2017-11-8 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – November 8, 2017 DS: David Smith, Administrator, Division of Forestry and Wildlife. We basically run a hunting program. The types of areas that we manage it’s gonna depend on how we manage the animals – so it’s species and the condition of the habitat. We can do a lot of really active game enhancement with game birds and game birds are a real important part of our program. We’d like to do anything we can to enhance game birds and for the most part we can manage a game bird program with pretty active enhancement program. I know game birds have been down for the last few years and that’s a concern. We’re really interested in running a top notch game bird program and especially Hawaii Island here is and it’s had a very good game bird resources and so we’d like to make sure that continues. NP: How is game management happening at the Kapapala Ranch? A Game Management Area Unit sign is posted. What game management is happening for the game birds at that ranch? DS: It’s not really a game management area – it’s a boundary sign, leftover boundary signs. They were put in areas that are available for public hunting – that’s not really a game management area. There’s a difference between public hunting and game management. Kapapala’s a really important area for us and we’d like to do more active management there – we’ve been tied up for a few years just trying to get the lease straightened out. There was an attempt to transfer that Kapapala lease to Ag – but we really wanted to keep it with DLNR because we would like to do game management there going forward. We think it’s a really important game bird habitat area. DS: It’s also a good forest management area so it’s a really important area for us and we’d like to be able to manage it going forward. We’d like to work in a cooperative fashion with the rancher and like a lot of these ranch leases – as the leases go out – we’d like to have control of those areas so that we could then manage them for forest resources and public hunting areas. NP: Right. Apparently, this is an important area for bird hunters also. DS: It is a very important area, so we haven’t been able to do as much work as we’d like to there – we would like to do more work there going forward. I would say that calling it a game management area is kind of a misnomer. JM: Joey Mello – East Hawaii Manager – the cooperative game management area name is that we cooperate with land management and Kapapala Ranch owners to open it up for game management. We try to do whatever we can to enhance the game bird population. So the game management area or the cooperative game management area part is more about the cooperation with the ranch and the landowner – which is our land agency in DLNR. 2