2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 5. COMMUNICATIONS a) Budget Report to the Commission 2017-2018 was filed. b) Presentation by Paul Banko, US Geological Survey Biological Resources Division to share with us aspects of Conservation Bird Biology and success with palila and others. PB: My introduction may go a little long because it’s important for me to explain to you who I am and my background. I graduated from Hilo High in 1968. I got my bachelor’s degree in zoology and botany at the University of Washington in 1972 and then between ’72 and 1988, I was basically doing a lot of small time jobs for the National Park Service, temporary employment. Then I started graduate school and I’m kind of a slow kind of person so it took me a long, long time to get my PhD. My PhD was on the nene goose – biology – and mostly just focused on Maui and the Big Island and you probably can remember at that time nene were not nearly as common as they are now so it took me a while to collect enough data and then I was employed – believe it or not – I got a job working with the US Fish & Wildlife Service in 1988 and you may or may not recall that there was government reorganization in 1996. Our research group in the US Fish & Wildlife Service was put into the US Geological Survey so it’s just one of those things where you have no control over where you’re put by Congress but they decided that this reorganization was a necessary thing. I wanted to spend a little bit of time explaining how I got into wildlife biology – my dad, Winston Banko, was assigned to Hawaii in 1965 and his assignment was to figure out what is going on... PB: My dad’s assignment in Hawaii was to figure out what is going on with these Hawaiian birds that seem to be going extinct at a great rate. It was general and broad, but at that time, he was exactly one half of the workforce for US Fish & Wildlife Service in the Pacific. He and one other guy were US Fish & Wildlife Service in Hawaii and the Pacific. When my dad arrived on the job, there were literally a handful of people who could really tell him very much about any native birds. So he talked to those people but soon discovered that the heyday of Hawaiian bird biology was actually back in the 1890s – there was a lot of activity by British and American and other nationalities exploring in science in the 1890s. State of the art science was collecting specimens of new species – that was very important work and continues to be important today. Although in terms of vertebrates, most vertebrates globally are already identified – just occasionally you’ll hear of a new mammal discovered somewhere in South East Asia. But, the age of species discovery for vertebrates is largely over and the attention now is mostly on invertebrates – insects and spiders – there’s still a long way to go with that. He read the old literature from the 1890s and began to formulate some ideas. He was supposed to figure out what is going on with Hawaiian birds and there’s really nobody there to guide him in that enterprise – all the naturalists from the 2