2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 NP: Do you think that they knew- by killing the banana poka that the i’iwi were feeding on the banana poka? PB: They knew. NP: This population will die back because we’ll kill the banana poka but native species will fill in and then the population will come back up the road... PB: This is exactly the thing is that if you’re only thinking of i’iwi you may or may not decide to kill banana poka – but if you’re thinking at the forest level – OK – we want a native ecosystem to be functioning – i’iwi are part of it – akiapolaau are part of it and so on then your calculation may be different because you’re saying well, am I only interested in i’iwi or am I interested in the whole forest bird community or the whole plant community and if, banana poka is smothering areas, which frankly, Piha was pretty bad – you got to think, OK, if we remove it, it could have some negative effects on i’iwi and maybe some other birds. Overall, we think maybe the positive effects out weight. NP: You didn’t know about the rapid ohia death. PB: Right. You never know what’s coming around the corner. Banana poka is a very rich nectar source. It’s a different quality nectar than ohia. It’s very rich – it’s very high in sucrose and birds love it but they don’t require it. I’ll point out a study that was done by a PhD. Student at University of Hawaii, Manoa and what she found was she put radio transmitters on i’iwi at Hakalau and then watched what happened and what she found was a lot of birds going down in lower elevation to areas of ohia and poka but mainly ohia during the non-breeding season. Not all birds – but some of the birds that she pegged went miles down Laupahoehoe area – fled some of them for several weeks and then came back up home to Hakalau. Other birds stayed at Hakalau. She found that the birds that tended to be successful nesters tended to stay at Hakalau but if you weren’t successful you were more likely to go in search of better foraging grounds cause you didn’t have as good a territory at Hakalau as the top birds had. These birds when they go down to the lower elevations are at risk of being bitten by mosquitos that are carrying avian malaria. It was probably a good decision to go after banana poka because I think it was really smothering a lot of native forests and in the long run again, If you look at the short term it might be different than if you looks at the long term. If we’re looking decades ahead and saying poka could be really, really smothering the forest and in the end all we’re gonna be left with is a lot of poka then a lot of species that are depending on other native plants in Piha could be affected by that. 19