2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 truck through the mud underneath stuff, you're gonna for sure pick up fungal spores. The beetles are very small — they make like a pencil lead hole size — that's a picture of one of the beetles under the ear of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a dime — so they're very small beetles doing this. We all know the directions of the wind on this island — what goes off in Puna blows south through Kau and then up the Kona side — so we know that's what happens with the vog. That's also the pattern and the way this disease is spread. What do you call it when evidence is — circumstantial evidence — direct evidence is do we pick up actual sawdust with the spores on it in the air? So we set up last month — we're starting — cause they're actually using the stuff they used to make pollen counts on the mainland to see if here we're finding this disease. We're setting up testing across the island to see is that stuff actually moving. This disease needs some kind of wound to get into a tree. If it just lands on the bark it's not gonna do anything — it's not gonna go through the bark — if it lands on a fork and the dust accumulates on a fork — a fork is kind of a wound — as the tree grows up the bark gets stuck inside - that kind of is a wound. But the other kinds of wounds are things that people do. One of the important things is not wounding trees. These are three trees that were infected — all which we saw that had some kind of wound in the past — so the one on the right there you can see — it was on a driveway — someone banged it with the earth moving equipment. It was just too much weed whacker on the small one and the one with my axe was some, again some kind of land clearing operation — took a big piece of bark off and that allowed the tree to be infected, the beetles... TL: On the wounding - Yeah, we're hunters in this room and when you're out hunting use cane knives, machetes, whatever it might be to go through the forest — you might wound a tree that way — might take a shot at an animal — might hit a tree. What kind of an effect is that gonna have on you — with you folks? JB: OK, shot an animal I'm not worried about it — I don't think you're doing a quantity of that. I'm a forester so I move around the forest too — it's almost always chopping some sort of brush underneath the ohia trees — chopping into an ohia — the one thing that I would suggest that people really avoid doing is blazing where you are by taking chops out of trees. I used to do that as a young man — I'd go through if I didn't know where I was. I'd take a chop of a tree every now and then to find my way back — that's bad. We really shouldn't be doing that — there other ways to mark your trail — figure out where you are — than just taking chops as you walk along, cutting brush. If you're in a forest and there's a little ohia in the way and you chop it out — then you probably killed that tree anyway. You're not chopping at trunks of trees — what I think is the thing we don't want to do is take chops out of trunks of trees. Most of the time I'm chopping raspberry or clidemia 14