2017-07-25 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawai’i Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 25, 2017 a dozen – you might count a dozen – you might count 20 – but what is the population really? It’s a very simple kind of concept – how many are there? And it’s the first question anybody ever asks of any endangered species – how many are there? And, yet, it is one of the most difficult to answer in any kind of credible way simply because they don’t line up for you? It just doesn’t happen. It’s not my particular area of expertise but there are people that also work at our field station that, that’s mostly what they think about – is how do we conduct credible surveys where there’s really two things we want: one is we would love to know how many are there and, yet, we know we’ll never know exactly what that is, just because the methods are simply too crude – it’s just too hard – and we also like to know – even if we don’t know exactly how many there are – if we’re consistent in our methods of doing the survey year-to-year – can we tell are they going up, are they going flat or are they going down, I mean, that’s really critical to know. My response is – I can never tell you how many birds there really are – I can tell you how many we estimate and have to bring in our statistician to go into great detail as to here’s how we generate the numbers. But just to walk through a scenario – we’re gonna do a palila count right now – where I’m sitting is a station and 150 meters down that way is another station and so on every 150 meters we’re gonna stop right here and we’re gonna set our timer for six minutes – and we’re just gonna be listening and I’m gonna be watching and turning around and trying to see what I can see and I’m going to be noting every palila that I detect and for that matter every other amakihi, elepaio, what have you – I’m recording every bird that I can. So right away you can say, well, that sounds good but obviously how do you keep from double counting. A bird is flying around, it’s moving, a bird is calling, you can’t even see it but you know it’s a palila. That’s the first level of complications is you never know. The best you can do is you train people to detect birds at a high level of accuracy and more importantly you get them together before you do the count and you calibrate and you say, we’re gonna do a silent count – everybody do their six minute count – we’re all standing right here – and then we compare notes and say, Tom, you counted six palila – the rest of us only got two. So you may be correct with your six but, it’s kind of herd mentality – it’s like well we’re all really just saying two because we think they were moving around. TL: Do you do this over a period of days like a week in the same transect? PB: Yes. It’s usually two people that go out. Usually, we’re training a person – you have one experienced person usually teamed up with a less experienced person and they both do the count. But it’s mostly – for the secondary person it’s just more training and building confidence in their abilities. We will go out roughly at dawn and proceed until about 11:00 in the morning. Typically, an individual will do anywhere from 12 to 15 of these stations six minutes duration and then just walking in between the stations. And then that transect 9