2022_03_15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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on mapping regularly to look for new areas of dead ohia outbreak and then going in – finding those dead trees – trying to determine if rot is what killed them – we use drones – this is kind of a high tech thing but part of what we do with that is that we also provide support to the different researchers that are working on ROD – we will provide manpower for a lot of those research teams to, you know, help provide whatever they need in order to continue the research on rapid ohia death and just generally we do a lot of outreach and education so we’re really active on social media if you’re interested at all – follow us on Facebook or Instagram. We also have a You Tube channel now with lots of webinars on there – we do classroom presentations, um, we do a teacher/professional development – I just wrapped up a teacher/professional development a few months ago in rat lung worms so we teach teachers how to teach children about rat lung worm and try create a safer community that way, we do a lot of community presentation and some webinars and all the normal stuff, um, one thing, you know, just thinking about when I saw I was on the agenda for game species and like we don’t really do a lot with game species – but what in the past you’re thinking – well, you know, we had in the past – you probably heard that BIISC was involved with coqui back in the day and that BIISC was involved with the axis deer eradication back in the day – so what makes our field crews different from maybe a field crew that works of DOFAW, you know, NARS, watershed partnerships – is that we’re not tied to a piece of land – so we are not restricted by boundaries. We don’t have any land that we manage. The way that BIISC is unique is that we are really set- up to be mobile and move around the Island and we move around the Island to lots of different places – I’m using this picture while explaining this because you can see these folks are not in the forests they are on private property and a lot of our target species – we find them on private property so the way that we work to go after our target plants species is we get permissions from landowners to go in there – I noticed earlier someone was mentioning replacement plants – so that’s one of the things that we do if we’re working on private property and we remove a species we refill that spot with a nice native or non-invasive plant to make up for that loss and so this is something that we’re very poised to do is be sort of nimble and so in the past – just like I said – we do for rapid ohia death – BIISC has provided man power – we’re sort of readymade teams of folks that are trained to go into the field, trained to work in rough terrain, rough weather, trained to work with various equipment who can respond to things when there’s a new species that needs to be responded to – so we have in the past worked with eradication of newly found species but we don’t tend to work on widespread species generally. So that’s my wrap up on this – this is our group as of November and now I am happy to stop sharing and happy to take your questions. BL: Oh, Brian – District 4 – if nobody’s gonna pop up real quick, hey, I appreciate Fanny, thank you for coming and everything else and sorry for the confusion for last month. I guess our biggest concern is we see the word “invasive species” thrown out toward our game animals and it’s a word game, let’s be honest, and you say invasive species and everyone says kill it and that’s what we’re running into and we would like to work out – these game animals were brought here, they serve a purpose, they can fight fires they can save our forests and, I watched a, ah, I think you were on it too – the Puuwaawaa Committee the other month and, I was disgusted and horrified to find out that they’re trapping these pigs, killing ‘em and just dragging them in the forest to rot and they’re going on and on about how they’re invasive species, they’re filthy animals, they’ve got diseases and everything else and don’t get next to any of these things cause they’re destroying everything and, this is the perception that we’re fighting – these animals have value in the community, they were brought over first canoe and we’re trying to work with everybody and like everything else a rose bush and a corn is a weed… 7