2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 Currently, there are 112 birds in captivity divided between the two islands so the program has grown but it’s been quite slow to get there. TL: There are a lot of people that love the alala...this episode that we had recently -really pained many people. There’s quite a bit of criticism about that program and it brings me to wonder, certain animals - at a certain point in their existence are going to need constant care and it sounds to me like the alala is one of those species. If you want to perpetuate this species – it will have to be in aviary or where the public can come and see them number one – when they go out in the wild you’re not going to find them number one. As a scientist you know how to look for them, you can’t find them – people aren’t gonna see them, but it’s a way to keep these things going on and on and I’m just wondering if that wouldn’t be a better path for the success of this bird – if you want to keep it around forever – it’s virtually extinct right now? PB: Sure. Well it is extinct in the wild. And as I say there’s maybe 112 birds in captivity. Your point is well taken and I think it hits on a real common issue or a central issue in conservation biology, which a lot of conservation biology focuses on rare and endangered species that’s almost by definition that’s what it’s about – it’s not exclusively about the rare species but it’s largely and historically has been and my dad’s - own professional history started with the Trumpeter Swan in southwestern Montana. He knew all about working with very rare species – where at the time the Alaska population wasn’t well known and it wasn’t known how large it was and it was just thought, at least in the contiguous forty-eight states. TL: They went from almost zero to like 13 or 14. PB: Yes. His colleagues were working on Whooping Cranes which were down to the last dozen or even less. He spent a very short period of time on the Desert Big Horn Game Range in Nevada. He was working with endangered species. And the common thread with endangered species work is they’re endangered for a number of reasons. One of the things that predisposes a species to becoming rare is that one, they’re not a prolific breeders. Their natural breeding system is on the slow end of the scale compared to rabbits or rats or things that we recognize are kind of fast breeders. Many of them are specialists either in terms of what their habitat requirements are or their food requirements – now the alala doesn’t quite fit that mode, I wouldn’t call it real specialized and I wouldn’t call it particularly slow breeder but its social system is, I think, contributes a little bit to its rarity, because they’re an ohana bird. The basic social unit is the family. We don’t know what they might have – how they might have behaved and occurred two hundred years ago when there presumably were a lot. By the time we caught up with them, it was clear that they were very family oriented. The young stay with the parents for 5