2025-09-16 GMAC Minutes Final Draft

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appreciate you folks for giving me the opportunity to present on this and appreciate your interest on Palila. LT: Oh, that was a fine presentation...Thank you very much sir for that presentation. That was a lot of information. First Leomana District 3, First, I just wanna say thank you we've been waiting to have you on for the past couple months, sorry for all the road blocks and the stuff that have popped a up...but thank you very much for the presentation. I'm just going to jump into what I've been thinking about and maybe you can talk about this, is the drought factors and in two thousand twenty (2021) we had that really big fire...across the island and I was looking at the Stats and report, I didn't see too much of a disturbance in population count and I wanted to get your opinion or your thoughts on the...how fires that big cannot affect the Palila count so much. BM: Yeah, that one is mostly just based on area. That huge fire, the smoke and everything probably had a negative impact on the birds, unless it destroys the habitat that they are in, it's probably not going to have a big impact on the populations. And so far, surprisingly we have been very lucky the area where Palila is found has been pretty resistant to fire. Even we've had some recent fires nearby that was started by PTA activities that got very close to Palila habitat and burned into some of the critical habitat area, but over the last several years, 2021 it came right up to the boarder of that big Parker Ranch fire came right up to the boarder of the forest reserve, but or by some miracle it didn't go into the forest reserve itself. So that's kind of the main reason why they haven't been impacted because their habitat hasn't been impacted by the most recent fires, however it's always a continuous concern. Historically a lot of their habitat has burnt in the past and Palila probably can never go back to those areas because the canopy is completely gone. So that's why it's super important to protect a lot of these canopy areas and to really control and keep down the fountain grass, and other invasive species that perpetuate fire. LT: Thank you and for my second question, I saw that you put the map up there with the voice recorders and that bottom boundary, is that bottom boundary line on top of the proposed release Pohakuloa land that DLNR has been discussing with the Army or do you have any of the Audio recording Palila recording equipment on the base actually or in the area? BM: Yeah... so that bottom back boundary...I'm trying to think.... I think that just where, unfortunately we don't have enough recorders to cover the entirety of the Palila core habitat right? So, the bottom area, is sort of kind a like...we extended down below where we had the lowest detection of birds, in the last five (5) years. Currently we do not have any recorders in the PTA areas, or the lease lands, that's mostly because we haven't had any detections of the birds for many years. That's definitely something we can look at and put a handful of recorders down to the extent of their range. If we do 16