2014-10-27 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes —October 27, 2014 trapping mongooses, wild dogs, which benefit all wildlife, native and non- native — so I just want to make sure they get some recognition as well — in wildlife conservation, it's not just the specialized groups. So my presentation today is on the future of hunting in Hawaii and particularly it will be focused on game mammals —the game birds aren't particularly being attacked in the idea of environmentalism, in a sense, so I'll be focusing there. Got a few pictures here of interest. I got a little girl — the future of our hunters are with the youth and also the future of our wildlife conservation and the lands that we are supposed to be taking care of is contingent upon people being involved in the outdoors, people that care about the land. It's not particularly the folks sitting in a condo who never get to come out here and see these things. The people most interested in protecting what we have are the ones out there. Another thing I have is — you see an iiwi bird there — it's one of my favorite birds in the native — native birds here in the forest with its nice red plumage and of course we have the hunted animals that we hunt. Got a feral sheep there from Puuwaawaa. And I just want to make an interesting note that you know a lot of folks will say that sheep don't eat fire weed — that's a little bit of short sighted thing because that sheep is munching on fireweed and she munches on fireweed for about half an hour. Selectively picking on fireweed, moving from fireweed to fireweed patch instead of eating the kikuyu that was right next to it. So just something I wanted to throw out there. Moving on —why am I here? Because the state public game mammal hunting in Hawaii will end. So that sheep you see in the picture? You're not going to have anymore public hunting of that anymore. It's kind of a bold statement but I'm gonna try and justify why that is. So game mammal hunting will end. Statewide we have about 900,000 acres of public hunting lands are available with over 700,000 acres on Hawaii alone. This is a statement given by our Chairperson William Aila on a testimony before the house committee on Water and Land. This is somewhat true; we do have a lot of lands that we hunt on. But I want to go into the details of why this isn't completely true and of course is our friend red iiwi there — all these are pictures I took myself so... You're gonna have to bare with my photography. So it's a map of the public hunting areas on this island of Hawaii. Most of you guys probably know all of these, you can see it's quite a lot of area, I mean 700,000 acres potentially. What I'm gonna do is you're gonna see how these lands are disappearing over time and why. So I'm going to overlay a few things. The first one is — let's talk about some of the places that are already fenced and are under eradication. So, of course, we have Mauna Kea —which is a big blue area on the map — I'll use the screen on the left of me here and an indicator with a pointer— so the blue area — or course we all know the palila habitat the eradication since 1979. And of course we also have in Pohakuloa which the 4