2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 TL: How do you find these bones? PB: It was Joan Aidem, an amateur archaeologist from Molokai. She was at the Mo’omomi Dunes and noticed bones sticking out of the petrified sand and started to take interest in that and then pointed experts toward it. They said, that it’s amazing. It was just a treasure trove of ancient Hawaiian bird bones in these sand deposits but they also collect in the openings of lava tubes where there’s a sky light – birds fly in and can’t get out – maybe get disoriented – flightless birds. In Hawaii, there was about 8 species of goose- sized ducks that became flightless as well as flightless geese, in fact, the nene was probably the only native goose – that could fly. There was a very large version of the nene – that was clearly flightless based on the bones of its wings and it couldn’t possibly have flown. It was found just on the Big Island. This is another wrinkle in the whole odyssey of being involved in Hawaiian wildlife. If you start with certain assumptions and what you can read and what people will tell you – it’s really only a slice of the picture when somebody discovers all of a sudden. Here’s all these bones of species we know that prior to the arrival of western culture of Captain Cook – about half of the Hawaiian bird species had already gone extinct probably because of the rat that came along with the first Polynesians who settled the islands. Also, some of the flightless birds probably tasted really good – really easy to catch – that could have explained some of the mortality. One just never know what discovery is going to completely shift your opinion about things so with this - the knowledge of the prehistoric bird community which was twice as big as it was when Captain Cook arrived. My dad became very interested in reading the literature and learning about the birds that had become extinct just in the last couple hundred years. He had this perspective and he handed that off to me of the history and then when this prehistory came along – it’s like boy this changes everything about so many preconceptions we’ve had about Hawaiian birds and habitats and so forth. What good is that knowledge now – let’s say in the case of palila. We know historically that palila is just found at the higher elevations on Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa on western Mauna Loa and Hualalai, but bones of palila have been found in coastal sites on Kauai and O’ahu. They have not been found on Maui which is kind of surprising but – and it doesn’t mean they weren’t there. A lot of bird bones have been found and discovered on Maui and none of them so far have been palila. So in efforts to conserve palila – you have to keep in mind, this bird evolved with these upper elevations as part of their habitat. They also had a lot of these very interesting lower coastal elevations that they lived in and so are we gonna be able to restore them there? Not likely, because where would you do that? The coastal areas are pretty well-developed and we don’t really know what the coastal forest vegetation looked like even a few hundred years ago, much less maybe a thousand years ago. One of the lessons is that where you find birds today – is not necessarily the best place for them in an evolutionary sense. If you could get in your time machine and go back – 7