2017-08-22 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – August 22, 2017 I like the principle of Wildlife management which is based on solid biological information. It must include management of humans because our activities affect wildlife. Good wildlife management must benefit plants and other animals – not just one species of wildlife. When we look at a place to manage animals – we have to look at all the wildlife there. Good wildlife managements put animal numbers at a level we can live with – not too many and not too few. Good wildlife management must balance animal’s numbers with a habitat – food, shelter, water and space – available for those animals. That’s always been a big one for me. I raised animals for many years and that’s the frustrating part because we talk about hunting and we talk about preservation and so forth, but I have always used the words before that the animals – they need a sanctuary too – they need someplace where they can go and rest too – otherwise they’re constantly under hunting pressure, constantly being eradicated from here and there and there’s no place for our game animals to take a break too, so, other than some management strategies by closing certain areas and things like that and then that falls back to some of Ryan’s concerns with poaching - that these animals don’t get a chance to rest because people are sneaking in there doing whatever. And then finally, a good wildlife management must balance conservation, wise use of the resource – not total preservation non-use of the resource. And that’s been my biggest thing and it’s on this list and I think that’s what kills us here is we kinda lose that between conservation and preservation. And I don’t know what we can do about it – I don’t have an answer for that but interesting are wildlife management tools – management plans describe the tools that a wildlife manager will use for keeping wildlife within the current capacity of its habitat. These plans must be flexible since the wildlife populations, habitat factor and social tolerances. It’s also important to note that the best wildlife management plan often uses a combination of all the management tools available. And I know we talked about it in the past – if it’s dry years or if it’s wet years, you know, our wildlife managers don’t necessarily have the opportunity to adjust for things like that and I don’t know how we can help them with that. To develop a management plan – wildlife managers must collect good information on habitat and wildlife numbers throughout the year. Every year they determine the type of tools needed. And that was my question to Robert Kramer – the State Commissioner there – if on a state level – that in the past I was able to get like for Mauna kea I could get the hunter hours and hunter success and so forth – that kind of information is available but what I’d like to see is the department put something more comprehensive together – I mean being that we’re losing a lot of areas to hunting within these 900,000 acres that we have to hunt – whether it’s Kipuka Ainahou – Mauna Kea – and the species – I would like to see a more comprehensive report of that. Cause I’m sure that’s changed a lot now – the amount of people that are hunting versus the success if they’re actually out there, you know, how much people – I know a lot of people that don’t go hunting now cause there’s just too few areas and there’s more restrictions 5