the land, you have to get the hay off. And so it's really the marginal lands that you have the most success managing. And we've got some great partners, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, based on information that was developed at the University of Vermont have come up with a delayed mowing scheme. You take a first cut, you wake 65 days, and you can take a second cut. The bobble ink needs that 65 days. The grassland bird that's doing the best is probably the savanna sparrow. You mow their nest, they hop right back on and start nesting again. And whereas there's a lag for the bobble ink, Audubon, Vermont's doing a lot of work with landowners. But I mean, grasslands are based on human activity in Vermont. I mean, I think that Vermont is important, especially the Champlain Valley, maybe the area around Lakeman, from Magog. Because while Vermont was going through its changes, we pretty much turned most of the prairie in the United States into the wheat belt. So that was really the stronghold of grassland birds. And we've pushed our bird fauna all over the continent. I know what this wanted to go, but what are we doing to protect those grasslands? I know about the whole issue with mowing and bobble and kebab and nesting, but what are we doing to actually help make it possible for these species to survive? And what are we doing to try to protect some of that land that's so critical for them? So we do manage some of our own lands for grasslands. We have a long history of having agriculture leases, and so we have some control over what happens to some of the open lands. So I'm thinking about like Dead Creek down in Addison County. I think one of the really positive stories is the Mississaquia National Wildlife Refuge has acquired surrounding lands, farmlands, and they have a big effort to manage their grasslands for grassland birds. And I personally think that we need to have some anchor sites like that, because you can't trust what's going to happen in the commercial farming community. I mean, if all of a sudden, seed corn is what they have to do this year to make ends meet, then the grasslands go away. So that's positive. We've worked with our partners, including Audubon and others, to draft a grassland conservation plan. We get involved with agricultural conversion, like with solar facilities, and bobbling and other grassland birds are one of the considerations that we have. Our staff spends a lot of time these days reviewing solar facilities in Vermont. It's not a free lunch by any means. There's always winners and losers, you know. And if they're going into an area with prime nesting habitat for grasslands, we try to work with them. There's plant impacts. On the flip side, we really don't want people cutting down our forests to put up solar. There's a different kind of impact there. I mean, and we have to find the balance and we struggle to do that. Yeah, if I could put an exclamation on that, what Steve just said is there's periods of stretches during the year that one of our wildlife biologists is around the clock working with solar development proposals in the state of Vermont. And we support the solar development as part of the state's energy portfolio. But at the same time, we try to invest an awful lot of time trying to work on where they place those panels, use the research that our staff and university people have done to determine how many feet of grassland habitat do you need until you hit the trees, so the burzel nest there and things like that. So it's an ongoing, continual interest that the department puts in with the working with the Public Utilities Commission, but also the developers who are doing this. And we try to, you know, our goal is to make it a win-win for both. And that's a real challenge, but and also for the landowner who, you know, these farmers who are welcoming that money to get their solar panels on their land. So it's a great question. Thanks. If I could just add one more thing, we've actually run into one solar facility that was threatening to disrupt a landscape connection. So we're also looking at these projects with that larger lens of the entire landscape. And were you successful in either changing the design or preventing it from interrupting the connection? We were many thanks to Eric Sorenson for his hard work on that particular project. There's cuts no matter what we do. You know, we never win 100%, but in this case, I think it was an acceptable balance. Great. Madam Chair, we're going to probably have a, you and I won't see it, unfortunately, in our lifetime, but one of the agreements, too, is the piece of land down there in Brandon that we worked with an agreement on will become a wildlife management area for future generations once the 10-year goat comes up on the solar panels. So. And is that 10-year, how long is that time? Do you recall those off the top of your head? I think it's a 30-year life lifespan for the project. Yeah, something like that. But I'm not sure what they did. Sorry, they did also make extensive changes to the project in an attempt to maintain that connection in the meantime. And it's interesting for your committee. We were able to work with them on that because that's a section 248 project. We have broader authority to work on wildlife and connect the 248 context than the 250. Thank you. Thank you. All right. We have a representative Satkowitz with a question. Yeah, thanks. Talked a lot about habitat and wildlife and our knowledge of all these systems. And I'm wondering if you could, if I'm not sure who the proper responder is, but if someone could comment on the state of the databases that we used to accumulate all this knowledge and what the priorities might be going forward to improve those databases. I'll try to answer that part of my program, the natural heritage inventory manages a large spatial database, the natural heritage database, where we're looking primarily at rare species in natural communities. It's quite large. We get a lot of information. We struggle to keep the information current and give it back to the people who are using it for either environmental review or for conservation planning and sometimes for research. We're trying to start to take better advantage of crowd source data, iNaturalist and eBird. There are limitations what we can do with that information. We did use eBird data as an ancillary data set when looking at the the metal arc. What our database is really good at is looking at how many occurrences. So that sometimes feeds into a status review for species and how many populations do we know of out there and it can work in both directions. So we're proposing to delist the Canada black snake root, a plant because we now know that there are more populations than we previously knew. And so we're proposing that for delisting because our knowledge is better. Well we don't really have the staff capacity to go out frequently and recheck those sites because sometimes they go away. Sometimes bad things happen or they're just the habitat changes with succession or something. So I think it's the best data set that we have. It doesn't cover all the common species that would just overwhelm us. But we have a cadre of biologists who depending on the species that we may specifically know a lot more than what's in the database. If I can add to that too, we have in Vermont has been recognized through court decisions and legislature the critical habitat of black bear habitat throughout the state of Vermont as well as deer winter in the areas. And so the bottom line of the answer is the department Fish and Wildlife Department maintains all these databases and uses them. And then we always when we know there's a threat that may happen to a specific area whether it's a wetland, a black bear, a beach stand that's going to be that we know is being heavily used by black bear some falls or a deer winter. We'll go to the site and visit it to make sure that our data and our mapping is up to date. So we use all the new tools and gadgets and technology that's available. A lot of it gets more refined through work at the University of Vermont. But you know we do the best that we can with all that and are constantly changing these maps that we have internally. At the risk of irritating the committee by being a broken record here, I'll just add briefly that this natural heritage database is another example of something that we do without a funding source dedicated to keep it. So we use SWIG money, we use other wildlife money to maintain that. It is of benefit to planners and towns and consultants for developers and developers themselves and others, certainly non-profits around the state who use this database. We don't charge for access to it. We've got to pay for maintaining it somehow. So I know the committee hears from me say this a lot, but I'll just briefly flag this is another one of those cases. Thank you. All right, Representative Dolan and then McCulloch, then we have to probably call it off end this just because we have folks who probably want to go to the tax workshop and other things at lunch, not to mention eat. So Representative Dolan. This is a great conversation. I also want to thank you for your hard work and support of the bird bill last year. I think that kind of partnership really I think was a success to recognize the importance of birds and their habitats. Today was particularly great where you emphasized about habitat loss and climate change being big threats. What I didn't hear you talk about much and I would appreciate it perhaps hearing from Mr. Perrin if that's most appropriate about forests and forest blocks and the impacts when you start to fragment forests. Well thanks for that question. That's that's a big one. We've been working on habitat connectivity for years and years. I remember being on one of the early teams developing a statewide bear habitat map. Different plants and animals have different abilities to move around the landscape. So if you're a bird you can fly from mount top to mount top like a big nose thrush but spruce grows not so much and if you're a turtle forget about it. You know it's not just the habitat but it's also the road network that goes through it. So we we address that through the Vermont conservation design which I think is a really important tool but in we can't just assume that because a black bear can get from A to B that all the other animals and plants can do the same. So there's a lot of other considerations. I think the Vermont we've been doing work on forest blocks for a long time and that has helped us melding that information in the information in the natural heritage database and other data sources to construct the Vermont conservation design. We've worked with other partners on connectivity issues but there's a lot of information out there. We make it available. We think that a lot of the landscapes especially the matrix forests can still you know be working forest as long as the larger block maintains its integrity. So I think we're very fortunate that we have a working landscape in Vermont. I mean that's a lot. I mean there may be impacts hopefully short-term impacts. I was just talking to one of our federal partners and it was bemoaning the fact that there's no market for pulpwood right now because that takes away the economic underpinning in order to do habitat management because we're still living with the legacy of past land use. And so if you want to diversify your forest and both diversity of species in age structures and physical structure sometimes you have to cut trees in order to accomplish that. So I don't know if I'm answering your question well enough but I'm trying. So I think that's a great answer Steve on the science, on the policy and regulatory side. I would encourage the committee to have in our scientists to work on Vermont conservation design and to work on regulatory issues to hear really two things. One is how Vermont conservation design works and how we use that tool in a wide variety of ways. And second the differences in section 248 and our engagement in section 248 and the differences between that and how we can engage in Act 250. And I won't pretend to be an expert in either of those but we have experts within the department especially Eric Sorenson, John Austin, Bob Zano, and Noel Dodge all of whom work with Steve and Mark. And I would encourage sort of the committee to have us in to talk about those two aspects and of course anything else you'd like. But I think that that would help inform because there are some significant differences between the two processes and how we engage with them. And there also are a wide variety of ways in which we use Vermont conservation design to try to address forest fragmentation and forest blocks. Thank you. And we will be hearing from Eric and learning about conservation design next week. Great thanks. Representative McCullough. Thank you. I want to just kind of maybe put some connecting dots here today for for myself and for the rest of the committee. We are fortunate to have this particular discussion today in front of the perhaps in front of the governor's executive order for reorganizing his department and and how that overlays the act 250 work that this committee has done and and and we'll hope to continue on the we are fortunate today that that not only do we have the commissioner of fish and wildlife here and his department but the commissioner is also the designated point person for us I think for act 250 discussion for better or worse for better or worse representative. Thank you and I'm sure and and what we did here today to help connect these dots is his department over and over today mentioned climate change and development on the landscape and that's what our act 250 on change legislation was was all about and is all about so I just wanted to connect those dots. Thank you and I will just briefly say that that it's also what I believe in the executive order is about and what we'll take up that conversation at greater length but thank you. We may take it up at greater length. Thank you all for coming in today and and representative McCullough for connecting the dots and we will be back on at one o'clock this afternoon. Thank you. Thank you.