2020-01-14 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 14, 2020 intervals don’t overlap – would suggest that that’s probably a true number – that there are more birds in the spring than the fall. On Mauna Kea the comparatives intervals overlap – sorry, I’m not very good at explaining statistics but I do know that, that means that they’re not statistically different from each other enough – but they only overlap a little bit so it would suggest a trend that maybe that there are more birds in the spring than in the fall – so something I would be interested in is to find out if those numbers are true and if we would need to adjust any kind of season because of that or why? Why are there more birds in the spring than in the fall? In the spring we did our surveys in February so right after the game bird season was done, um, Kapapala did theirs’ in March so, some questions that I have as a result of this project. So this one, sorry, I jumped the gun a little bit. This is the one where the researcher combined all of the information into one graph which I had questions about and I’m not sure why he did it that way. Another thing that he did that I would need more time and I would like to, I guess, analyze and assess it – why he didn’t include all of the birds for just a general – these are the density of game birds – it doesn’t matter if it’s urkel, franklin, what – this is how many are on the mountain and then after that parse it out into urkels and, well urkels are the only ones so that was something that I wanted to see and I’m going to talk story with him and try to find out. So I don’t have answers for that yet, um, but these density estimate numbers are basically what we’re seeing in that table before about how many birds there and then the last slide – so those – I mean, I kinda talked about it a little bit but my conclusions are - species specific density estimates require larger sample sizes, which require significant increase in manpower so I would kind of assess whether that’s worth it or not, I mean, for us, like I said, for one season there was 300 hours of staff time and then 80 hours of volunteer time to get information that was close – it was almost good – but I needed just a little more surveys with hunting dogs did result in higher counter rates so it was more effective to find birds and to get a good density estimate with the dogs \[unclear\] quite a bit more and we talk about – I’m interested why the difference in fall and spring – why are there more birds in the spring than there are in the fall and so we need to check that out and then I would like to examine alternative statistical analysis, ah, maybe using camera traps at the water units, um, or also what I said about combining all of them to get a general game bird density on the mountain. Doesn’t matter if it’s urkel or pheasant or what – those are kinda my conclusions of the project. The project for me, um, it was fun to go out and count birds and to follow the dogs and watch the dogs do their job – that was cool – and to get a few hunters excited to help us out, um, but it was a big task for information that might not be – is not as good as we would like and for how much manpower it took to do – we got to reassess that in my opinion. NP: Well, how much do you depend on hunter harvest reports? 9