2023_02_21 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

you are familiar with the different ungulate species that we have – but we have different assemblages of them on different islands, um, and so I’ll kinda go into a little bit about each – maybe highlighting a few of these – I’m kinda highlighting the maybe problems with them or the issues of managing them and how that species biology might affect the way we manage them. And so, starting off with feral pigs, um, is probably the most easily recognizable ungulate in the Hawaiian Islands, originally brought over by the Polynesians about 1,000 years ago and then there were subsequent introductions of European pigs, um, with the arrival of Captain Cook and post European contact, ah, and now our pig populations are kind of a hybrid between Asiatic pigs, um, European pigs and domesticated swine. They’re present across most of the main Hawaiian Islands, um, being absent from Lanai and Kahoolawe. And then many of you are probably well aware of, you know, they are game species actively hunted throughout the Hawaiian Islands and they have kind of present this challenge in terms of management – because they’re simultaneously considered an invasive species as well as an important game species, um, and one of the reasons they’re considered this invasive species is because of this kind of rooting thing behavior among other impacts that they have on the environment. So here’s just a couple pictures that we picked up over the years in our survey efforts. Are people mentioning Axis deer throughout Maui Nui as we are well aware of the issues that they raise there, um, you know, pretty numerous populations of largely throughout private land and public lands over there which presents a number of challenges in and of itself of being present across those different land boundaries and so there’s a few clips of Axis deer – this is a small herd that we picked up on a private landowner’s property on Maui. And I say a small herd cause here’s a video that was provided to us by Maui Nui Venison – they do these aerial floor surveys using infra-red. And so I’ll play this real quickly here, it plays, um, and so if you look – each one of the white specks here in a minute will be an individual Axis deer and so this is also on a private landowner’s property, um, and you can imagine the difficulty in managing these game species being a single private landowner – having this many animals across your property and from a hunting perspective it’s difficult to access them if they’re largely on private land. This is a couple of minutes, I’ll let it play for 30, 45 seconds just to give you an idea of how many animals there are across this one small area. Yeah, so all of those white dots are each individual Axis deer and this is on Maui. OK. Feral goats, I’m sure most of you are familiar with goats being on the Big Island their presence across most of the main Hawaiian Islands similar to pigs being absent from Lanai, Kahoolawe and Niihau. And same thing here, they occupy different areas than the deer, um, largely high elevation areas, um, in dry areas – here’s a few clips of them browsing some vegetation on Kauai. It’s one the reasons but look at these different ungulate species they occupy different areas – when we look to manage them – I heard people talking about game management and conservation management and removal and things like that – it gets challenging because from a legal and the State’s standpoint they’re bound to manage these animals as both an invasive pest species and a game species and so they’re legally mandated to have, you know, conserve and protest our native ecosystems while at the same time maintain a viable hunting program and you can think that’s pretty challenging because the management intervention that you do for both of those things are very different so if you’re in a game management area your management for these species is very different than, you know, a natural area reserve, for example, and often these areas are right adjacent to each other and so there’s kind of this conflict in terms of management objectives and management interventions. And this was kind of like the driving question around our research that we’ve been for the last 6 or 7 years now – is how, can we look at these challenges and how can we produce data to better achieve or better provide data to inform the decisions surrounding these two different objectives and two different mandates. So, early on we kind of looked at it and we kind of sat 14