page_title: Vermont
section_title: Fauna
hierarchical_section_title: Vermont / Geography / Fauna
caption_attribution_description: Carondelet Park, St. Louis Missouri 4/3/14, sun is setting
context_page_description: Vermont is a northeastern state in the New England region of the United States. It borders the states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, and New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the north. Vermont is the only state in New England that does not border the Atlantic Ocean. Vermont is the second-least-populated U.S. state and the sixth-smallest by area of the 50 U.S. states. The state capital is Montpelier, the least-populous state capital in the United States. The most-populous city, Burlington, is the least-populous city to be the most-populous city in a state.
  For some 12,000 years, indigenous peoples inhabited this area. The historically competitive tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Abenaki and Iroquoian-speaking Mohawk were active in the area at the time of European encounter.
  During the 17th century, French colonists claimed the territory as part of the Kingdom of France's colony of New France. After the Kingdom of Great Britain began to settle colonies to the south along the Atlantic coast, the two nations competed in North America in addition to Europe.
context_section_description: The state contains 41 species of reptiles and amphibians, 89 species of fish, of which 12 are non native; 193 species of breeding birds, 58 species of mammals, more than 15,000 insect species, and 2,000 higher plant species, plus fungi, algae, and 75 different types of natural communities. Vermont contains one species of venomous snake, the timber rattlesnake, which is confined to a few acres in western Rutland County.
  Wildlife has suffered because of human development of the state. By the mid-19th century, wild turkeys were exterminated in the state through overhunting and destruction of habitat. Sixteen were re-introduced in 1969, and had grown to a flock estimated to number 45,000 in 2009. In 2013, hunters killed 6,968 of these. Since 1970, reduction of farmland has resulted in reduced environment for, and resulted in a decline in numbers of various shrubland birds, including the American woodcock, brown thrasher, eastern towhee, willow flycatcher, golden-winged warbler, blue-winged warbler, field sparrow, and Baltimore oriole.
  The use of DDT for insect control resulted in ospreys laying eggs that were too thin to support the development of young. This species disappeared from the state. It began to reappear in 1998, when ospreys were observed again locally. As of 2010, they were no longer endangered in the state.
  From 2008 to 2010, White-nose syndrome killed an estimated two-thirds of all cave-wintering bats in the state.
  The New England cottontail disappeared from the state in the early 1970s, out-competed by the eastern cottontail rabbit, imported in the 1800s for hunting. It is better able to detect and avoid predators.
  Out of a total of 33 species of bumblebee, by 2013 the number declined to 19 or 20 species in the state. Bombus terricola (the yellow-banded bumblebee), although once common in Vermont, has not been seen in most of its range since 1999 and is now absent from the state. For honey bees, colony collapse disorder has affected bee population in the state, as elsewhere.
  Invasive species included the Asian spotted-wing drosophila, which started damaging berry crops in 2012. Vermont was the initial point of invasion in New England.
  Since 2010, the Vermont Department of Health has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct blood serum surveys of the state's deer and moose populations. Tests for eastern equine encephalitis virus antibodies were positive in moose or deer in each of Vermont's counties. In 2012, 12% of deer and 2.4% of moose tested positive.
caption: The hermit thrush, the state bird of Vermont
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