2017-11-8 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – November 8, 2017 TL: I’d like to make that distinction that we have an official designation called game management areas. When I say it’s not a game management area, I mean that it’s not officially designated as a GMA under our rules. In Kapapala or any cooperative game – like Kahua Ranch and Puuwaawaa there may be others on the island also – when you talk about the management part of it – what are you allowed to do on a cooperative management of state land. What can DLNR do or DOFAW do as far as enhancement to the property? Who actually controls that property? JM: It all depends on the agreement between the land agency and the lessee and ourselves – we come to agreement – we can do more on agricultural land than we can on conservation land. We have in the past when there was no question about the lease and we have the ability, we cleared several hundred acres in the past in Kapapala and then the landowner cooperated by putting cattle in the area that we cleared to help keep it cleared but over the years that’s been overgrown. DY: What does Game Management really mean for you guys? Enhancement is one thing but do you have a structured program say for mammals of going in and saying, ah, this parcel is going to carry X number of animals – that’s the carrying capacity. We want this kind of animal on there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I see very little of that so when I hear reference to or the use of the term game management it all sounds very nice and structured and ordered and controlled but I’m not really certain that I understand what that really means. And over the years I’ve sort of come to the conclusion to my own conclusion – it’s my opinion – that there is very little game management going on. I would like to know how the department sees that whole area called game management. This is in keeping with HCR 22 which came out a year ago. I haven’t seen much of that. Unless we get a definitive statement from the board, I really don’t know what that means. I would like to have that clarified. I’d like to see a plan drawn up. DS: We can do really aggressive game management for game birds – it’s hard for us to do aggressive game management for animals. Our focus is more on maintaining a public hunting program. Now a public hunting program isn’t necessarily the same category as game management. You may, you may not, but it’s gonna be a real active game enhancement program. What we’re trying to do and what my focus is on providing as much area as possible for hunters to access and to provide us as much access as possible for hunters. We have a bunch of resources to manage and our primary focus is actually on managing forests and a lot of these animals are extremely destructive in forests. We just have to be careful how we manage them – so in some ways we’re managing impact and so we’re looking at the resources as they occur on the ground and we’re looking at the animals that are there and we’re 3