Formed by underground dikes – deep walls of basalt that cut through softer volcanic rock — Makaleha Spring on Kaua`i pumps out an amazing amount of water that feeds the island’s eastern watershed. The spring is one of six known habitats for the endangered Newcomb’s snail. It is also home to the koloa, or Hawaiian duck, and other more abundant native stream fauna such as `opae (shrimp) and `o`opu (gobies).
Mike Kido, a researcher with the University of Hawai`i, and biologist Adam Asquith are eager to see the spring and more than 2,000 surrounding acres added to the state’s Natural Area Reserves System (NARS). Designation would protect the spring from being tapped for drinking water – a fate that was proposed for Makaleha Spring a few years ago and which has already befallen a lower spring that now provides water to Kapa`a and Wailua.
The reserves are managed by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife and overseen by a commission of 13 members, representing the state and scientific, hiking, and hunting communities.
At a January 29 meeting, the NARS Commission voted to consider proposals to include in the system Makaleha Spring, Kaluanui Stream (Sacred Falls) on O`ahu, and extensions at Hanawi and Kahakuloa reserves on Maui. If the proposals are approved, they then go to the state Board of Land and Natural Resources. And should the Land Board approve, the next step in the process of designation is public hearings.
Established in the 1970s by Governor John Burns, the NARS was intended to preserve in perpetuity relatively untouched state areas that support native flora and fauna or which are important geologically. To date, the NARS includes 19 reserves totaling 109,164 acres. Several new candidates were identified years ago, but the process to get them approved has crept along at a snail’s pace.
The new proposals are the first in years to approach review by the Land Board. The fact that progress is finally being made is encouraging to most NARS staff and to conservationists, but is sure to strike dread into the hearts of others, especially hunters. They have become in recent years a vocal group with unswerving, constant demands for access to these protected areas and have often challenged the ability of NARS workers to carry out many of their duties. Adding to their difficulties is the fact that the entire NARS program is sorely under-funded.
With the Natural Area Reserve System strapped and its staff exhausted, the prospect of adding more reserves raises the question: Can the state handle any more?
Guarding A Treasure
The Natural Area Reserve System is like an open treasure chest. It includes some of the state’s rarest species and unique biological, historical and geological systems. The only thing that stands between these treasures and would-be plunderers is a handful of guards — dedicated and skilled, for the most part, but poorly armed.
The state’s support for its Natural Area Reserves averages $11 an acre. Compare that to the $271 an acre that the Army pays to manage native ecosystems on its O`ahu training areas, the $122 an acre available for Haleakala National Park on Maui, the $66 an acre that goes to support privately owned areas participating in the state’s Natural Area Partnership Program ($44 of which is paid by the state), or the $56 an acre that goes to manage lands in the Hakalau National Wildlife Refuge on the Big Island.
To fend off threats to the mesic forests of Ku`ia on Kaua`i’s west side, and the valleys, streams and forests of Hono O Na Pali to the north, the state spent $85,000 last year. That works out to about $17.76 to manage each acre in the two reserves. Last year, Maui NARS staff spent $100,000 managing 20,073 acres – under $5 an acre. On the Big Island, the figures are worse yet: $120,000 went to manage its eight reserves totaling 81,935 acres including such diverse landscapes as rainforests, ice-age rock formations, and recent lava flows; that’s $1.33 an acre.
O`ahu’s reserves fared the best of all last year, with an average of $48 an acre spent on the 658-acre valley system at Pahole in north Wai`anae; 1,100 acres at Mount Ka`ala, O`ahu’s highest point and home to some of the rarest plants in Hawai`i; and the 12 acres of coastal dunes at Ka`ena point, where north meets west and Laysan albatross and the endangered Hawaiian monk seal can often be spotted.
According to a recent report by the Mid-Pacific office of Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, less than 25 percent of land within the NARS is fenced or actively managed by the system’s 19-person staff. “This amounts to one staff person for every 5,745 acres,” the report states. “Volunteers, including environmental organizations, the Youth Conservation Corps, and hunters, assist in management, but limited staff and volunteers cannot protect the NARS as envisioned by the Legislature in 1970.”
Because of limited resources, Kaua`i NARS managers have said they do not want Makaleha Spring or any other area added to the system. The biological resources at Makaleha are not worthy of NARS status, they add, noting that the surrounding forest is full of invasive alien plants. Still, Kido and Asquith argue that the spring is worth protecting for its aquatic resources alone, while the alien vegetation could serve as a buffer to protect the aquatic system.
O`ahu reserves are overall the smallest (1,770 acres). Yet last year, the state spent the most money-per-acre on their management. Its small Pahole reserve is the most intensively managed NAR is the state, says NARS staffer Talbert Takahama. But even on O`ahu, things are tight.
As O`ahu NARS manager Brent Liesemeyer told the NARS Commission, a reserve at Poamoho, which has been a candidate for years, would only be “a NAR on paper without more resources.” The terrain at Poamoho would make fencing difficult, he said.
Scant resources also have Maui NARS manager Bill Evanson in a bind. At the `Ahihi-Kina`u reserve, which is rich in marine life as opposed to forest life, “Guys are enforcing outside their expertise. A streamlife conservation biologist would be best [for aquatic NARS], but we don’t have one yet,” Evanson said. Makaleha Spring would have the same problem if it became a reserve, he added. Kaua`i NARS manager Galen Kawakami’s background is in forestry.
Despite the difficulties, Evanson is all for adding new reserves.
“Like the other guys, I don’t want any more work than I can handle. But putting [new reserves] on paper is the first step. We’re not going to get more money if we don’t have more to protect. If it comes to not protecting or protecting, I’ll protect it. To hell with the problems. I’m confident issues that arise can be addressed. I recognize the need to protect more rather than less.”
Support Sources
Whether NARS will be able to protect more – or, indeed, whether it will be able to continue managing what it has at current levels – depends heavily on more support from the division that administers NARS as well as on funding from the Legislature.
The Natural Area Reserve System was established in 1970 but did not get a program manager until more than two decades later, in 1991. The DLNR’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife, which manages state forestry efforts, hunting, hiking, and watershed management, has not taken much interest in NARS. Some within the division have called the program an “unloved stepchild.”
Evanson, who used to be a resource manager at Haleakala National Park, says the park had 20 people to do same job he now does for the state with two dedicated positions.
“The state is not very aggressive in their work,” he says, and it only undertook NARS “because it was forced into it. The Fish and Wildlife Service was dangling money [in front of the state] for fencing. Even then, [the state] did it reluctantly.”
1992 saw the peak in NARS funding ($2.5 million), much of which went to pay The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i for studies. Ever since, funds for the system have declined. Last year, the Legislature allocated $1.2 million for the NARS.
This legislative session several bills have been introduced to secure permanent funding for the system. House Bills 1518 and 1165 and Senate Bill 1301 would dedicate 50 percent of the conveyance tax (paid when property changes hands) to the NARS, which would otherwise go to the general fund. Two other bills, House Bill 1163 and Senate Bill 1437, would dedicate 3 percent of all state appropriations for capital improvement construction costs to the NARS, in a manner similar to that used to fund the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts’ Works of Art Special Fund. These proposals were identified last year by the DLNR’s NARS Funding Working Group as a means of obtaining adequate, dedicated funds for the system that would allow long-term management actions to be initited.
“To be successful, natural area programs generally require long-term commitments of both people and resources. Reductions in the NARS operating budget over the last five years have impacted the ability to protect Hawaii’s native ecosystems,” the DLNR informed the Legislature in a January 2001 report. “Funding for the NARS, as with other natural resources programs in the state, has never been sufficient to meet the Legislature’s various mandates to DLNR. For example, NARS budget has shrunk to 41 percent of the 1991 allotment.”
Betsy Gagne, executive secretary to the NARS Commission, says the system needs three or four times the financial resources it now has. “Everybody is tired of running in place,” she says. In addition to maintaining fences and access paths, conducting surveys, removing ungulates and alien forest predators, and eradicating non-native plants, NARS people organize weekend volunteer trips and community working groups.
Rear-Guard Battles
Hunters add to the difficulty of managing and expanding NARS. The number of hunters is relatively small – roughly 10,000 – but their political clout is disproportionately great. This has led some conservationists to complain that hunters are “holding hostage the rest of the land.”
“Face the council — not that you’re in the hot seat or anything,” pig hunter Thomas Lodge told Mike Buck at a Hunters Advisory Council meeting held February 3 near the Arizona Memorial. Hunters from across the state – and a sprinkling of staff from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state DLNR – had gathered at a small set picnic tables near the ocean to voice their concerns to state and federal officials.
As head of DOFAW, a division where some staff works on enhancing the population of game mammals on state land while others work to try to reduce it, Buck is often in the hot seat when addressing either hunters or environmentalists.
“Pressure on the federal government regarding native species issues is going to increase, increase, increase,” Buck told the hunters. “When you compare how rare Hawai`i’s rare species are to [those on] the mainland, they’re so rare, [pressure to protect them] isn’t going to end. Fighting the process is a waste of time.”
Arguing for the preservation of game mammals “is tough,” Buck told the hunters. “The science is clear” that ungulates threaten native species and ecosystems.
Hunters have long fought projects to fence areas within several Natural Area Reserve units, rare plant habitat at Pohakuloa Training Area, and forest bird habitat within the federal Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, all on the island of Hawai`i. They forced the state to tear down a pig fence erected in the Pu`u O Umi NAR and were behind a proposal, denied by the NARS Commission last year, to remove a large chunk of land from the Pu`u Maka`ala NAR – again, all on the Big Island. Many environmentalists think that hunters were responsible for pulling out endangered plants and vandalizing fences in other reserves. Hunters also halted temporarily the state’s aerial shooting of pigs on Moloka`i, arguing that the meat was being wasted. And it took years of fighting before the DLNR was able to resume aerial shooting in selected areas.
To Gagne and others, the hunters’ concerns about losing prime hunting grounds are bogus. Altogether, DOFAW has responsibility for 800,000 acres, with roughly one acre in eight falling within the Natural Area Reserve System, she notes. More than half a million acres of DOFAW lands are available for hunting, she adds. Even if the reserve system acreage doubled, it wouldn’t come close to what hunters already have, she says.
“People are used to going where they want to go,” she says. “People don’t see the big picture.” Referring to the important function natural areas play in recharging aquifers, she adds, “People don’t know where their water comes from.”
In a NAR on the Big Island, she says, a large amount of fresh lava was included. Hunters complained that it was too big, not realizing that a good portion of it was barren, virgin land, unsuitable for hunting anyway.
Hunters often talk about how pigs and sheep control fire by grazing on invasive, fire-prone non-native grasses. At the February hunters meeting, one hunter called the eradication of sheep on Mauna Kea – undertaken under a federal court order to save the endangered palila bird — a “cruel” act because it increases the risk of fire and, some hunters claim, further endangers the palila. (The argument has been rejected by the federal court on more than one occasion.)
The state has proposed using cattle as a means of controlling wildfire fuel, as cattle are more easily controlled than sheep. But hunters say their game animals are better for the soil and roots since they are smaller than cattle and step more lightly on the ground. In addition, they say, cows pull up whole roots, while pigs and sheep nibble only the tops of the grass. As Ziegler notes, however, the hunters conveniently ignore one of the logical implications of this argument tilting the field in favor of the cows: “If the problem is non-native, fuel-loading grasses, it would be beneficial for cattle to remove the entire plant, roots and all.”
Upon hearing the hunters’ arguments, Gagne clamps her hands to her face and shakes her head. She’s heard every theory in the book offered by hunters on the virtues of ungulates.
One question they ask all the time, she says, is, “`If ungulates are so bad for endangered species, why do they seem to occupy the same area?’ Endangered species may exist where there are many ungulates, but they are declining. They say it must be some type of symbiotic relationship, but the science is clear on the effects of ungulates.”
Hunters also stress their love of the forest and many say they would never participate in its destruction. One of the hunters Evanson works with uses hunting trips to keep his boys away from drugs and in touch with nature. “I don’t want to stop that,” Evanson says, making a point that protecting selected natural areas need not be incompatible with hunting elsewhere.
In the past, Thomas Lodge has worked with a Big Island organization that plants koa seedlings and silverswords on the Big Island to help boost their populations. Although he’s also active in the Big Island pig hunters association, Lodge says he’s not always thrilled with the animals.
After one koa planting, he says, he returned days later to see his saplings strewn all over the place, trampled and eaten by hungry pigs. The purpose of his reforestation efforts is simply to help the forest, he says, and is not a ruse either to create more habitat for pigs or to boost numbers of native species. Still, he and most other hunters are not so protective of the forest as to accept fences or snares in NARS or any other forest preserve.
Hunting is a big deal to Lodge. He is a professional hunting guide and has organized the last two statewide Hunters Advisory Council meetings. Lodge says fences increase the concentration of animals outside the protected areas and accelerate degradation in those unprotected areas. And while he agrees with conservationists that especially pristine or unique areas should be ungulate-free, he and turkey hunter Mike Peeters say those areas are rare.
In fact, Lodge says that some of the NARs should be delisted because they are degraded, while others should be more actively managed.
Fighting NARS is “strategically stupid,” Buck has told the hunters. “They’re not suitable for public hunting. The big battles are the forest reserves. Fight NARS and you’ll lose.”
Lodge says, “I don’t think anybody wants to fight NARS, aside from expansions and those areas that aren’t pristine.”
Making Strides
While Buck says hunters will lose their fights against NARS, strides that hunters have made in other areas suggest some accommodation with natural areas is possible.
“In the past, we regarded the Fish and Wildlife Service as opponents of hunters,” hunter Wally Heyer said at the February meeting. But two years ago, when the 7,100-acre O`ahu Forest Refuge was being established, Heyer visited the then-head of FWS with concerns that the management plan prohibited all hunting. After some negotiations, the plan has been relaxed to include hunters. In its latest version, the plan allows hunters to participate in pig control. Other methods include snares, toxicants and sterilants.
Heyer said he made similar headway with The Nature Conservancy’s Honouliuli preserve, also on O`ahu.
“Early on, TNC used to be regarded as somewhat suspicious. They favored eradication. All animals present after 1760 were to be eliminated,” Heyer said. “We never regarded TNC as being a real supportive association.”
In long-term protection plans for the preserve, TNC will fence less than 100 acres of sensitive areas, where it will pursue eradication. Outside those areas, the plan says, hunting will be employed to reduce the ungulate population to a low level.
Including hunting in the preserve’s plans is a big change, Heyer says. Getting in early on these things and providing reasonable alternatives beats an “us against them” situation, he adds.
Evanson agrees. When he walks into a store on Moloka`i and comes face to face with a hunter, he wants to be able to smile and shake his hand, he says. After working tirelessly with hunters on that island, “We now get along great. It’s not pigs sheep and goats that are the biggest threats, it’s our attitudes [that] are biggest threat to resources.”
Comparative Funding for Managing Native Hawaiian Ecosystems
Landowner: O`ahu Training Lands, U.S. Army
Cost: $271
Source: Pers. Comm., U.S. Army Staff
Landowner: Haleakala National Park/ National Park Service
Cost: $122
Source: Strategic Plan for Haleakala National Park FY 2000-2005
Landowner: National Area Partnership Program (NAPP), State and private landowners
Cost: $66
Source: NAPP Legislative Report 1999
Landowner: Hakalau National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Cost: $56
Source: Pers. comm., U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff
Landowner: Natural Area Reserve System, DLNR
Cost: $11
Source: NARS Legislative Report 1999
Building Bridges
Hunters feel shut out. Conservationists feel they’re on the losing end. What’s to be done?
“The bottom line is that we have established a peacetime war movement, the environmental movement. We don’t have an attack on Pearl Harbor to get behind. We need a cause,” says Bruce “Ka`imiloa” Chrisman, a Big Island hunter who attended the February meeting.
Fish and Wildlife Service staff in attendance sought to get beyond that confrontational attitude by soliciting specific questions or concerns hunters had about the science behind current management practices. Send us a list of them, FWS biologist Steve Miller asked.
The NARS staff has also worked at bridging gaps between the hunting and conservation communities by organizing working groups on Moloka`i, Maui and the Big Island.
“It takes little time and money to address hunters concerns,” Evanson says. “Once we start working, they’re not so unreasonable.” He talks about the issue of retrieving the meat from goats killed by aerial shooting on Molokai. Evanson uses a hunter on board the helicopter as a spotter and meat retriever.
“If animals are killed in terrain where they’re able to be retrieved, we put the hunter down and he hooks a line to the animal. The time spent doing that is small when compared with benefits. The costs were thought to be too much until we tried it. It was not until we were forced to work together” that he realized it.
Some environmentalists are also willing to work with the hunters whenever possible. “We need to find areas where we agree and work from there,” says Ziegler. “For example, on Kaua`i, closing state parks occasionally to do park maintenance and such also provides an opportunity for public hunting without risking public safety. Animals would be taken from or chased out of sensitive native areas, such as the reserves, and would move into game management areas at lower elevations. [Federal] Pittman-Robertson funds to the state could be used to support this kind of win-win situation.”
Still lacking is strong state leadership to tackle the tough issues, including assigning priorities to the many and varied objectives within DOFAW’s conflicting programs. Hunters and now Mike Buck have used the term “global planning,” which is their ideal plan where state-managed land is broken up into areas managed for different purposes – for example, zones where no ungulates would be allowed, zones where hunting would be allowed to continue at present levels, and zones where populations of game would actually be increased — provided that everyone agreed on the science.
Drawing lines on maps where game management will and will not occur is the biggest obstacle to solving the management problem, Gagne says, adding that in the NARS, “we don’t have the leadership or the spine” to do what needs to be done. “We’re so worried about hunters. Bill [Stormont] is tired. [NARS Commission Chair] Linda Pratt and Jim Jacobi [a botanist with the U.S. Geological Survey – Biological Resources Division] are tired of spending their nights at meetings where they hear the same arguments. Both sides think the other is unreasonable,” she says.
“We realize that there is no way we’re going to save it all. The only way it’s going to fly is if [conservationists] give up areas where there are few endangered species to game management, so that the rest can be better protected,” Gagne says.
This may prove difficult since she says the “plant people” are just as bad with disagreeing with each other as the conservationists are with the hunters. “At least the hunters agree with each other,” Gagne says.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 11, Number 9 March 2001
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