2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 at least a year – kind of learning the ropes but staying on the edge of the parents’ territory – very deferential to the parents – don’t get in the way – probably help with the upbringing of their younger siblings and they’re produced year by year until they find their own territory and acquire a mate. If you drive that kind of a population down to low levels, you may expect that it’s gonna take a long time for things to build up. A lot of these species are extremely slow in terms of our lifespan. It wouldn’t surprise me at all that if we could fast forward the movie we might say, oh, the alala finally starts to get going maybe in fifty or sixty years from now. You can also reflect on the nene – the nene has been a conservation focus in Hawaii since the 1930s. Around 1935 the Territorial Legislature told the game commission at that time – to do their first approach with nene and distribute birds that they had already in captivity from people like Herbert Shipman and others – there were several individuals and families who had tame or semi-captive nene. These were distributed to wealthy landowners and people who they thought would take an interest in them and adopt this species for restoration. It was not a bad idea - it just didn’t really take off and it wasn’t, of course, until the late or about 1950 that birds were sent to England. Also Herbert Shipman’s flock became kind of the real focal point for conservation of nene and the real turning point for nene. They had terrible success in breeding them in captivity and which for a goose it’s not that hard to breed a goose in captivity. *But nene they just had tremendous issues getting production from the captive birds and probably it was because they were so inbreed that it just led to a high rate of infertility and low hatchability of eggs so – what happened was seven individual nene – either in the form of eggs or goslings or a few adults that hunters simply encountered by chance and there may have been a more concerted effort to look for more birds but my recollection is that hunters were involved at least in one or two instances of bringing in this wild stock – the last of the wild stock or some of the last of it and that really revitalized the captive breeding program and so, you know, it kind of got over this genetic bottleneck and things really began to take off. And now it’s quite simple and relatively easy to breed nene in captivity but it was a genetic problem, but again, it took decades, really of just lots of hard work by a lot of people to move this thing from very close to zero to maybe a few dozen and then, you know, maybe a few hundred and after a while they were able to release a lot of nene – you may remember the big releases in the 1960s especially where hundreds of birds were released annually in various places on the Big Island and also on Maui at Haleakala. So your point is though, that there are some species that are going to be – many species, actually, that are gonna be extremely challenging to bring back into any kind of abundance and some of them I’m sure we’re gonna find can’t be done. The po’ouli on Maui is an example that was discovered in 1972 as a species at least by western science – we don’t have any information as to whether Hawaiians knew of \[unclear\] there are I believe bones of po’ouli elsewhere on Maui that suggest that it was more widespread before western times... 6