2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 browsed off. If you’re a one meter tree – chances are you could be completely eaten up – that’s not always the case but potentially you can be, so there’s a huge difference. If you’re a big tree, the impact is way different than if you’re a little tree. In the vegetation work – studies that we’ve done up there show that the average size to height of mamane, at least when we did the work in 2001 – was about 4 meters. It just depends on high the mouflon can get on that particular tree, but on average, probably only a ¼ to 1/3 of a tree that size is available to a mouflon – to a browser – that can reach up. So you can kind of just do the calculation. The tree is producing mamane flowers and pods all the way down to ground level – the branches that I’ve seen growing on the ground – I’ve actually even seen palila foraging essentially on the ground. NP: NP: Without the grazers, then the grass grows. The grass can get thick and it can smother the small mamane? PB: Yes. There’s fire fuel in the grass. When we were doing our vegetation analysis up there – we saw lots of grass even in areas where there were still lots of mouflon at the time. I don’t know what the threshold is – how many sheep would it take to graze the habitat to the point where you don’t have high fuel build up of grass but you still have good luxurious mamane for palila. NP: Can there be a population of game animals – grazers – mouflon sheep – that could co-exist and actually be beneficial? And one other question, I remember hearing the palila would pluck or pick from the ground sheep hair and put it in their nest. Wwhen the sheep were eradicated, they no longer could keep their babies warm that way. Is that true? PB: It’s true that they use wool and if that were an important issue that would be an easy one to solve because with or without sheep we could simply go distribute wool around and the birds would use it. They’ll use all kinds of things – the nesting material is usually sticks with grass lining and rootlets and things like that – it’s a very fine thing – and then the last thing they put their nest is lichen usually. NP: I also heard through that the helicopters eradicating the sheep and mouflon and whatever there was that they came pretty low and they would cause a lot of turbulence – the mamane would be blowing and the palila nests would be in distress. Do you think that could have caused some nest abandonment – the eradication process? PB: I think, hypothetically, I mean there’s lots of things. TL: National Park Service did a study ’84, ’85 – the lower level of Mauna Kea being devoid of palila because of the noise of the helicopters and they also cited up at the national park situations where helicopters were causing birds to leave their nests at the national park and so the National Park Service 12