It may not look like it, but it’s that time of year when bears are emerging from their dens and you need to take down your birdfeeders, says the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.

“Do not wait to take down your birdfeeders and bearproof your yard until a bear comes to visit,” said Jaclyn Comeau, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s bear biologist, in a press release. “You need to act now to head off bear conflicts over the spring and summer, even if you have never had a bear visit your property before.”

Unfortunately, bear “incidents” have been on the rise over the past several years. Officials believe this trend is a result of a healthy black bear population in Vermont learning to associate people with food over multiple generations.

Vermont’s bear population has been stable over the past two decades and shows signs of growth over the past five years, even with increasing numbers of bears being taken by hunters. There was a record “harvest” of bears in 2024, according to Fish and Wildlife.

Shorter winters are also playing a role in the increase of human/bear conflicts, with bears leaving their dens earlier in the spring, as early as mid-March in recent years. This is roughly two weeks earlier than what is traditionally considered the start of bear season in northern New England.

“Preventing bears from having access to human-related foods is key to successful coexistence with these long-lived and intelligent animals,” Comeau said. “Bears can be found in every corner of Vermont other than the Champlain Islands. Put bluntly, most Vermonters live in bear country.”

Take these steps to coexist with bears

Fish and Wildlife asks you to take the following steps to coexist peacefully with bears:

• Take down birdfeeders between mid-March and December.
• Store garbage in bear-resistant containers or structures; trash cans alone are not enough.

Taking these precautions will also help reduce the chance of attracting other wildlife, such as raccoons, skunks and rodents. Fish and Wildlife is also asking you to submit reports of bears targeting birdfeeders and garbage, feeding on crops or livestock or investigating campgrounds. You can submit a report on the department’s Living with Black Bears web page.

“At the end of the day, purposely feeding a bear is not just bad for the bear,” Comeau said. “It is also dangerous for you, it causes problems for your neighbors and it is illegal. If bears are finding food on your property, it is your responsibility to remove that attraction and report a problem before the situation gets worse.”

Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.

Vermont silviculturists and the folks who make Silverados may have more to bond over than one might expect. Namely: the tangle that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are creating for their products that travel back and forth across the Canadian border during manufacturing.

Oliver Pierson, the state’s director of forestry, and Katharine Servidio, manager of the forest economy program for the Vermont Department of Forests, Park and Recreation, mapped out that tangle for the House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry on Wednesday. 

As sawmill capacity in the U.S. has retracted, New England’s loggers have looked to Canada to process timber felled on this side of the border. Vermont has felt that loss acutely with the 2023 closure of a Bristol sawmill and the 2024 shuttering of one in Clarendon. A recent Seven Days story reported that an estimated 150 sawmills have closed across the state since 2000.

Vermont imported $52 million in sawmill and wood products from Canada in 2024, according to Pierson. The neighbor to the north is also Vermont’s biggest export market for sawlogs and hardwood.

Pierson and Servidio couldn’t put a number on it, but said “a high percentage” of Vermont lumber — especially softwood — goes to Canada, where it gets sawed and processed before it comes right back into the U.S. Once it’s back on this side of the border, the wood is crucial for expanding Vermont’s housing stock: softwoods are used for framing and walls in new construction while hardwoods are prime finishing material for floors, cabinets and the like (think maple, oak, ash). 

“So why would anyone think it was a good idea to tariff it going up and tariff it coming back if it was our product?” Rep. Richard Nelson, R-Derby, asked.

There is a case for bringing more milling back to America, Pierson said, but “it wouldn’t be tomorrow. It wouldn’t even be a year or two from now when we’d be able to stand up additional processing capacity.”

With a “long-view” on the industry, Servidio said she sees that tariffs can offer “a potential opportunity” to Vermont, but that can only come if there is more certainty on whether tariffs on forest products are here to stay. 

In the short term, Servidio and Pierson said that they expect that U.S. tariffs on lumber imported from Canada and retaliatory Canadian tariffs on Vermont timber will be debilitating for the logging industry in the state: “The key takeaway point here is if there is this trade war that’s protracted, it could be expected to put some U.S. loggers out of business,” Pierson said. “That’s on top of challenges that the industry is already facing for other reasons: climate change, market variability, (and) workforce issues.” 

Next week, the committee plans to hear from the Vermont Forest Products Association and, potentially, from lumber companies. The state should know by April 2 — next Wednesday — if those on-again, off-again U.S. tariffs on Canada and Mexico will, in fact, go into effect.

— Olivia Gieger

In the know

The Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott are currently locked in a heated political battle over the immediate future of the motel emergency housing program. Without legislative action, next week, on April 1, the program’s winter-weather rules will expire — triggering restrictions on how long unhoused people can stay. A new 80-day time limit enacted last year resulted in the evictions of more than 1,500 people from motels over the course of the fall. That restriction was waived for the winter months but is set to kick back in again on Tuesday.

Read more here about the current stalemate and the reactions of program participants staying at Colchester’s Motel 6. 

— Carly Berlin

The University of Vermont Health Network has reached a tentative agreement with the Green Mountain Care Board to resolve a dispute over the fact that the hospital network brought in roughly $80 million more patient revenue in the 2023 fiscal year than it was allowed to. 

Under a proposed settlement announced Tuesday, the network would pay $11 million to “non-hospital” primary care providers and $12 million to the insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield. It would also fund a team of consultants and an “independent liaison” to review the network’s finances and operations. 

The settlement also includes restrictions on bonuses paid out to hospital executives. In the 2026 fiscal year, at least half of executives’ bonuses would be tied to specific factors: reducing the usage of emergency departments, payments from New York hospitals to Vermont hospitals, and reducing prices charged to commercial health insurers and revenue from those insurers.

Read more about the settlement and the public discussion about the terms at Wednesday’s Green Mountain Care Board meeting here.

— Peter D’Auria

On the move

The Senate suspended its rules Wednesday afternoon to give both preliminary and final approval to H.2, a bill that would delay the full implementation of Vermont’s Raise the Age initiative for at least two more years, keeping 19-year-olds accused of misdemeanors and low level felonies under the jurisdiction of adult criminal court. 

The push was to get the bill to Gov. Phil Scott to sign before the current legal deadline for implementation, next Tuesday, April 1. The bill also would increase the age at which children can be charged with juvenile offenses from 10 to 12 years old. 

Also, on Wednesday, the Senate approved S.18, which would create a licensure process for freestanding birthing centers, exempt those facilities from the Green Mountain Care Board’s certificate of need process and require coverage by the state Medicaid program. In the same vein, on Tuesday, the chamber approved S.53, which would create a certificate program for doulas and require Medicaid to cover their services. 

In other action, the Vermont House gave preliminary approval to H.244, which would require the state to spend 70% of part of its advertising budget on in-state media outlets. The body also approved H.401, which provides licensing exemptions for food manufacturers grossing less than $30,000, as well as H.474, which would make several significant changes to Vermont election law. 

— Kristen Fountain

Visit our 2025 bill tracker for the latest updates on major legislation we are following. 

Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is the story of a man in need of compassion with no easy way to ask for it. With arresting theatricality, the play uses light humor to show the main character’s isolation from others while slowly clarifying the depth of what damaged him. In Vermont Stage’s assured production, tragedy and comedy mesh in a portrait of a troubled man, guiding us to look instead of looking away.

Booth graduated from the University of Vermont and went on to attend the Juilliard School’s playwriting program. Primary Trust won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The writing is filled with funny observation devoted to a tender appraisal of the unusual and affecting character Kenneth. The conflicts are small, but the stakes are emotionally big.

The play’s structure is stylishly compact. Quirky details fill the text, so that a story told in 90 minutes is still saturated with emotional weight. In brief monologues that bookend action, Kenneth directly addresses the audience to share his thoughts. The play covers about two months of big changes in his previously routine life, enacted in many short scenes.

Wearing a bright plaid shirt buttoned up to the neck, Kenneth enters to introduce the play, himself and the small fictional town of Cranberry, N.Y. He’s nervous. He interrupts himself to start over. Actually, a small ding from an egg timer interrupts, a signal that we learn indicates a slight slippage of Kenneth’s awareness of time itself. Events repeat or elongate to include exaggerations that may or may not have actually happened. The jittery repetitions give us a chance to perceive as Kenneth does. It’s a jagged world, and memory doesn’t smooth out his experiences.

The anxious figure onstage keeps trying to share his story, an effort that draws the audience’s sympathy and concern. And our laughs, because Kenneth’s odd perspective is intriguing. He’s got a sad childhood, but he seems to have overcome losing his mother at age 10 and growing up in an orphanage.

Ever since, he’s sought a reclusive, repetitive life. He’s worked in the same used-book store for the same fatherly owner for 20 years, and he spends each evening at the same bar drinking happy-hour mai tais with the same best friend, Bert. Patterns help him cope, but they don’t help him make more friends. Only Bert can help Kenneth squelch his anxiety.

When the bookstore owner has to sell his shop, Kenneth’s life must change. That’s when he reveals that Bert is imaginary. He has invented the person he needs, and he needs him more than ever.

As solitary as Kenneth is, he is quite good with people, as a potential employer would like. He’s smart and skilled at surface interactions, which suits a job as a bank teller at Primary Trust. The bank manager takes a chance on him. The script contrasts the hollow language of customer service with Kenneth’s confessional narration to show how empty, and how full, words can be.

Director Jammie Patton uses space, sound and light to convey Kenneth’s perceptions. The set consists of almost life-size black-and-white photos of the streets of a small town. Desks and tables are black and white, as well, and flattened into two dimensions. These stylizations convey Kenneth’s sense of the world as facts without the living pulse of color or shape.

But he does see one place in full. Wally’s Tiki Bar is Kenneth’s haven, and its jauntily lighted bar, gaudy thatched roof, bright tablecloths and soothing yacht rock are all as realistic as can be. Here he can conjure Bert.

With a single major character and no intermission, Primary Trust places the demands of a one-man show on Delanté Keys, playing Kenneth. Keys glides lightly between withdrawal (into safety but also near-psychosis) and expansiveness (toward connections but also misunderstandings). He conveys unease with a stiffness that runs through every muscle, then softens into loose relief upon seeing Bert. Kenneth is comically unselfconscious. His words may take all the strength he has, but when he laughs, he draws happiness from a very deep well.

Two actors play multiple characters, another expression of Kenneth’s imprecise perceptions. Natalie Jacobs portrays the many different waiters at Wally’s. The staff may blur to Kenneth, but they’re distinct onstage, as Jacobs utters Wally’s welcome speech in accents warm or cool, Jamaican or mumbled, musical or toneless. One waitress, Corinna, connects with Kenneth and opens a little more of the world to him.

Mark Roberts plays two fatherly men taking an interest in Kenneth, plus one stuffy waiter taking no interest in anyone. Roberts fills these simple portraits with sharp details, such as letting a stiff drink startle him or puzzling a bit when an obviously troubled Kenneth is too distant to help.

Bert, the imaginary friend, is made beautifully real by Donathan Walters. His voice and manner exude the calm of a soothing waterfall. With a warm smile and a cap spun backward, Walters makes Bert the best of best friends, breaking into silly jokes or gently signaling to Kenneth how to respond to anxious moments. In a rapid montage of drinking scenes, Walters and Keys hilariously flash from emotion to emotion in a dizzy bit of revelry.

Vermont Stage’s fine production values begin with expressive costumes from Sarah Sophia Lidz. Jamien Forrest’s effective lighting marks almost every beat of the show, especially Kenneth’s memory variations, often rendered as big color soaking the sky above set designer Jeff Modereger’s black-and-white building façades.

The people around Kenneth aren’t deeply drawn, just as the streetscape is bare and contrived. It’s Kenneth’s decision to connect with them that brings them to life. The breakthrough in this story isn’t Kenneth’s sudden ability to master the world but our ability to see what prevented him from feeling safe. Hope rises, too, as the very vulnerable Kenneth starts to see the kindness around him, the kindness of people who are real and not imaginary.