2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 TN: With the devastation of the ohia trees all over this island with the ohia fungus that’s attacking it – has this hurt the population of our birds? I went to B.J.’s Friday lecture series at NELHA and his newest number is that we have 75% of our ohia native forest in Puna area around the island just totally decimated. Being that his numbers are so high will that affect the bird population? PB: Yes, really good question. Yeah, let me first say – my understanding of the ROD is that not 70% of the forest is devastated at this point but that may be happening in the future. However, I take your point, what has happened is extensive and it’s alarming and it does affect birds – ohia is the backbone of the forest ecosystem for most of our native birds – with a few exceptions – palila – you know, they don’t have ohia in the first place, but most birds are – ohia is very important to them and so this is cause for real concern – that’s kind of the short answer – I don’t tend to give very many short answers but there’s a short answer for you... TN: What is being done should the bird population become even more effective with this ROD that’s affecting all of our ohia trees because once the ohia tree goes then the forest canopy goes – once the forest canopy goes it affects the other trees, once that goes then the invasive species of weeds and bushes takes its place. So what is management doing? How will it affect your research work, all of this has to come into factoring into your research. PB: Right. I won’t speak for the whole researcher-management community but I’ll just mention a new project that we’re gonna be starting. We were successful in getting a small amount of money. We’re gonna be looking at plant hosts of caterpillars and the reason we’re going to be doing that is caterpillars are really the number one food for our native forest birds. As a general rule – they feed it to their off spring – it’s important to most of the adults too. And so just as an example at Hakalau where we examine bird droppings, We can find in the bird droppings – well the little mandibles – the little jaws, basically, of caterpillars are really the key thing for many species including the endangered ones and this is not like a real surprise. Caterpillars are important bird foods around the world – beetles and things are also important but our thought is – because we have very few native trees and shrubs relatively speaking – it’s important to know we identified three caterpillar – we don’t know the species but we can identify them just by their looks and we’ll try to identify them by species under this project. There’s only three at Hakalau that are really important and all the rest are eaten. Our goal is to figure out do these three caterpillars. Is the main host plant ohia or olapa? What are their host plants? We’re hoping that it’s not just ohia. If it’s 17