2018-09-24 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – September 24, 2018 once it’s infected and showing some signs of stress will being to emit ethanol and other chemicals and the bugs find them. They’re attracted to that. They get in there – they begin to bore and they put out boring dust and it’s called “frass” which is their excrement, basically, and that has the fungal inoculam in it and can get picked up by the wind and carried and we – like I said – there’s still a lot we don’t know – these are things that we’ve learned along the way in the research that’s gone into trying to understand this fungus has been – is helping us drive our management and what I wanted to come this evening to share is that sometimes – well, what we’ve seen in our sampling on the Island – expecially in wet areas of our forest where there are a lot of very large ohia trees – sometimes forest users will have a practice of using - - putting blaze marks with a machete on ohia trees and we’d like to ask the Commission and the members of the hunting community to share that that can be a cause for a tree to become infected with Rapid Ohia Death and I have some sets of pictures and I apologize for not putting it more – develop a PowerPoint presentation together for you but I will – I have some images that are taken recently – this is off of Stainback Highway in upper Waiakea. And so I simply come this evening to ask and we know there are a lot of different forest users – hunters are among them – there are maile pickers – there’s people picking Kakumon for other uses in the home – and for a variety of different reasons with – we know that hunters are among those who are in that forest and we would ask that the Commission ask the different community members in the hunting community to consider curtailing this particular behavior cause it can be the cause of an infected tree. And so the more we can do about that the better – is simply why I come to ask and share with the commission and ask that it be encouraged that that practice be curtailed, so... TN: I have a question Tom. Please have the speaker explain to me what are blaze marks. SB: Blaze marks are – what I’ve seen done is when folks are walking through the forest so that they can identify the trail that they’ve used to get into an area they’ll take a machete and they’ll put a mark – they’ll cut the bark off of a tree – and leave a mark. So that’s when I say a “blaze mark” that’s what I mean and they – I’m sorry – I don’t have – I’m not sure if there’s a way we can project the images to them... TN: How do you know that hunters are doing this? SB: I don’t. I’m saying that we know there are a number of different kinds of users in the forest and I do know that hunters who I know have done that in the past – but that there are others there – I’m not trying to point fingers I’m just saying that that is – they are among the users of the forest and I”ve seen that practice in the past. 10