GMAC Minutes 2.18.25 - Laserfiche WebLink

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With 458 hunters a total of 401 birds were harvested which equates to a slight drop in hunters’ success measured at birds per hunter. We went from point eight, point nine one to point eight seven. But we think that’s due to a lot of the new hunters who came out and didn’t have much success. One needs to know the area to hunt Kapapala it’s not uniformed throughout the ranch. You can go from one area with guava thickets, and then you drive a mile north and it’s different not very wide. A lot of the core hunters know where to go, where the new guys, who must figure it out to be successful. We had ten hybrid pheasants, and we had twenty-four chucker’s a hundred and fifty-eight (unclear) and most of the chucker’s and the, in fact, most of the pheasants and chucker’s were release birds. Some birds harvested from the release two years ago, so that’s good evidence that a lot of these birds are surviving. We saw some of the released birds from previous seasons in areas where releases are safety zones from hunting areas. We still see a lot of surviving. They are individually banded and color coded for years that we have released and when we are out there working, we see them surviving out there. So that’s a good sign for us. We had one hundred fifty Erckel’s Francolin. We had four (unclear) hens, and four turkeys get harvested. So, we had a pretty good season out there. Hunters are pretty excited for the releases. We have a bunch of new hunters, kids that just made of age in their hunting they got to share in the harvest. In our release efforts, our main target is to try and stop breeding birds out there. Breeding a lot of our releases in areas where hunters can hunt (unclear) in portions of the ranch. Ranch managers closed off the hunting for ranch purposes for safety reasons we closed off some because of high Nene traffic activities. We usually come from the highway so we focus our releases in those areas to try and make sure that birds can survive without any help. There’s a lot of water resources at the ranch so that helps with all the beautiful forage. Last year we released two hundred and twenty-one pheasants at Kapapala and we had a hundred and seventy-nine chuckers released in Kapapala. We also released two hundred and twenty-four pheasants up Mauna Kea and then they released eighty-five pheasants up Puuwaawaa. So that’s kind of it for our release efforts for last year. And those numbers include hens. We probably released half, if not a little more hens than we do roosters. As a summary, hens can be harvested during the inbreed season of pheasants. 6