2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 1890s and a little bit later had moved on or had passed on. He checked with museums – looked at museum specimen labels – so every time a naturalist shot a bird as a specimen – they would record where they were and when they shot it and then it would go into a museum and some of these specimens were many, many decades old by the time he began to look into ‘em and see what he could learn just from the little piece of paper that was attached to the specimen. For example, in Kaumana – O’o has been collected back let’s say in the 1880s, he began to compile a catalogue of where Hawaiian birds had been collected and when and by whom and that began him on the path to going to these places now. At that point sixty to seventy to eighty to even 100 years later and say well is this species there now? And most of the time he would find, they’re not. But a lot of his time was just spent educating himself on where are the birds, what they look like, what they sound like, how do I detect them and how do I connect the historical abundance and distribution of these birds with what we see today. He spent a lot of time at the Bishop Museum, for example, looking at specimens, reading accounts, talking to whoever he could about Hawaiian birds, Hawaiian plants and Hawaiian insects. And then it occurred to him – he was getting a little bit ancy because he’d come out as a wildlife biologist and wanted to be in the field – not so much in the museum – and that led him to come up with an idea that, you know, everybody knows what a crow is – or almost everybody does – so why don’t I talk to the residents of the island about where are alala – the Hawaiian crow. That was kind of his first species to really focus on and at the time we didn’t call it citizen science – but that’s what it was. PB: He started looking at alala about 1969. At that point, I was in college so I wasn’t close on his heels at that point, but when I graduated with my bachelor’s in 1972, I joined him in the field. I came back to Hawaii without really any plan of my own for employment but he needed help. At that time his budget was really, really tiny. He didn’t have an official vehicle or anything, you know, it was just sort of a boot strap operation so for room and board, I was his assistant for a while and it was very gratifying for me – it was great to have him as my mentor – his modus operandi was to contact anybody who would talk to him – landowners, ranchers, cowboys, hunters – basically anybody who would go into the forest or who had been in the forest and ask them what is your recollection of alala when you were growing up – what is your recollection now – where would you advise me to go to find them. And slowly, this little network of information began to grow and he met very helpful people – George and Margaret Schattauer were particularly useful to him and very, very accommodating and helpful in pointing him here and there to talk to people about crows and find crows on his own. And I joined him in that and that’s how I got the bug – the wildlife bug – we’re going out – we’re finding alala – finding nests and learning what we can about their behavior and distribution... TL: What was the population like of the alala in 1969? 3