2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 happens every year. We were able to document that so we believe cats are an important predator. We thought mangoose might have gotten one next but it wasn’t a nest we’re not positive about that - we think rats probably do occasionally get the palila. We did not have documentation of that either with rat droppings or anything. We don’t want to forget that palila have native predators too – the pueo. The pueo will hit nests with chicks. It’s hard to document because they’re very, very fast. We had one person in a blind one day and he said he just was looking down for a moment. When he looked up, this pueo was just sort of flying away from the nest and it had taken the chick so there are predators – there are threats. Going back to weather – probably the single biggest factor in destroying palila nests can be just these big mountain storms. You just get a big rainstorm or even hail and you go out the next days and many, many nests have failed because the chicks got too cold or the eggs got too cold and wet. TN: I come to my question now with all these previous efforts of fencing an area to protect the palila bird – has the fencing method worked? PB: No. The fence doesn’t have any short term impact whatsoever. So we’ve been talking about short term threats and we have not been talking about the longer term threats or the medium term threats. It’s too early to say what impact the fencing has had or will have. Based on studies by Paul Scowcroft of the Forest Service, he measured growth rates of mamane. He said, it takes about 25 years for a mamane to grow to a 4 meter height – and that’s about the height that is valuable to palila. In other words – a small mamane, maybe a meter or even 2 meters high has some value. The birds use it a little bit – but what we found is the birds really use the big trees – the bigger the tree overall - the more valuable it is to palila. We’ve got a very slow growing tree in a fairly harsh environment where, it’s just gonna take decades and decades for these resources to become really very valuable. They become incrementally valuable every few years as they grow, but the value is diminished in any given year maybe by drought if it’s a bad dry year – the trees is not going to produce very many flowers or fruit pods - the value of that tree in that period of time is low for palila because there’s really not much food on it- there might be some caterpillars which are important... TL: Todd Lum was interested in the palila. One of the things that he told us was that the sheep were an impact on very small mamane trees. When you talk about a two meter tree, he said from two meters on up – browsing of mouflon is what he was talking about – wasn’t as serious a threat to the tree as it certainly was to younger trees. Do you agree with that? PG: That’s quite right, We’ve thought about the tree size issue quite a bit – if you’re a six, seven, eight meter high tree, browsing is only getting your very lowest branches – in fact – you won’t have any lower branches cause they’re 11