2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 PB: We knew of about 65 individuals at that time and we knew there were some more but they were just in places we couldn’t easily get to. People would say, maybe a couple of years ago I knew a pair that nested over here. If we could get access to that area we’d go and check it out and find a nest or not. But at that time, it was very clear to us that things were unraveling for alala. The sixty-five known birds and only relatively maybe a dozen at most – other birds – that we never personally could account for but we had some confidence they were there. He said, wow, you know, this is pretty amazing – here is a species of crow which worldwide are relatively adaptable birds and this is all we can account for. And so this was one of my early lessons in credibility was that we observed first hand in true local experience of residents and it was very for us to be believed by official people because they would say you’re just not looking hard enough, you gotta go out and look and we continued to look, but clearly the evidence bore us out and within just ten or less years it was clear to everybody. In fact, there are not very many alala left. During that time, we started the captive breeding of alala or at least the captive population of alala. It was by accident – there was no plan for a captive population. It was simply when my dad would go out and this was just before I joined him in the field. In 1971, he found two young alala perched on logs or low down in the trees and he walked right up to them and they didn’t move. He thought, they must be sick or something – they don’t look injured – there was a nest nearby. He knew that they had come from the nest – and decided maybe what I need to do is I’ll grab ‘em – take ‘em to a vet – see if there’s anything wrong with them. But once you take a young bird like that it’s not that easy to give it back to its parents. But he thought they were basically done for at that point – which they well may have been – and it turned out that both of them had avian malaria, one of them died not long after being taken into captivity – it was decided since he had no means of keeping these birds or breeding them – he sent them back to the mainland at the request of his home office where they had a very large captive breeding program for Sandhill Cranes and Black Footed Ferrets in Pawtuxet, Maryland. The first two alala went back there simply because, while there was no provision for them in captivity here and then by the time I joined them – the next field season – we found three birds in the same kind of situation. Three young birds in different areas all on the Kona side and they were perched, yu’d just walk right up to them like I could walk right up to you. It was very startling and a little bit disturbing, - we took them into captivity as well under the assumption that they are also sick with malaria. There wasn’t any money in Pawtuxet for an alala program and so they said, do what you can – figure out something there in Hawaii. It turned out that the National Park Service decided to build some aviaries. At that point, the state became quite interested in breeding them. The birds were transferred to Pohakuloa and you probably know the rest of the story – then the flock was moved to Maui eventually and now it’s under management both on the Big Island and Maui. 4