2019 02-12 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – February 12, 2019 game –it takes so long – I’m looking for other solutions to try to work through that and then this is always the hard one but we’re trying to identify lands that we can turn into cooperatives – that don’t have the strict rules of forest reserves and stuff. That’s gonna boil down to lease lands and see where we can get with some of those as far as at least making cooperative – I’ll tell you right off the bat – cooperative bird hunting areas are more palatable to a lot of lessees – I don’t know why but that seems to be the way – but we need more places to hunt mammals that are not gonna be offensive to people trying to preserve, you know, just areas that may be already degraded and stuff that we can still have active hunting and managed hunting. So I’m trying to identify some of those areas and then areas where we do have animals I’ve noticed that we don’t have a lot of good data for how many are there so it’s hard for me minus what I see in the field I can’t really tell you – so I’m trying to start a more – a little bit better survey methodology so I can figure out what’s out there. BKK: What’s the preference of the survey? IC: Preference? BKK: Like preference is how you would take the survey? IC: Ah, right now it’s down and dirty fastest ones are aerial surveys for mammals. We started doing game birds surveys in Kapapala on foot – the same methodology that they did on Mauna Kea this last fall and they’re gonna do this coming up week, I think. So for game birds we’ve been trying to do – we’re doing ‘em on the ground, obviously, cause it’s hard to see ‘em from a helicopter but, um, for game mammal – at least in the open country we’re using helicopters. It doesn’t work in forested areas, you know, for pigs and stuff but there’s – it’s actually really hard to survey for pigs. BKK: And based off of your past assessments – do you think they’ve increased, decreased – the same? IC: We haven’t been doing it long enough. BKK: No? IC: We haven’t been doing it long enough. Yeah. If we do, um, see an increase or decrease I hope it’s because – if it’s a decrease I hope it’s cause we’re allowed to hunt some of ‘em but, um, it doesn’t always work that way. We’ll see what happens. TN: At legislation I heard Representative Nicole Lowen be bombarded with calls that these ungulates – goats – are now on private property – have you received any calls of the complaints of goats being in private area like Pine 17