2020-01-14 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 14, 2020 of work we call it “national best practices” but other lessons or, you know, the grass is too high kind of things that we can learn from other places that have spent the money to study this area so that we don’t have to recreate the wheel to learn what we need to do to, um, improve this situation. KS: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been – I’ve read some papers and been to conferences where they do talk about those types of things – about keeping grass down and shrubs down, um, but we are unique in that our native resources – our drive the way that we manage, um, and then our number one priority is to protect the native forest and the native fauna within that forest and so sometimes those actions are not as beneficial to our forest, you know, so, just, yes, it exists – we are aware of ways that we can make habitat better for game birds, but a lot of that would cause maybe degradation of habitat for our native forest and our native animals. ?: Last one Kanalu – in Oahu they recently had one, um, pheasant release program – do you guys have something similar like one Kona side \[unclear\]? KS: No we don’t have anything like that. Oahu does it, I know Kauai does it, um, there’s a little pilot study on the Island and we are researching ways that we could possibly do it yet. ?: Cause that one too also get hunter volunteers too, ah? Cause one of my friends is on Oahu and he did that... KS: Yeah, Oahu and Kauai they use \[unclear\]. ?: ....he was in that program and so I seen ‘em. KS: Yes. ?: OK. NP: So one other question... So the game bird in Kaohe are all naturally occurring? KS: What’s your definition of “naturally occurring?” NP: It... KS: Yeah, I mean, they’re they got released, you know, fifty, sixty, seventy years ago or more – whatever it is... NP: Yeah, exactly, not recent... KS: And they are self-propagating, I guess... Or, yes, self-sustaining... 15