 Thanks for coming, everybody. I know a lot of people are watching by work as well. We're going to have, let's say, just short of two hours tonight, and we can end sooner if we run out of things to say. And so joining us are Nick Fortin, who is, I think, the state biologist for dear, if not one of them. I am the one and only. Yeah. So this is his whole career, just to understand. Oh, thank you. Oh, my God. Working overtime, thank you. And John is the wildlife officer for this area. He just got this job, right? Yeah, I just got released in February. I signed in February, since it was released. I actually talked to someone else last year, and so. Dustin Cersey is the other warden that's close by as well. He covers them over the part of this area. So one thing that I became really aware of is the potential for this to be a very confrontational conversation. And it's not supposed to be. And I personally don't have energy for confrontation. Come on in and just make yourself comfortable. So tonight is going to be an information session. And I'm hoping that we can continue this conversation once we know each other. But it's always nice to get to know each other on friendly footings before jumping right into extreme views, whether it is very much like shoot all the deer or turn over the whole city to the deer. I think it's better to get to know each other and know really what we can learn first, the education. And it gives a lot more common ground. Isn't that a black and white issue? And I'm mostly curious, like what is going on? I think I'm going to learn a lot tonight. First of all, why don't we quickly tell you folks who we are? So how many of us live in, well, clear as a jurisdiction? All of us. Oh, good. You haven't missed any. Come on in. I'm sorry. No? We're just saying who we are. Do you live in a clear, municipal living? I live right in town. Yeah. And that was my second question. Who lives in what we would call solid downtown? What do you call downtown downtown? Where you can see neighbors right against your house on both sides. So most of us are actually downtown. And it's funny because if you're comfortable there, there is lots of your sort of a way to do it. That's one question I have. Is it indeed worse, which it feels like it is downtown? Or how does it affect people who are a little away from the center? Now, I grew up in Montpelier. So I've been kind of aware of the theater not being here earlier for, well, I've been an adult and having a garden for 30 years. And I'm curious, who else here is a gardener? So most of that's been used in the interest. And what is the primary motivation for anyone to use here? We think we should go around the room. If it's not just simply garden. It's gardening, right? I like to understand kind of what they're doing, how they're moving, what motivates them. Yeah, I'm just curious on what we can do. You know, so they don't need some of the plants. And I think about the ticks, too, how we can do stuff to prevent having that get by. How many of us have gotten ticks in our own yard? I've gotten one. Ticks on us in our own yard. Yeah, so the third of us, anyways. OK. There's one reason why I'm here, because I've heard about ticks coming from deer. And I've seen more deer here than I can ever remember this season, this time. And damage to the garden and to a danger driver. I'm with her. Whatever she says. I also grew up in Montpelier, and it's amazing difference that has happened in the last 40 years. We did not have deer in town. We had a lot of deer outside of town, which I keep trying to get mine to go there. They don't understand. They do not understand. Anyway, they just eat everything in my yard. And I kind of got to the point where I almost ate it up. So I'm a neighbor of Marthas. And the last count, five months ago, there was 16 deer in our yard. And now it's about five or six. And they've totally decimated our trees, our hydrangeas. And I worry about their own health. And actually, calling it my driveway, I worry about hitting them. I've had that experience, too. I was the most worried about the ticks. And I keep bees in Saban's pasture. So I want to find out a way to protect us from ticks while not harming the bees and other wildlife. I know someone else. Susan Becker keeps bees on the elm street. So anyone who wanted to fill in the sign and sheet, it's back there. And thank you so much. You've got your time figured out. I'm going to sit back over here just so that we're spread out a little bit. Thanks, Sadie. Yeah, so thanks all for coming. My name is Nick Forden. My official title is Deer and Moose Project Leader for the Fish and Wildlife Department. Yep, so I am basically, I oversee all things Deer and Moose for the whole state. So I'm going to talk for about 20 minutes, provide some background information on the situation, some important relevant related information. And then I'm going to open up to questions and discussion. And we can, as much time, I'll stay as long as you all keep having questions. I'm the Game Warden that covers the Montpelier area, but I also cover down to Brookfield as well. Right. And so John is going to mostly help out when there are local questions, because I don't know that Montpelier area specifically all that well. And of course, any legal law enforcement type question is his. So what I wanted to say is, because this is our first evening, getting to know each other in the subject, we have two topics and only two topics on our agenda. One is, what's going on? Why are there so many Deer? And then the question of what can we do about it is we as individuals, this is not getting to the level of community response tonight. Right. Are there more Deer? We'll get into that. Short answers, yes. But yeah, so just to get right to it, so the title here is overabundant Deer. That's a term we as biologists use a lot, overabundant. It's not a term most people use. So what does overabundant mean? It is a fancy way to say there are too many Deer. But then the logical next question is, well, what is too many? When do you go from enough or a lot to too many? And that gets us to carrying capacity, which is a term I suspect many of you have heard before. It's the most misused term in ecology. But at the basic level, it means exactly what you think it means. How many Deer can an area support sustainably long term? That is the capacity. When you get above that, you have too many Deer. When you're below that, you're generally OK. There are two types of carrying capacity. Biological or ecological carrying capacity, that's what we as biologists worry about. That's when Deer start impacting their habitat. How much food is there for them out there? You have too many Deer, they start impacting their habitat, their health declines. Then there's social carrying capacity. That's how many Deer will people tolerate. And that is different for everyone. And generally speaking, in Vermont, we hit ecological carrying capacity long before we hit social carrying capacity. The exception to that is in what are technically suburban areas. Some people might come urban areas. But those heavily developed areas. Because the ecological bit doesn't matter because it's such an altered landscape that we wouldn't even know how to measure ecological carrying capacity. So then it's just, and usually Deer are real healthy because your landscaping is really good nutritious food. So then you run into the social bit. It's not that the habitat in downtown Montpelier can't support a lot of Deer. People can't tolerate a lot of Deer. So our goal in Vermont, so we have a goal in our, we manage Deer obviously statewide and not really thinking about suburban areas so much. But our overall goal for Deer is to maintain Deer at population levels that are both socially acceptable, meaning we're meeting that social criteria. And ecologically sustainable, which like I said, is more often than not our focus. Because in most of the state, that's what we bump into first, is that ecological sustainability. Do we have too many Deer for our habitat? So some of the social impacts we see when we have too many Deer, breaking these down into basically three simple categories. There's a lot of overlap between them. But you have economic impacts, right? When Deer damage your landscaping, or they eat your crop if you're a farmer, or a home gardener. There's an economic cost to that impact. There's the health and safety concerns. Some of you mentioned these. Ticks are obviously one we'll talk about more tonight. And then potentially hitting one with your car is a health concern for you. Would also be an economic concern potentially. Both of those kind of get us to the third one, which is the sociological or psychological issues, which Sandy mentioned we're gonna kind of try to avoid. But essentially Deer can become incredibly contentious because people have very differing views on how many there should be, how they should be managed, what do we do about it. But this also touches on the hitting a Deer with your car has a health issue, health concern. It has a potential economic impact. But also just the thought, the fear that you might hit one with your car is an emotional mental strain, right? So that gets that sociological bit. And then someone mentioned they've given up on gardening and growing things. Like after Deer eat it enough, that's again that mental kind of stress of having too many Deer. You kind of just, you can't fully enjoy your life like you want to. And that's why people have very passionate views about what should be done. Not gonna be our main focus, but as a Deer biologist, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on the ecological impacts. Again, this is not necessarily relevant to downtown Montpelier, but in the bigger picture in managing Deer, these are our important considerations. So Deer can and do have very significant ecological impacts, meaning they affect the health of our forests, the health and function of our forest habitats, particularly through their feeding, right? This is an example of an area on the right, Deer are fenced out, Deer are allowed to be in the area on the left. Obviously there's a pretty stark difference. Not to say that no Deer is a natural situation either, but it's closer probably than the right. So Deer damage is actually really hard to see in a forest, right? People think you should look like this, like a tree that's been browsed a whole bunch of times and kind of starting to look like a little bonsai shrub. That's very uncommon with Deer. This is actually moose brows in this case, but with Deer we kind of do see this sometimes in areas where Deer spend the winter. So where they concentrate in the winter, you'll see these, this is actually a tree sapling that's been browsed year after year after year, or you'll see the browse line where they eat everything off in cedar, arborvite or in this case fur, everything they can reach. You typically see this in the winter. So the reason these trees can even exist at that height is because they can grow during the summer and then they get browsed back in the winter. But where there are too many deer year round, they're eating plants in the summer too. And so it's much harder and much less noticeable for folks when they're walking around in the woods. Most people would walk through woods like this and say, that looks pretty normal. I don't see any real browsed trees or shrubs. There's no evidence that Deer are doing a lot of damage there. There's green stuff on the forest floor, right? No impact, no obvious impact of deer. This is another exclosure that we have on the left, no deer. And you see there's tree seedlings in there covered in tree seedlings and wildflowers. This exclosure is actually in Grand Isle, protecting northern comfrey. I believe it's a rare wildflower. But you can see that deer have an impact, but if all you saw, if that thing wasn't there and all you saw was on the right, most people would not acknowledge or notice any real impact from deer there. So a lot of our forests in Vermont look like this. Nice park-like woodlands. They're beautiful to recreate in. You can see a long way, it's easy to walk everywhere. Forests should not ever look like that. This, again, anywhere there's green, in this case it's grasses or sedges or maybe ferns, there should be trees growing there. There should be the next generation of forests growing in those areas where there's enough light and there isn't, which tells you you have too many deer. Again, most people wouldn't notice this and a lot of people like the woods to look like this so they don't see a problem. The other situation we often see in Vermont and more often I would argue depends where you are in a lot of parts of Vermont, more often than this, we see this and this is kind of hard to make out what this is. I don't know if anyone can identify this plant that is growing everywhere in this. That is. What is it? Barberry. So very often we see just a carpet of invasive shrubs in the understory and people walk in there and like there's green stuff everywhere and the deer haven't touched it. So must be we don't have too many deer but the only reason these shrubs are invasive is because deer don't eat them. And they eat all the native stuff which allows this to take over. I'll touch on this a bit more in a second but a really important factor here is research has shown that in invasive shrub thickets the number abundance of ticks, deer ticks specifically is much higher than in native vegetation. So not only does this cause ecological issues for the future health of the forest but this is also contributing to tick abundance probably more than the abundance of deer. Well there are deer there but they're not feeding on that particular plant. But yeah, again I'll touch on this but deer are not the sole culprit for ticks. And then lastly the other thing we often see in Vermont and is a carpet of ferns in the understory. Also not natural. Ferns are a native species but the continuous mat of ferns well if it is allowed to develop which usually means the deer have eaten everything that was competing with the ferns. If that's allowed to develop tree seedlings can't establish through that mat of ferns and so you can kind of perpetuate this indefinitely. This is also often a result of I'll call it inappropriate forest management. Usually you'll see this after log job logging where they finned when you can just plucked out a few trees. Sometimes that's not appropriate and you end up with this. So there's often that element when you see this. So getting to our main focus question why are there so many deer particularly here in Montpelier? One major reason is how humans have shaped our landscape to benefit deer. Deer are often called an edge species. They really thrive in a fragmented landscape where you have a mix of forest and field. A lot of them are particularly in our valley areas. We have that. We have these agricultural fields or other openings and you have relatively small blocks of forest. So you have a lot of edge between those. Those edge areas have a lot of food for deer, a lot of cover. So deer do really well in a fragmented landscape and if you took the city of Montpelier out of this image and it was just farm fields and forest you'd say oh that's great deer habitat. You put the city in there it doesn't matter it's still good deer habitat. The other important bit and a couple of you mentioned how this has changed over time. We used to basically not have deer in Montpelier and now we do. This change in land use is a big part of that. So if you go back 40 years or more there was a lot more open land, farmland around the outskirts of Montpelier to the point that that area probably held fewer deer. Ultimately deer are a forest animal. They benefit from fields but they are a forest animal. So that kind of buffer of a whole lot of farmland actually kind of limited how many deer you would have to feed into Montpelier. We see that today in like Addison County in the Champlain Valley. We have fewer deer there despite the whole world being really nutritious soybean plots and whatever else those farmers grow. But there's just not enough forest to support deer numbers. So having more forest, more habitat for deer that has been an important bit of it. The other big reason generally why we have more deer or a big reason I should say is reduced predation on deer. Part of this is natural predators. I don't like the term natural predators. Non-human predators. The two major predators of adult deer are wolves and mountain lions. Those don't exist anywhere in the east, eastern United States. Bears, coyotes and bobcats do kill deer. Coyotes and bears kill a lot of deer fawns but it is not enough to actually control deer populations. One theory that a farmer friend of mine that she's seen a lot more coyotes. I don't know if that's what kind of bottom line is. Is that they're not a predator of deer? Yes, mainly fawns though. They will kill adult deer occasionally in hard winters with the snows deep. And especially if there's a crust where coyotes can stay on top and deer break through, they can kill adult deer. But more often than not, they're just killing fawns and to be blunt, fawns are food. That's why they make so many of them. Are there more, there's bobcats now? Yeah, we've had bobcats for a long time. But bobcats, most cats actually are specialist predators so they focus on certain food. And for bobcats, it's small food and if a deer happens to get too close to a bobcat, it will try to kill it and they can. But they're not actively hunting deer. But so the most really important part about reduced predation is humans. Humans are natural predators of deer. They have been major predators of deer for 10,000 years. Yes, we have different equipment and we do it differently today than indigenous people did. But the fact of the matter is humans have been major, major predators of deer since the last ice age. And this is the biggest reduction we have seen in the past 40 years. Not so much because we have fewer hunters. We do absolutely have fewer hunters but Vermont still has, I would argue, more than enough hunters. We have a lot more hunters per square mile than most of our neighboring states. We have more than enough hunters to control our deer population. The problem is our hunters don't have access to our deer. They don't have access to what? To the deer. Hunters can't kill deer that live behind a posted sign. So there's far more land now and thus far more deer that are simply inaccessible to hunters in not Montpelier city proper, but the area around there is far less hunting today than there was 20 years ago, but certainly 40 years ago. So that has allowed that deer population to increase and they overflow into Montpelier, essentially. And I blame this. I put the posted property sign up because that's what everyone blames it on but it's not just people posting their property against hunting. It's also, as land gets more developed, when surrounding Montpelier was all big farms, it was huntable. If you're a hunter, that's an area you might want to actually hunt in. When it's all five to 10 acre house lots, even if it's not posted, no hunter wants to hunt there. So it just doesn't get hunted. And then, of course, public attitudes are also changing. People have different views today about hunting, about deer and how and when you should kill them than they did decades ago. Quite frankly, 40 years ago, if people had deer eating their gardens, they dealt with it, they dealt with it themselves, meaning they probably killed that deer. Not suggesting that's right, wrong or otherwise, but it helped control the deer population. But that's not illegal, right? That is very much illegal. You know, can I go back to that? I'll let John answer the legal questions, but. Yeah, so like statewide, right? We, as an agency, enforce state laws. In and of itself, in major cities, there are city ordinances that your municipal law enforcement will enforce, not to say that we can't enforce those laws. However, most of the time, it's to your municipal law enforcement. And I have spoken and just out of curiosity about the enforcement of the hunting regulations of the non-pulier from a non-pulier police officer, and they said that there's no hunting allowed, but I do need to double check because. I would actually ask. It's a curious, a bow and arrow is allowed, yeah. We have signed on the elsewhere saying no rifle shooting, buckshot only, which suggests that buckshot is illegal. There's some more communication that needs to be made between myself and I think that local law enforcement just to get some clarity, because I'm hearing different things. So the other, I've talked to someone, oh, Hunter, is that usually if you actually shoot an animal that way, it runs a long distance, and that's really. Anything makes sense? It's, yeah, it's not so much how far they run because they can run if you shoot them with a rifle, too, but you have very small properties. So it's very likely it's going to run onto the next property, which is obviously a concern if that person didn't give you permission. You mentioned before that a bobcat, if it's close enough to a deer, will kill the deer. I assume that means he'll eat the deer, right? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. But there, my point was simply that a bobcat is not out there trying to find a deer to kill. It's kind of like anyone can go sit in the woods on a rock and maybe you'll get lucky and a deer will walk by. If you're a bobcat, you might try to kill that deer. There aren't too many bobcats, I think, in Vermont, does it? Depends where you are in Vermont. In the Champlain Valley, there are a lot. This area, I don't know, probably not as many. I live near Rutland and we have a lot of bobcats. But. So, yeah, so this is kind of our issue currently with why we have deer. In a lot of the state, deer numbers have been increasing simply because hunters don't have access to do the job we need them to do. So the long-term ultimate solution is we need to allow and promote more regulated hunting. We need to kill more deer. That's not what we're gonna focus on tonight because we're in Montpelier and that's a whole complicated political thing that we gotta figure out how to do. But ultimately, it is important to keep in mind that that is the only way we're gonna ultimately control the impact of deer is to reduce the number of deer and the only way we can do that realistically is through hunting. So the two topics that Sandy wanted to cover tonight were what can be done about ticks and how do you protect your gardens, et cetera, from deer. So first, how do you control ticks? I think before, I mean, you can read the things there, but before I get into that, I think it's important to understand a bit about ticks and why we are actually concerned about ticks, right? We're not afraid of ticks, I think, most of us. They're just another bug. The issue is the diseases that they spread, right? If they didn't spread diseases, they're just another bug. Girls like every other bug, but they're a bug. So our concern with ticks is about the diseases they spread, so that's important to keep in mind, right? That's a key factor and it affects some of the things, how we control them. The other thing is their life cycle and what they actually feed on in different stages. So most ticks, deer ticks included, technically called black-legged ticks, even though everyone calls them deer ticks. They're a three-host tick. So they have three life stages, larvae, nymph, adult, and they feed on a different animal in each of those stages. For deer ticks, typically, the larvae which are tiny, tiny little specks and you'll almost never have one on you, they feed almost entirely on rodents, mice, chipmunks, and that is where they pick up tick-borne diseases. They're not born with it. They pick it up from usually Pyramuscus mouse, so house mouse, field mouse, or chipmunk. There may be other small rodents that are also the reservoirs for Lyme disease, Anaplasma, the diseases we're concerned about. So ticks are born clean. They pick up these bacteria in that first life stage from a rodent, so keep that in mind if you're trying to control that. And then they take their blood meal, they drop off, they molten to a nymph, which are the tiny ones that you may have on you that you would actually notice as a tick. They're about, you know, sesame or poppy seed size, the tiny little black specks. Those are nymphal ticks. Normally, they will feed on either a rodent again or a medium-sized animal. In a city, that's probably a raccoon or a possum or your pet or a squirrel or a skunk. There's a lot of them, right? They may get on you, but they don't know feed on that. At that point, they can transmit diseases, though. And then, of course, as an adult, they'll drop off the molten to an adult tick, which is the one we all recognize as a female in this photo that has the red abdomen. Their primary host as adults is deer, which is why they're called deer ticks. That's the most abundant large mammal out there, other than us and our pets. So that's what adult ticks look for. And so deer are called the reproductive host because as adults, they get on a host and they breed on that host. So they get on a deer, they hope the opposite sex tick gets on the deer, they'll breed on that deer and drop off lay eggs, start that cycle over again. So the number of deer can affect how many ticks are out there because there's more hosts for those adult ticks. Has no influence whatsoever on the prevalence of Lyme or Anaplasma or any of the tick-borne diseases. The other bit I'll add is that if you don't have the intermediate steps, if you don't have all the rodents and medium-sized mammals, for them to go from larvae to nymph to adult, doesn't matter how many deer you have, there aren't gonna be that many to jump on them at that point. So you have to control those middle stages as well. And so that gets us, I guess, to how we control ticks. Can I just say, I'm curious if every, I've gotten Lyme or a deer tick on me and I never put this together before but I was working in my Bishop's Suite. So in the Bishop's Suite in Montpelier is everywhere and it's really dense. So is that what, rather than a lawn per se? Yeah, so any, so yeah, so this gets, I'm gonna put in here Moira's shorter. I'm knowing that a lot of you are gardeners and you might like to have some pollinators in your lawn. Yeah, like me. I don't mow my grass very short and I have picked up ticks right in my lawn but more often than not, you're gonna get it in thicker vegetation. And the reason is ticks are very sensitive to humidity so they can dry out very easily. When you get hot, dry days, they go down, they hide in the leaf litter or in that vegetation where they can stay moist. They can control the moisture. So if you had like really short grass and it scorched, there wouldn't be any ticks there but it's not really how you wanna manage your lawn. But that's also, that is why, I mentioned earlier about the invasive thickets. That was one of the primary reasons why those habitats support more ticks is because they're denser than most native vegetation so it's a more humid microclimate in there so it supports more ticks. The other thing I wanted to interrupt you is that probably everybody in this room knows this but molecularism is a very, very high population of scum. Every urban suburban area has very high density populations of those which is a major reason those areas have a lot of ticks because they have so many of those, it's the rodents too. Like our yards are ideal mouse and chipmunk habitat. Those animals are few and far between in way out in the woods but man they love that fragmented habitat in our backyard. So you end up with a ton of those rodents, a ton of the medium-sized animals which are perfect for the nymphs. Despite what anyone may have heard, possums do not eat ticks. Should have stopped me earlier. No, that was based on a study. I don't know who did the study and I'm pretty sure they were actually like an animal rights group. But they basically in that study poured a bunch of ticks onto a possum and it was about how they deal with ticks on themselves. Turned out they ate a lot of those ticks but you just poured a bunch of ticks onto a possum. It's not a natural scenario. There's been a more recent study a couple of years ago it's from the south but they actually looked at possum diet in the wild, hundreds of possums based on DNA in their scat and they found zero evidence of ticks. They do not eat ticks. Any bird will eat ticks. Chickens are great, guinea fowl, people often propose, but chickens are, I would recommend over guinea fowl. Sure. What is the difference between deer ticks and the moose ticks that I understand are killing moose? They're entirely different species of tick. The winter tick that kills moose has a very different life cycle. You will never have one on you ever unless you're handling dead moose. They have a unique life cycle where they stay on the same animal for all three life stages. So they get on an animal in the fall, spend six to seven months on that animal and drop off in the spring. That's why they're called winter ticks. Any animal that grooms itself will dislodge most of those ticks over the course of those seven months and of course it's winter so they die, they get knocked off. So that would be like cats. Cats, deer, bears, anything basically will get the vast majority of winter ticks off. Moose don't groom. They didn't evolve with external parasites like ticks so they don't groom until it's way too late and they have tens of thousands of ticks on them. So it's a- Are you coming back and I don't raise my question now? I was not gonna say anything more than control rodent populations. As I found a stock feeding birds because a bird feeding attracts- Absolutely. The fear that I had on my neck but it also attracts squirrels, dead moose, skunks, and I haven't seen a squirrel in the last two summers since I stopped feeding the birds. The birds are doing great out there. They don't get my bird seed. Any time of year. That is great advice. Do not feed your birds in the summer. We recommend that for a variety of reasons. This is a good one. Bears are the primary reason we recommend people not feed birds through the summer months but this would probably be a better one for a lot of people actually. You would actually get them to comply. I've never seen a rat around that doesn't mean they're not there. The big ones for at least lime and anaplasma are chipmunks are known to be a reservoir for it and then like I said, the house mice and field mice. Those are the big ones. And then you chew it. And chicken ratio now so that's better. So yeah. Right, that's part of the problem is there's a lot of feed out there for these animals. I'm curious how many we had... Sorry, the older I get, the more problems I have finding words, but it's how many insects there are in Vermont? No, I've known a lot. So treat your yard? Treat your yard. So there are a lot of products out there to spray in backyards and kill ticks. They probably kill a lot of other species. I would guess, I don't know. I've never, I don't know a lot about them. It is an option for controlling ticks in your yard. From a beekeeper's point of view? No, I would not personally recommend it from any ecological point of view but we often have to take the stance ecologically that your yard is lost anyway. A lot of people, it's not great habitat for anything. So your health kind of comes first in that situation, but... It's not just babies, it's butterflies, it's... It's all the pollinators, yeah. And again, I think the treatments that are widely available, tick treatments, there are other insect treatments, but tick specific treatments tend to be pretty narrow to don't impact, but again, that's assuming they're applied correctly in the right areas. So it will kill your cats? Bermithrin will kill a lot of things, including humans in the right concentration. Yeah, a lot of those chemicals are just bad. And so if you want to avoid using chemicals, don't treat your yard, there are better options but I had to throw it in there because it is a real option. So that's ticks. And then as far as what we do about deer, short of killing them, fencing is really the only effective long-term solution. We have six feet fence, and so as the deer jumped in with no effort, I was chasing it. So yeah, fencing works if it's tall enough. The problem is it has to be even an eight foot fence. If a deer really wants to jump it, they can jump an eight foot fence. A fence is a deterrent largely, unless you're gonna put a 10 foot fence around your entire yard. But it's the best method that is available. Deterrents, I put it up there, they can work. There's all kinds of sprays and scents and noise makers and things. They all work for about two days and then they don't work anymore. Blinking lights to them. Nothing works. Because the problem with any of the deterrents is deer get used to them. They realize it's not a threat and they go on business as usual. Because we're a lot of gardeners in this room, I wanna ask about multiple fences because I've heard that if you have two fences at a certain distance away, that that can help. And I have berry plants and so I have two rows that are six. So one fence, deer fence, and then I have a railing to put bug netting over. That's about six feet tall so I can reach it. But it's a pipe, it's metal conduit. So it's very bright at night time. So that's actually one question I have. But so those two things and they're six feet apart. Somebody has told me that they can measure that in the night and just give up. Wishful things. So there are, I've heard a lot of different things. There are some ways you can kind of play with deers. They don't have great depth perception. So yeah, like a double fence or sometimes people with slope of fence either can go actually either direction but they struggle to gauge how far they actually have to jump in that case to get over or under something. So they hesitate and they usually don't jump it. It's not that they're incapable. It's that it messes with their perception of exactly what they need to do. And the other thing is if you can't reach up the high enough to get to a knee fence can you string something another foot above? Like we actually tied on tomato stakes and then I use Christmas lights that weren't working anymore just to have something shining. Yeah, people do all sorts. And it's the same, it's just a visual because they're gonna see anything up there. It could be a string piece, long string going across. They're gonna be like, I have to jump that. Do they have good night vision? They have fantastic night vision. It's black and white and any case with deer their depth perception is not great but they can see very well. Because for vegetables, this is a major bit. Tell us if you're gonna go over this one later. This is like one of the main things. Yeah, there are lots of tricks with fencing. I'm not gonna get into all the detail. I mean, I'm happy to answer any questions but this is most of what I had. The thing with fencing is it is, you shouldn't think of it as like it's a wall and they absolutely can't get through it. You're trying to like make them really think about can I get over that or not? And if they question it and there's any other option they're not gonna jump in there. The other thing that works pretty well if they're not starving is if you have a small space within your fence, like you can have a six foot fence which a deer can jump without even thinking about it. But if it's only going into say a 10 by 10 space the deer is not gonna be comfortable inside that space. And so it probably isn't gonna jump in there. It's not a hundred percent deterrent but if you have small raised beds or something you may be able to fence those individually and the deer's not gonna jump in there even though it's physically able it just is uncomfortable in that confined space. And I'm part of the 1%. It's happened. I mean, no, they can. And it was like the deer rocketed out. It went straight into the air and somehow landed over the embankment on its feet. No kind of promise in the time this was ended at seven? No, you said we had. Quarter to the late. Quarter to the late, so, yeah. One other thing I found in pieces of curiosity with people, my front, I don't know the history. My front yard, I had already put up a four foot picket fence and I grew roses over that and I'm not thinking about deer at that point in my life but Rosa Rogosa grows to at least six feet and then back three feet we put seven foot high deer fence and then we put the reflective tape on top of that and so that whole assembly that's like seven feet probably with the Rogosa, it's really big but it seems to work. But all, to be frank, all it needs is it goes to someone else's garden. Yeah, I mean, that's all you're doing and more often than not the recommendation nowadays with fencing because it's expensive is if you have individual trees or shrubs or small things you wanna protect, fence those. Don't fence your whole yard because it's just prohibitively expensive and yes, you're just sending them to your neighbor. The other thing you can't see. So that's the, I'm sure you're all familiar with the really cheap mesh deer fence you can buy anywhere. That's basically how that works. They can't really see it, it's at close range. Again, that depth perception because their eyes are so far apart, their focal point is way out in front of them so when they're close to something like that they can't see it and they bump into it and they're like, what is happening here? Of course. On my phone I have a video of it and do you really have a fence like that? I have a video of a deer kind of running into it and bouncing back. Yeah, they, it can be very effective fencing. The problem is it's cheap and it doesn't last very long and so you end up having to maintain it and replace it a lot but it can be very effective. Yeah, I mean, so my last thing was to say you have to haze deer, always. And haze means harass them, yell at them, chase them out of your yard. Do not allow them to be comfortable in your neighborhood because that is ultimately why they're there. They get used to whatever else you do and they say that's not a threat and your dog barking from the porch when they know it never leaves the porch is not a threat. They have to actually perceive a threat from whatever you are doing. So yell at them, throw stuff at them, have the kids chase them. Whatever you can do, just get them out of your yard. Don't let them be comfortable in your neighborhood. And that's, I mean, in practice, I recognize that's hard to actually do but it is important that they have to know they're not welcome in that space. You don't remember that? So they don't have to come back this every time? No, they'll come back but if they actually feel uncomfortable there, they're not, they're gonna be less and less likely to come to your yard. The reason they're coming there is because whatever you're doing now is not a threat to them. I like to walk in the dusk and pretty often I need to dare on that college street or a different, and they feel very comfortable. Yeah, I'm sure, because... Well, and part of the issue, and that is one of the issues with Al-Qalam Suburban Deer is they see a lot of people and they get used to people and they get used to people not being a threat at all. You're just there. Even like 15 years ago, they were much more afraid of people. I mean, if you drove up, they'd run off, but now I've driven into my driveway and they're by an apple tree right there and they just look and they'll think, well, when they get out and close the door, they'll run. No, they don't. Yeah, and it's a generational, so I mean, they learn from their parents. And so you have those that have spent their life in Montpelier not afraid of people and they teach their fawns to not be afraid of people. And eventually it progresses to, there are a lot of cities and suburban areas in New York and the Mid-Atlantic where deer will sit in the median strip between the sidewalk and the road, or in the median if there's an actual median in the road all day long, middle of the day, just bed there. They're not scared of people at all. They need an actual threat. So I did read that deer will actually read dogs. So they'll delineate between different dogs. They will study the dog and look at the dog to see if the dog is a threat or not. I don't know if they're reading an individual dog, but they've certainly learned that, someone's little yippy dog is not an actual threat. But even like a lab, if people have a large lab that doesn't ever leave the yard or doesn't chase the deer, it's not a threat to a deer. My full-sized colleague was running around this afternoon and the deer was just standing there. So they're used to deer. Again, they see a lot of people, they see a lot of people have dogs. They see a lot of dogs and they're not an actual threat unless the dog chases them, which we don't want you to let your dog chase deer, actually. Yeah, we can talk a little bit about that, please. So that is illegal. That is illegal. Don't have your dog chasing the deer. If you want to leave it on your property to scare off the deer, that's another thing. Right. If you have a dog that has a fence. Yeah. But why is it illegal to have a dog? Because what will happen is the dog will just chase the deer for pleasure and it's a pretty horrific sight to have this dog just nip at this deer until it's exhausted. Basically, you have well-fed domestic dogs that will just chase deer until the deer dies of exhaustion because they can't. It's not good. It'll run the deer into roads, it'll run the deer into other places. Yeah, it's a significant safety hazard. And it used to be, part of the reason it's illegal is it used to be a major issue. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, statewide it was a major issue. There are documents, well before my time, but 60s and 70s where domestic dogs running deer was probably that killed more deer than anything else in the state because a lot of people had basically free-range dogs. Before the deers get used to what you're charging, used for deterrence. So what, somebody like me who does an awful lot of walking, what else can you do except to spray your, your people or not? What you said to do is to yell at the deer. Yeah. Does that work? No, I mean, ultimately they need an actual fear and this is where killing them comes into play, right? If you, you can run after a deer, there's not a threat to the deer. The deer's gonna trot away and be like, I don't know how it stands looking like that. Or that, until it sees one of its friends die as a result of that, it's not a threat. And while that sounds kind of harsh, that's evolution in deer, right? They, unless, until it's an actual threat, they're not scared of people. I wouldn't do this, but can you throw something at a deer? Oh, yeah, I do it all the time. Yeah. I have a whole bag of tennis balls and stuff that I throw. Yeah. That sounds, that sounds okay. No, I would recommend it here. If I did one of those, that would be yours. Yeah, if you have a tennis ball, I'm, tennis balls are great because you're not gonna hurt them. You're gonna scare them. You're gonna break a window. And I know they do it for geese here and sometimes in front of mine is actually on her and he's on her. And he has to come in to control on certain funds. And certainly like in Atlanta, they do control funds and they do it in New York City and particularly around golf courses. What are your thoughts about that with deer and non-pillars? So again, like the hunting thing gets, it's complex because every community is different. John mentioned their local ordinances that you have to work around. I mean, like I mentioned long-term, ultimately we need to somehow get hunting. I don't know if that's to be in Montpelier. So I wanted to, I don't think I did mention this about the landscape around Montpelier. What I'm assuming you all are calling downtown Montpelier, which is what looked like downtown on the map is relatively small. It's maybe a mile by a mile. A deer's home range is bigger than that. So very likely all of the deer in Montpelier are at some point venturing out into the suburbs of, yeah. So you're getting deer from around coming in. So Montpelier wouldn't be a great place for a control but mainly because you don't have a like city park to do it in. I mean, Hubbard Park isn't that big. But you could potentially somehow get more hunting right around Montpelier and eliminate the source, so to speak. How would that happen? It's a complex. It's a complex to a very difficult problem. Exactly. And ultimately. It's like a consider. Yeah, I mean it's so our department, we try to encourage it as much as we can just from a broader deer management perspective. The deer is the meat that they do in the May. Every, most places do it. I mean we have, well we don't have really great examples in Vermont because we've never had to do it before. It is a relatively new problem for us but it's not new for other places. So there are ways we can deal with it. You guys have a program where people, there are families that will get onto a list and you'll provide a set list. You have venison for monitors, yes. Yeah, so most states have, they're rather called venison donation programs but they are typically a nonprofit entity because the state has some limitations on what we can do in terms of giving meat out or processing meat, et cetera. So typically there's a nonprofit entity that will accept venison donations and distribute them to food banks and needy people and it's whatever. We haven't had that historically. Our wardens have basically picked up roadkill and had it processed or some needy people are capable of processing it themselves. They just don't have money to buy meat and so those are donated. The venison for Vermonters program's relatively new and it's sort of our attempt at getting toward that venison donation program but we ultimately really need some nonprofit to take it over and run with it for it to really take off. I mean, we have other jobs that we have to do. I mean, venison for Vermonters was started by two of our wardens that have a meat cutting background and they were processing deer themselves. And the thing is that a lot of people don't seem to want to look at deer as an incredibly great local organic sourcing. Mm-hmm. Does that taste good? It tastes great. And there's so many people that are hungry that can't afford to go to the co-op to buy organic food but they would like to feed their man with that. Yep. And solve that with... I will add that we have the benefit in Vermont and again, some private entity needs to take this over. But we have the benefit of Vermont of being the only state where it is legal to sell venison. Where it is legal. It is legal. There's a limit on when it has to be during the hunting seasons or I think it's 20 days after. But that's from October 1st into January. Yeah, and so I mean, we've always had the history of like hunters donating extra meat when they harvest it but it gets into the, if you want to incentivize a hunter to hunt here or the issue we run into more is incentivizing our successful hunters. Because we have a lot of hunters but some of them are not particularly good at it. I'll say effective. Their goal may not be to kill a deer. But the ones that are, if they shoot two deer, that's all the meat they need. For one, one is all the meat most they need. And so it's incentivizing them to go out hunting again, take another one and give that one away. Giving them an outlet for that. So like these are some of the options that we need to look into how we incentivize this sort of stuff. Yeah. It's actually true, but I have heard there is a form of deer birth control. Is that a thing or is that a life? There are, there are actually a couple. They, the short version is they don't work. They do work if they were zoo animals. But they're wild animals. They're, I think the best one is 90, just over 90% effective, which you'd say, okay, that's not bad. You have to inject the deer every year. I have to inject the deer. So you're giving them a hormone injection every single year. Oh. And as tame as you think your deer are, once you've shot them with a dart gun once, you will not shoot them again. But so it's, yeah, it's every year, the one I'm most familiar with, both of them, that deer can never be consumed. So it runs around with giant ear tags like a farm animal. And essentially you are, even if you manage to inject it every year, that animal's still gonna die. It's gonna die by getting hit by a car or eaten by something. It's not a good solution. So it's, it's- So do you have any practical way to, to reduce the population deer? Well, what's the best, the ones that would just- Kill them. You have to hunt them. You have to kill them. Do you mean that this, at what point do you think that the state would up the limit on how many deer you could get this season? That is not our limiting factor right now. Hunter can shoot four deer right now and no, like I said, no one wants four deer. So the issue is, the issue is more about getting hunter's access to deer. I mean, you know, we're essentially, I don't know exactly how much land is posted or otherwise off limits to hunters, but I would not be at all surprised if we're only hunting 50% of our deer population. And the others are just un-hunted because hunters can't access them. Is it four deer, four deer overall? Four deer overall, but with, with archery equipment, so if you're hunting with a bow or crossbow, a hunter can just go buy a license, shoot a deer, buy a license, shoot a deer, buy a license, shoot a deer and they can shoot does. Yeah, I know. All four of those can be does with bow. Rifle is still limited to buck only, which quite frankly, and I've argued this a lot, it's not the best way to manage, allowing hunters to shoot more does with rifles or more deer with rifles is gonna do nothing for your deer population here. Hunters with rifles are going way back up in the hills. They're not hunting where we need deer killed. So we focus on bow hunting for the suburban, or suburban is not the right word, but the more developed area, you know, focus. If you imagine that 50% is ideal or is not ideal, what percentage would be ideal? Well, we wanna be hunting 100% of our deer. 100%? Not killing. I said we just want hunters to be able to pursue all of the deer that are out there and that's the problem now is half the deer out there, a hunter cannot, they have no chance of being shot by a hunter because they're in a place that hunters can't hunt. So I mean, and deer, so I think to your point though, our target in productive deer habitat, you need about 30% of your deer need to die every year to maintain a stable population. And maybe I got something wrong because I thought you said 50% is what we're doing now. What you're doing now. Okay, that was my misinterpreter. Yeah, so that's, no, we would try to get, it depends where you are in the state. Some areas 10% is plenty, but in productive habitat like this where you don't have a lot of other things killing them, you probably need to kill 30% of your deer every single year. They're very productive. Where is that in the larger Montpelier area? I have absolutely no idea how many deer there are in Montpelier. A reasonable guess, so let's say the city of Montpelier is a square mile, mile by mile. Probably need to think a little bigger than that, but if it's a square mile, I wouldn't be surprised if there's 30 or 40 deer that largely live in that square mile. So a third of them is killing 10 to 15 deer every single year. Doesn't seem all that difficult, but again, you probably have to think bigger picture too, but yeah, I mean, I think it's very doable. We're at a stage where it's a very solvable problem if we don't kick the can down the road too long. Most places wait until it's absolutely ridiculous and like there are major health concerns and people are killing 15 deer a year with their cars in the city and then they act and then it's too late. You're just too many deer and you can't do anything. So I honestly don't know how, I honestly don't know what the best solution is. We know we need to kill more deer. How we go about doing that, respecting like private property rights and all these other things is not, there's no obvious easy solution to it. Again, we've never really needed to do it before because we've never, this is a new problem for us because of the issue. I mean, it is. So yeah, Montpelier was kind of at the forefront here. We have never, because of the landscape changes and the relatively recent lack of access for hunters. And also, I didn't mention this because I don't think it's a huge issue here, but broader in Vermont, the number one thing that kills our deer is winter. Most of them starve to death. They don't starve to death anymore. They get eaten by something, but essentially they starve. Well, and climate change, we're having milder and milder winters every year. And so winter is less and less of a factor. So historically, 30 years ago, winter would kill enough deer that we didn't really have to worry about much. And now, especially when they're living in backyards and people plow nice paths for them, so they don't have to walk through the snow anymore. We're not losing that many deer in the winter, so. It seems like this, a key part, is the medicine for remonters or something similar. So that there's a good coming out of it. Yeah, I think what other states have learned, I think in a lot of these, in managing suburban deer, in a lot of states have way more experience with this than us, is that it kind of has to be a community-led effort, not that the community has to oversee everything, but there has to be community support for whatever happens. And the medicine for remonters program is one way to get a lot of support because there is the benefit, the obvious visible benefit that comes out of it, as opposed to simply offering more hunting for hunters, right? The stigma that hunters are villains is what, it's a big part of it. Like, I have, in my household, been two people that went out hunting this year, and I was like, you know, we've got a perfect tree that we can just hang the deer here and we can process it, and there you are. And I'm like, gosh, front-bore tarp is gonna blow up all the nature, and it's gonna freak out as we are trying to put meat in our freezer for the winter. And even as my son comes back from ice fishing this year, and I'm processing fish on the picnic table in the backyard, I'm like, I know the neighbors are probably watching, like, I should probably go inside. We don't need to be judging people like this. Like, they're providing food for themselves, their family, and they're not monsters. They're just hunters, fishers, men doing it for fun, doing it for food, doing it for many reasons. Yeah. You're transporting to the processing facility that you said that there isn't for a month now, and you only have two guys. Well, we have the two wardens that do it, but a lot of it now we actually pay regular meat cutters to do. Part of the issue with deer also is, so like, some of you may be aware, there's generally a lack of butchers in this state, if you've tried to raise an animal and get it slaughtered. USDA regulations don't allow wild game and domestic game to be processed on the same equipment unless they stop, clean everything, do their game, stop, clean everything, and then go back to domestic. So a lot of the bigger butchers don't do deer. So a lot of the deer processing is by, you know, some guy that works at the supermarket, Deli, that does it on the side, cuts up deer on the side. So it's complicated there. And how to put your deer by a neckie professor. That was his course that he taught. Yeah, and in Vermont, like a lot of states actually have places, and there are some in Vermont, particularly like Franklin County where we have a ton of deer, that's just do deer for four months of the year because they can be busy enough. But in a lot of Vermont, because so many of our hunters process their own deer, there's not a lot of demand. And so that kind of limits access to that too. So it's, there's some challenges in like, you know. So if we only need to process 15 deer, as you were saying. Yeah, you can probably contract with someone that does it already and say, hey, we'll pay you a hundred bucks an animal to do these. Right, and then I wonder, how much vote would one deer provide a lot? Oh, I think our average is about 50 pounds of. 50 pounds of meat. Of red meat from one deer. Whatever that is, 75, yeah. 750 pounds. It's a lot of meat. It's a lot of red meat. Yeah, and I mean, if you were factoring that that's, well, it's venison, so it's even more expensive than buying beef. But even if you put it at beef prices and say it's $8 a pound, like cheap ground beef prices, it's a lot of economic potential impact. Is there a chronic waste of disease here in Vermont? So we don't have to worry about it. No, we have never detected it. So there's no disease concerns we have to worry about right now. Yeah, it's a lot of potential. Seems like there's a possibility that there's a fundraiser or it's just a human impact. You made a theory for people that can't afford meat. Yeah, there's a lot of, there are a lot of, a lot of potential options here. Yeah, I've read that people deer herd in Vermont is sort of moving south. Is that true? Or do you think I've just touched on that, say, about Fredericks County? No, no, we, no, I would say. Our deer, so, Vermont's a small state, but very different deer populations in different parts of the state or they're maybe going in different directions or performing differently. Franklin County and, well, the Northern Champlain Valley and like Grand Isle County, the Champlain Islands are sort of hotbed for deer right now. A lot of agriculture deer thriving in those areas. So something like 25% of all the deer killed in Vermont are killed in that like corner of the state. And then you have other parts like the spine of the Green Mountains are up in the Northeast Kingdom where I'm from and where I still hunt. There are very few deer. That's wonderful. Yeah. So. For anybody that listens to podcasts, I highly recommend Allegies with Alley Board. They just did a really great like hour and a half show about ticks and tick-borne diseases. And it was a specialist that are in New England that are studying this. Yeah. What was it called here? Allegies. It's called Allegies. So go ahead. So yeah, mostly habitat is a limiting factor in places where we don't have a lot of deer. It's big tracts of forests that are just not great deer habitat. And then up in the Northeast Kingdom, very long hard winners also limit deer numbers. General, are you familiar with any efforts to do community cleaning, culling? We both nixly, when it comes to any coal efforts. We definitely take leave from the vial. We just kind of enforce any laws that are behind those culls, but we haven't had any. Yeah, it's not so. I mean, other states have done it, but like generally speaking like culling is sort of the last like culling from our perspective is like hiring sharpshooters to come in and kill deer. That's a last resort thing. We as a state would require a town or whoever was trying to do that to try everything else first, right? Try to do it with hunters. Try to do whatever other mitigation, maybe which we know in work, but we make you try everything else before we let you pay for sharpshooters to come in. Oh, and then they use the wrong word. No, and so yeah, so sorry, I was gonna finish that thought and I got sidetracked. Culling is what we call that. If it's just like a controlled hunt was a term user, that's what we would call like very strictly regulated like hunt in town. So there's degree, there's individual hunters, there's controlled hunting and then there's culling. Right, so there's the like hunting under our regular hunting regulations like everything else. There's controlled hunting where we could give you permission to like use firearms, even though it's not the firearm season in a certain part of town in like a three day window or something. And then there's culling, which is hiring people to come in and just kill deer, which you would pay for. I think there's someone who's in New York where the population is really severe. Like it's the environmental and they're starving. Yeah, yeah. And they for, I think it is a two or three day period. They actually don't have any limits and can get a lot of deer and then there's a community process. Yeah, and that's how a lot of communities do the controlled because often controlled hunts are done on like a park that's in or next to a urban area because you can't put a lot of hunters in a, in suburbia, right, people's backyards. So it's usually a chunk of public land surrounded by unhuntable land. And then they close it down like no hikers for these three days. You were just hunting deer, go in, kill all the deer you can as hunters. And yeah, and process them. Do they try to find them into that area? Everyone's different. Some of them do try drives. Some of them just let hunters go out and sit in tree stands. They all, it's all, everyone is different, which is why it's really hard to generalize about these things and every situation is different. So, yeah, they're all. Thank you about what you were saying about the deer going into areas that we, that are posted. What is the state's thoughts or would there be any chance that baiting and using scent would be an advantage? I mean, using scent is legal, scent lures. They just can't contain urine or other bodily fluids because of the disease risks. Baiting, we actually consider it regularly, but ultimately the disease risks of baiting outweigh any potential benefits. So the issue with baiting is like, if you're going out and dumping a pile of corn, trying to attract deer to a spot, so you can shoot it. It's good from a killing deer perspective because you often get a very controlled shot at a deer that's sitting right there. But you also end up with a bunch of deer feeding nose to nose from the same pile. And that's a very good way to spread diseases, as we all now know after the last couple of years. So we don't, that's why we don't allow, it is illegal to bait deer or feed deer in Vermont for that reason, because of the risk of spreading diseases. I actually saw like that. That is now illegal to sell. So for years, we only have the authority to regulate what hunters use in the field. But every sporting goods store in the state sold deer food. They could use it out of state. But now the agency of ag recently got on our side and now that it is illegal to sell anything labeled as deer food. But that is recent, yeah. Any other questions? Doesn't even have to be related to this. I don't want to be here all night. So, quick on hunting local deer. It seems like on one end there's do nothing. On the other end is do a controlled hunt. It seemed like you were inferring that maybe there was a middle thing where individual homeowners did some things to the deer. Or, you know, the middle, the, I suppose or something. I mean, ultimately, if everyone just hunted themselves and killed the deer in their backyard, this wouldn't be a problem. Well, yeah, of course, during the season. But realistically, it was more of a, as sort of an intermediate step because the reality of implementing any sort of hunting around here or new hunting regulations, this stuff takes years. Even if you could get city council or whatever it is in Montpelier to say, yes, we will support this. Let's move forward. We're still looking two to three years out before we'd even have regulations in place in hunters on the ground. So, and we're not even there. So in the interim, that's where I was saying, like, you guys just got to, I don't know, harass deer. Do what you can to make deer uncomfortable in Montpelier. I don't know if the 15 people in this room. If you have a hunting license and it's in season, you can use a crossbow and shoot the deer in your backyard from right out of your window. It's as many as possible. Up to four. You have to observe the hours. Yes, it has to be. And you can't light your yard. And spot the deer, correct? Yeah, if you shoot it. And what's the reason for that? It's just, what's that? Well, the deer will just freeze up. It's an unfair. It's a, yeah, it's a poaching deterrent. Night is not, it is not legal to hunt at night. Would you use that technique for a hunt down? For sharpshooters, if you hire people to come in and call deer, they will sometimes shoot them at night. But there are a lot of safety issues with shooting at night period, even with highly trained people. So it's not ideal. No, I mean, ultimately if you have either enough people hunting, your success rate doesn't have to be high individually, but if you have enough people out there, they'll kill some deer. Or you just have really skilled, competent people out there who will find the place to be and kill deer. It can be done. There is a book I'd really recommend. It's on, it's called, Briefly Did It, and it's by a writer by the name of Mary Roche, R-O-A-C-H. Some people may be familiar with her work, but she isn't an ecologist herself, but she handles some really, I mean, subjects like this in a very good way. And this one had to do with, I don't know if you've read it or heard of it. I feel like her name sounds familiar. That they did on a grizzly, that was supposedly one that had mauled and killed at Hyker, but she went to a training that was led by Canadian Mounties that they did. So she was interested, so she went to this training. And to this, they showed that the grizzly hadn't done it because they did an autopsy on its stomach and it had no human remains. And so from that, she elaborated onto related subjects as far as, like in Colorado, I think it's Boulder, Colorado, they have a terrible problem with bears and deer. And in, down in the Amazon and in the rainforest. Now, because they've been so decimated that there was only pockets, so elephants now have a very hard time trying to get from one side of the country to the other because they have to go through little pockets. And the native people there, they think that if they put up like a little fence around their hut, that they'll be safe. But what happens is elephants like to drink. They're alcohol, it can be alcohol, become alcoholics, they like booze. And so then the natives do their own hooch thing outside and the elephant's drunk. And then it goes and in fact, goes right through their, you know, their huts. And so now the local enforcement people are doing familiarization and teaching with the people down there on what's happening ecologically and how to work with the animals and with school children too. It's really fascinating. So it's called by Mary Roche, ROACH. And the grizzly did it. I have a question. And I asked, was it Dustin was the previous? Yeah, it was. One day, and this was in the middle of the summer, so out of season. I came into my garden in the morning and my dear friends had fallen down. And it was at right at the scene, so they, anyways it ripped. And it, look, I thought, wow, that probably broke the deer's leg. I didn't see any deer around. But what do we do if there is a deer injury? Call me. Okay, so that is, I just wanted to- Yeah, yeah, if there's a deer that's injured, call me. Okay. And we'll figure out- You take it from there. I would take it from there, yeah. Okay. Yeah. That to say, don't go out injuring deer just to get me to come through. Because there's no guarantee we're gonna kill it. Are the deer in town, females and their fox? That's what I always see. Largely, yes. So, I mean, in part that's true everywhere because bucks are pursued by hunters that much more. So we generally have, hunters would argue with me, but at least two, if not three, does for every buck. Okay. But specifically in town here, a big reason deer in town this time of year is to avoid predators, meaning coyotes, et cetera. Bucks are up on a mountain somewhere hanging out with each other, being boys. Girls are in here keeping their kids safe. And where there's a lot of also highly nutritious food. So that's why I'm not putting out your compost, too, don't leave compost out. I mean, compost isn't gonna be a big deal for deer, although they will probably eat if you leave good food in there, but bears would be the bigger issue with compost. But probably in town, raccoons and skunks and everything else are gonna be a bigger problem for you, antics. Do male deer tend to stay with the female bears that they've had a child? No. Or they don't. No. Deer have a very short breeding period in the fall, and that is the only time the two interact. And the bucks go do their thing, and the does are off. Go their own ways. Yep. That's when the buck was in my yard. Yeah, so very likely I wouldn't be surprised if in the fall, so probably October through November, certainly into December, you may see some bucks in town coming in to find all the does while they're in season. In December, I walked into my yard and discovered a dead young buck under my deck. Oh my God. And it must have been, I don't think you weren't here yet. It must have been your colleague who came. It looked perfect. I saw no sign of injury. He came when I was not home. So I never heard if he had any theory, just what he thought if it might have been hit by a car, and that's as far as it got. It came in and fell shelter. So we know there was at least one buck on the bull herdspeak. I have a comment. I guess from what you said, the problem is going to get worse. And we have a deer stand in our backyard and the deer are munching on everything. And I guess I would wonder whether you would take back to the powers that be concerning regulating the deer population that is becoming a problem. And whether I become a bull hunter and start shooting deer during season in order to enjoy living in downtown Montpelier. I have walked here. It just seems like if you have access to the authorities that project how this problem is going to be dealt with, maybe you can take back that a lot of citizens are getting pretty sick of her. I absolutely will. It is a concern we are well aware of. I would argue it's one of our primary focuses going forward in terms of one of our biggest challenges. So it's kind of a focus of we don't know how, we don't know exactly what the solution is, but we know it's something we need to focus on because like I said, it's only gonna get worse. And of course people above me, the loudest, the squeakiest wheel gets the grease, right? So as more and more suburban communities start complaining about deer, that's going to be where we focus our attention. There's no age limit then on crossbow hunting, right? Nope. So I mean, I'm really nervous about the impact you could have in the society of Montpelier if one group starts to talk about a community controlled effort to have the benefit of medicine and we could teach each other how to dress and butcher deer or have a contract with someone. And we could teach each other how to bow hunt, which is a couple of days of training and how to be safe in a suburban environment. Most people here don't probably remember that the guy, some guy was living in a trailer by the airport about 30 or 40 years ago and he got shot in his living room by a rifle hunter who was being killed. So making sure things like that don't happen. But I'm really concerned that a well-intended effort, which would be ultimately good for the deer as well as for our people who believe me and for us with gardens, that that would turn into a huge conflict inside Montpelier. Yeah, and it's a fair concern and I think most of the communities that have dealt with it, you have to go through that at some point, right? There's no way around that. You're going to have people in the community that feel differently. It's best usually to interact with them earlier in the process rather than get real far ahead. And there is a website run by Cornell University called DeerAdvisor and it's deeradvisor.org. They have a ton of information on community deer management. It's how a lot of places in New York and the Mid-Atlantic have dealt with their problems but they have all the social bits too, like how do you address these issues? How should we go about this as a community discussing these topics? What are the common conflicts that come up? There's a lot of resources there for communities. Some of it's not directly relevant to Vermont but that sort of stuff. I think you'd find a lot on that. DeerAdvisor.org. DeerAdvisor.org. I know where you two have at least it's driven quite a long distance to get here and staying here late tonight. But I'm wondering if we were to get to the point of bringing this to the city council if one or both of you would be willing to come in. I don't know how to start making it a public conversation that's positive. Yeah, I mean we, it'll be me at this point. I mean we'll help however we can. I will say that, so we, three years ago, well took effect in 2020, we passed the changes before that. We made some pretty sweeping changes to our deer hunting regulations. One of the things we put on the books was what we called expanded archery zones which was intended to be a suburban archery hunt in specific areas that we designate. But we didn't designate any areas at the time because we wanted to work with communities beforehand. We didn't want to just send a bunch of hunters into a suburban area. And then the pandemic hit. And I took on being a moose biologist also. So capacity of the deer program has been greatly diminished. So I'm hoping soon we'll have another person on that is one of their major focuses will be suburban. Expanded archery areas. Expanded archery zones is what we called them an in-regulation, they're suburban archery hunts is what the purpose of them. Mount Pylir was going, is absolutely going to be one of them. But all that is, is a little bit of extra archery hunting earlier in the season. Might help, we don't know. Might be enough if we can do it sooner. But again, that's something we have to grapple with as a department getting the capacity to make that actually happen. If the community were able to get 15 deer in one year, would you have a way to monitor if that was actually helping? I mean, ultimately, we can track a lot of things but what is ultimately going to matter is are your conflicts decreasing? Are you seeing fewer, are they not eating your gardens anymore? Because that's ultimately what you're trying to get to. So there's no magic number of deer, there's no magic number of something else we can measure. What we're gonna measure is when are you all as a community happy with the lack of damage from deer? Basically. So City Council allowed hunting at the country club site this last year and that was a big hullabaloo. So to push even further, I don't wanna be a pessimist, but. Yeah, and I think that's where we kind of came at it from. We didn't designate any areas but in thinking about them, we're not gonna designate downtown Montpelier as the area. It'll be well outside and probably most of the hunters are not gonna hunt in here, they're gonna hunt around the fringe but you're killing the same deer, right? So that was our hope. That's a lot of sense to, as you were saying, at the beginning of that edge land that is more open, less concentrated, less probability of hurting a human being. Yeah, I mean, it's all archery. Archery hunting is certainly a lot safer than shooting firearms around buildings. But yeah, I mean, that's where we were hoping to go. There may be other solutions and I think there are other things we have to add on to that to actually be effective. But hopefully we can move in that direction. But you know, in terms of what you were saying, I think if the average person knew what was at stake in terms of, you know, we have another opinion about all this and explain it carefully that you wouldn't have a chance of more people supporting the idea of reducing the population. Yeah. I think I said that with every argument though. I'm sorry. We could say that with every argument, like with Longmore housing, that there's still many people that don't. Well, I think it's worth a try. Yeah, it's. I'm a public meter, whatever. Yeah, there are ways to, yeah. I think don't rush into it would be my advice. Like. Don't rush into it. Don't rush into it. I mean, get it started. Get the process. Get the ball rolling. But don't try to do something next year. Like then you're gonna probably do more harm than good. You wanna make sure everything lined up. You have all the support you need. You know, move forward slowly, but deliberately. That'd be my advice, I guess. Start with information. Absolutely. Start with information. People have to be aware of the problem. Yeah. Figure out how to get meat to people. Sure. Yep. Yep. You're not. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming.