2018-01-29 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – January 29, 2018 destroying the mamane forest habitat. That’s a photo taken some time in the 1970s and it indicated the browse line on manane trees – it’s about 5 ½ feet high – it’s as high up as a sheep can reach. So in 1979 the court ordered the State to remove all feral sheep and goats from the mountain. There was an additional remedy sought in 1987 a claim by the environmental folks that the Mouflon and Mouflon Feral Hybrids also threatened the palila habitat. So in 1987 the court orders all feral Mouflon and hybrid animals removed and that the State restore the damaged habitat. Essentially, all Mauna Kea goats were removed by 1988. There was recent incursion some years ago and they were quickly removed. Between the ten years 1987-1997 four thousand sheep were removed from the mountain and between 1998 and 2016 an additional 18,000 were removed and that was through several methods: public hunting, staff contract and aerial shooting. This is a graph that basically shows the removal of – again the data were extracted from those reports. The top line is the total number of animals removed – the red line is the portion of those animals that were removed through public hunting. So from 1987-2015 a little over 22,000 animals had been taken off the mountain. So what’s happening with the palila? The current palila population is concentrated on the southwestern slope of Mauna Kea near the Puu Lau area – the Puu Lau cabin. The population estimates are all over the map – a high of over 6,000 in 1981 and a low of somewhere around 1,000 in 2015. If you plot all that and I’ll show it to you – you can see that the trend from 1980-2016 is one of continuous decline or up and down and up and down but the mean is – the palila is declining. So these are some of things that I personally concluded from the data that I looked at which is half of all the animals removed from Mauna Kea were taken by means of public hunting – which is good. Mamane regeneration appears to have been largely achieved – I don’t know what you see when you drive the mountain but there certainly mamane is all over including the young shoots so whatever the current sheep population is, it presents to evidence of damaging the habitat. And this photo was taken a week ago – that’s my wife – she’s about 5’ ½” so she’s about the same height that you saw the browse line on the previous photo of mamane. There are some incidental occurrences – there’s no more grazing animals or essentially no more grazing animals on the mountain so the brush has increased which has the great potential fire – maybe a catastrophic fire – which would probably take the rest of the palila with it. This rampant vegetation growth has diminished productive habitat for bird hunting. I’m a bird hunter and I can’t hunt in areas that were formerly open for that. In spite of all the effort and costs the palila population continues to decline. Those remaining palilas are millionaires – each one – when you start adding up the cost of fencing the entire mountain all of the effort in eradication – if you drive up towards the cabin you see that new dip tank that was put it – I’m sure that was primarily for fire suppression on behalf of palila – it’s in the palila habitat. And the other things that – trapping that goes on – if you divide all that money by the number of palila I’m sure each one of those birds is a millionaire many times over. So what should be done? Here’s what I think should be done: 1) for the 10