2023_08_15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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reduction. They really are talking – Targeted Grazing – Targeted Grazing right, because if you let your cattle cruise, they are going to go where the forage is - the best they want to eat all the candy and they are not going to go hammer the really dry and poor quality forage and I guest for you guys—for Big Island what we are talking about, we can get into the species, and that’s Fountain grass, and we kind of all know that like fountain grass, is not a preferable forage, really low nutrient quality. And so, my interpretation of this is that is kind of what we’re seeing, these dry and very dry, moderately dry areas that affect is pretty small. In other words, they’re not really hammering the fuels back in an effective way and so the catch here is we’re talking about is fire risk on a day, to day basis and by that, I mean, where are the fires most common? They mostly burning in these lower elevation drier sites. The other side of that, the flip side that, those stories that Miles would tell us about, where they were trying to make protection and those place that were burning, those were up in kind of higher quality habitat. And it speaks to this anecdotal experience, about, well when you’re in those areas where you have high quality native forest you probably also in these wetter areas where you’re going to have higher quality forage, and so again I think you’re also, going to also speaks to the fact that there would have been this affect, you fence out the area, you remove the ungulates you are increasing the fuel loads, especially in those wet zones and so if a fire does occur, which is the case, it’s not that they only occur in these lower drier areas, they are occurring at higher elevations, unfortunately as well. Impacting our remnant native forest, which again comes back to me, thinking about and it’s kind of a question to you all, is, are there ways that we can be more strategic with the managing wild ungulates? Because again, the grazing footprint is shrinking in Hawaii. Not again, I haven’t talk about this. The footprint of active ranch land is shrinking, you know a lot of these operations are on a shoestring budget, they barely making it, breaking even. And frankly we’re losing a lot of knowledge of how to work with animals on the landscape. That’s kind of my fear as far as looking at grazing as a tool. And yeah, kind of like, about to say I don’t think like, I’m not anti-anything, I think, all of these things provide opportunities, potentially to reduce risk and we’re seeing this week there is this dire need to use all the tools that are available to us. But I think the lesson here is that it needs to be more strategic, and in the areas like around our communities primarily where we see these big fire impacts. Like in Lahaina you would be in this space for example, right, and then you know the flip side, so uncontrolled population, you run right other issues, so for example the deer, Axis Deer, when you have just high, high, high, numbers among animals, you start running into problems, with the erosion, over grazing right, this is the same thing that happens, if you hammer a place with cattle you get over grazing which results, not only erosion impacts, but the other problems that we’ve seen in some of these over grazed pastured, is that grass becomes replaced with non-palatable species. So all of a sudden you have gazing as a tool, and then if you a hammer a place, and it gets replaced with something that you can’t actually graze. You are kind of stuck there. So, That’s what I have to share, I guess the other thing I just do this really quick if you’re interested into some of the evidence of targeted grazing, we do have this document here that we, worked on which is just sort about the idea of grazing as a tool you can find this at https://pacificfireexchange.org 10