Hunting in Hawaiʻi

What does hunting really mean in Hawaiʻi—and why does it matter more than many people realize?

In this episode, we head mauka to explore a side of conservation that’s often misunderstood. From early mornings in rugged terrain to the deep cultural roots of subsistence living, hunting is more than a pastime; it’s food security, ecosystem management and a way of life.

Join DLNR Game Management expert Nick Vargas and lifelong Lānaʻi hunter Stan Ruidas to unpack the realities behind the practice: how hunting helps control invasive species, feeds local families and connects generations through shared knowledge and experience.

Whether you’ve never set foot on a trail or you’ve seen hunters disappear into the backcountry and wondered what drives them, this conversation offers a look at the people, purpose, and kuleana behind hunting in Hawaiʻi.

Transcript

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 [Music]

 Patti Jette: Aloha and welcome to Hawaiʻi Conservation Kuleana, brought to you from Hawaiʻi's Department of Land and Natural Resources. I'm Patti Jette, and we're here to explore conservation issues from land to sea, with expert insights and stories from the field.

 Stanley Ruidas: Something that is really known but not really repeated, is that Hawaiʻi has a two week supply of food. If the barges were to stop coming in, we're done in two weeks. So these animals will help sustain life in Hawaiʻi. We got a lot of natural resources that we can depend on, and that's what they did in the old Hawaiʻi. So, you know, no one in old Hawaiʻi depended on a boat bringing food in. Right now, we're so dependent because we're the lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and everyone comes to us for resources.

 Patti: Today, we're talking story about hunting. It's a vital food source for local families and plays an important role in managing and protecting our ecosystems here in Hawaiʻi. I'll admit, this is a topic I know very little about personally, but I like to eat what the hunters bring home. With me today to educate us all about hunting in Hawaiʻi is Nick Vargas, DLNR statewide game program manager, and Stanley Ruidas, who represents the island of Lanaʻi on the Game Management Advisory Commission. Aloha. Okay, so first of all, I think we should say, for anyone who doesn't know what is the Game Management Advisory Commission?

 Nick Vargas: The Game Management Advisory Commission, or GMAC, serves as an advisory capacity for the Board of Land and Natural Resources, which sets policies for the department. They are gubernatorial nominees. They get they get processed through the state legislature. They get nominated by any of their representatives for each of their islands. And they form a commission for hunting in Hawaiʻi. And so what they do is they serve as an advisory commission. So anything hunting related topics that come up in the news whenever we have game rule changes, or just topics that show up that are just related to hunting, usually, we want the game advisory commissioners to be able to be like our advisors, or our connection between the public and the and the state. The GMAC commissioner is just like Stan. He represents the island of Lanaʻi. So whenever they whenever we host GMAC meetings, he will talk with all his with his peers, all his hunting peers, and get information, get updates, anything related to like the hunting seasons, or how the animal populations are doing, and then he'll bring that up in each of our GMAC meetings that we host.

 Patti: And Stan. What about you? How long have you been hunting? You know, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

 Stan: Oh, man. I've been hunting since I was nine years old. My dad taught me we were bird hunting. Well, that's almost like 50 years, 47 years. And growing up on Lānaʻi, you know, hunting was a must, you know, if you want to survive there. The animals that we hunt was mainly for subsistence, not much as you know, for trophies, birds, you know, a lot of birds. We used to have pheasants, Chuckers, quails and turkeys. You know, growing up on Lānaʻi, that started my my craziness for doing anything hunting. You know, I've hunted New Zealand, Wyoming, Ohio, you know, for various animals, besides Hawaiʻi and all over the state. I guess I had fun doing it. And, you know, we get to eat the meat. So that's the bonus.

 Patti: Yeah, how often do you go hunting now when you're home?

 Stan: Well, you know, I really, I'm real busy. So luckily, if I go once a month, it's probably, realistically, about every other month.

 Patti: Like I said, I don't know that much about hunting, but I have gone hiking and the trails and the places that you hunters go, you guys are crazy. There's nothing like I mean, I'm in some sort of standard hike, hiking trail, but hunters will go everywhere. It's amazing. You guys are tough. So what are kind of the main animals that we're hunting statewide here. What are, what are the most common, I guess?

 Stan: Shall we do it by Island? 

 Patti: Yeah, that's okay. 

 Stan: So Kauai has black tail deer, and I think they have pigs, and what's the other one? Goats, yeah. Goats, yeah. And then coming down to Oahu, more pig hunting. But they do have goat hunting. Going to Molokai, they have, well, they have an assortment. Because some of the Molokai Ranch, back in the old days, their animals got loose and, you know, they populated. So there's some animals out there at Molokai ranch….

 Nick: They have Black Buck,

 Stan: yeah, and it's black and Axis deer and and goats. I'm not sure about pigs. I don't think so there is some yeah? Yeah. And then Maui has goats, axis deer and pigs. Lānaʻi, we have mouflon sheep and axis deer. And on the Big Island, they have pigs, goats, feral sheep, mouflon, as far as like the game, game mammals. And statewide, it depends on which island they have the various birds.

Patti: How common is trophy hunting versus subsistence hunting?

Nick: I would say that Hawaiʻi gets a mixed bag of different types of hunters, right? Hawaiʻi definitely does have an appeal for the types of animals that we have here that are able to be hunted, just like Stan was saying, we got deer, sheep, mouflon, pig. One of the more intriguing things is that we're open year round. Basically, you can hunt Hawaiʻi year round, and a lot of the different units are year round daily. So I would say a lot of the hunters take an opportunity for more of just the, the the ability to be able to hunt, not necessarily trophy hunting as much. There are people that that do hunt specifically for like, oh, they want to get a big ram or they want to get a big axis buck. But for the most part, I would say just getting out there, getting the opportunity to be able to hunt these animals, is probably more of the appeal and harvest, harvesting the meat.

Patti: And more so it's residents who are doing the hunting, instead of visitors. Is that accurate or no?

Stan: I think a lot of out of state people are catching on to what we have in Hawaiʻi; mainly before we had on Lānaʻi, you can have hunters from like three generations hunting at one time. So it's more like a bonding experience, more than, you know, just just hunting itself. Yeah, we've been seeing a lot of out of state people coming because of the weather, you know, they want to in the wintertime, like now, you know, trying to get away from the cold weather. The public hunting in Hawaiʻi that the state does is really cheap compared to if we were to go to the mainland and hunt. So that's why it's kind of popular for out of state people, even even though they have to pay the airline, airfare, rent a car, or, you know, stay at a hotel, it's still cheaper for them to come here and hunt. And plus, they can bring their wives and leave their wives at the spa for the whole day and go hunting.

Patti: So it's cheaper. How for because of the licenses? Or…?

Stan: yes, yes. 

Patti: So what, what types of hunting are kind of allowed all the time, open season? What is prohibited? When I know that's a long that could be a long story, because there's a lot of differences, and it depends on the island. But what's kind of some of the basics, like, can you just come here on any island and hunt a pig at any time, or no?

 Nick: So coming, coming to Hawaiʻi, essentially all a hunter, either a resident or a non resident, they what they need to do is buy a hunting license, right? Hawaiʻi hunting license, even prior to that, if they don't, if this is like their first time, they got to get their Hunter's education. So they get their Hunter's Ed, they get a number, and they're able to use that number to buy the hunting license. From that point, they're able to choose whether if they're going to hunt game mammals or game birds or both. So they can buy those stamps for their hunting license all at once. So say that a hunter buys everything right, game mammal and a game bird stamp depending on which Island, this is where it gets kind of complicated, where, depending on the island, each island has hunting units that cater to different hunting seasons, means of take, even the game species that are available in each unit. So I can give an example on Oʻahu. So say I got my hunting license and I got my two stamps and I got them July 1 of of this year. Say that we're going in the future right now, right? So I get my hunting license July of 2026, I can use that hunting license all the way until next year, June 30 of 2027 so I'm able to hunt. I'm able to go hunt in any of the hunting units on Oʻahu or even the other islands for that whole entire year. If I go to a hunting unit like Unit C Waianae Kai, I can hunt goat and pig year round, daily, with any means of take. So, firearms, archery, dog and knife. So just depends on the hunting unit. Really, there are other units that have seasons. So say that I wanted to hunt birds. You can only hunt birds from November through January in the state, there are special seasons depending on certain like dove species, where the hunting season will start in October and end in February. But for the most part, like the general game bird season is from November to through January.

 Patti: And where these birds come from, because, I mean, it's pretty it's pretty funny when you see a pheasant like running across the street or something you know, up in the woodlands. Where do they all come from, all these birds?

 Stan: The birds were established in the 1920s and throughout the years, people been importing birds, raising them. Some birds wouldn't take to the climate, like the northern Bobwhite wouldn't take but the pheasant, depending on what species, I think all of them can take the season changes over here. Basically Hawaiʻi, we have only, like hot hot season or cold season. So you know birds, you know they really survive on grass, seeds, insects, whatever they can forage for. And throughout the years, I guess they accommodate their habitat to what they want to eat. I think for us on Lānaʻi, we seen a decline after the pineapple plantation closed up, because that was a lot of food. And, well, you know, pineapple is good for the birds and the insects, and they used to keep it short, so the birds would have a lot of vegetation to eat. And it was, it was also a lot of rainy seasons, not like recently, we had, you know, a lot of drought seasons, so the birds can't forage for food that much. On other islands, they got all kinds of different species. So every island is different. As far as what game birds you can hunt, there is a pamphlet that DOFAW puts out for for hunters, and it's pretty interesting, what kind of animals, or what kind of birds that they can hunt in the Big Island versus, say, like black francolin, like Lānaʻi doesn't have black francolin, and then, like the Big Island has this kalij pheasant, which is a nice pheasant with a long tail, and you don't have, .ou don't have that any anywhere else, I think.

 Nick: yeah, there, there are some, there are some, Oʻahu.

 Stan: Yeah, so I guess every island got a little bit of each, yeah. 

 Nick: There's a mixed bag. Yeah, yeah. Even the state, we have special programs where we work with volunteer hunters, where we raise game birds. 

 Patti: Oh, okay

 Nick: I believe Stan, you told me too, you used to raise, 

 Stan: Yeah, I used to raise game bridge for this Palawai Outfitters in Lānaʻi, and it ranged from chuckers to quails to turkeys, pheasants, you know, all those used to be part of this outfitting that they had on Lānaʻi. And then it closed down after a couple of years, the state has made a program where, you know, it started on, Oʻahu I think was that -

 Nick: It didn't start on Oʻahu. It started on Kauaʻi, but it definitely kicked off, yeah, more after, after Oʻahu got one, then Maui and then Hawaiʻi Island, everyone started getting game bird rearing program set up. 

 Stan: It's a really good program for bird hunters, or new bird hunters. Just want to get involved in raising the birds, because it's really interesting. I say we're bringing in day old chicks, but I used to raise them from incubation and for a little kid to see the chick, you know, peeping out and, you know, breaking its shell. That's something that they wouldn't forget until now. They say, Hey, Uncle, you know, I remember going to your house and seeing all these baby chicks. I said, Yep.

 Patti: That's so interesting that we're actually bringing in and introducing these species. And it's not all just a bunch of feral animals that are running around that we're hunting here. I kind of assumed it was just all ferals, that it wasn't intentional. So that's interesting. Why is that like, why are we doing an intentional like, raise and release?

 Nick: We're able to do this just because the game birds don't really have a niche that impacts any of the native species or the native plants, we're able to put funds for these types of programs, so that way, you know, we're able to work with the community, work with hunters, especially now we're developing these projects to where we're working with the schools, setting up game bird rearing projects there, and the students are raising the birds for for hunters and we're hoping that that will start, that'll start the students getting interested in hunting. And then, you know, it just, it just, it's like a perpetuating wheel, like, we get new hunters, new recruitment for at the younger stage. And so they want to go learn about game bird hunting, or, even if they're not about game birds, maybe, like, oh, I want to learn how to hunt a pig, or I want to learn how to hunt a deer. So, yeah, this program is, is pretty interesting. We it's, it's probably the best program where volunteer hunters, students, anybody that's interested, can handle wildlife. A lot of the stuff that we do in the conservation side of Forestry and Wildlife. It's, it's kind of hard, right? You got to have training how to handle native birds. You got to have training how to handle native plants, and a lot of the times like, you don't want the general public to mess with these types of things. So with these game resources, the game birds, we can have students, you know, grabbing a pheasant and loading up in a transport box and then releasing it into a hunting unit till the next weekend. They can probably go hunt it with their parents or their friends or anything like that. So it's a pretty unique project.

 Patti: Thatʻs really interesting. Now, how else do you learn how to hunt if you're not going through a school program or something like that?

Stan: Traditionally, it was someone's uncle. Someone's dad, someone's uncle, someone, some family member. Now you can be an expert in five minutes on YouTube. (laughter) You know, basically, you know, hunting, in Hawaiʻi, the best way is to teach them, teach them when they're young. That way, it instills their values of hunting, and that's the best way to train someone that wants to learn. But there is people that you know don't pick it up until they're they're in their adult life, they figure out that, oh, maybe subsistence hunting is what they want, you know, something that is clean from hormones, antibiotics and that sort of thing, from mauka to makai. How the aina provides. This is what the aina can provide, and we already have our ocean, so it kind of connects everyone to their natural resources. 

 Patti: What's your favorite thing to hunt here in Hawaiʻi?

Stan: It has to be deer, because we have a lot of deer. And, you know, the deer, it tastes real good, can make a lot of dishes. And growing up on Lānaʻi, everything was, you know, deer. We used to have goats, but that was probably eradicated back in the late 70s, because we had only one watershed, and that would tear up our watershed. So they got rid of those the goats, and now we only have axisdeer and mouflon sheep. You take, if you taste deer from anywhere else, you can tell the difference. Maui deer tastes different from Lānaʻi deer. I think, I think it's because of what they what they eat, you know, their diet, yeah, yeah.

Patti: Do you hunt with dogs, or no?

 Stan:  Dogs are not allowed on Lānaʻi to hunt with.

 Patti: Oh, okay, okay, because I do have questions about dog hunting. I don't know if you like,

 Nick: I do. 

 Patti: How does that whole process work? How does somebody, like, train a dog to even do that and everything and like, how does that I see guys. I obviously see the trucks, and I see them, you know, going off into the wilderness or whatever, into the woods with the dogs. But how does it actually work? 

Nick: I don't have experience with pig dogs. However, I feel like I only talk about bird dog. I have a bird dog myself. I go bird hunting, and I have an American Britney, so I got him as a puppy that I did a lot of YouTubing, a lot of training on YouTube, and just getting pointers from there. A lot of my pointers too are just like Stan was saying, is, like, from my uncles over here that introduced me to bird hunting. Yeah, it just takes a lot of repetition. I would say the best tip that I learned is that not to over train, a training moment can take, like, maybe even five minutes, as long as the dog will do it, you reward them and then leave it at that. Once you start repeating and do the training more often, then it just becomes a natural behavior. So for for my dog, it took a little bit to get them introduced to wild birds and have them point. And like, the whole point of a bird dog is depending on which ones you get. But mine is a pointer, so he'll smell the bird, lock in on the scent and hold until I get there, and then either I release him, or if he sees me getting close, he'll flush the bird, I'll shoot it, and then he'll go and retrieve it and give it back to me. The rest of that stuff is all based off on instinct and breeding. I don't I've there's no way to train that. So a lot of it is just good breeding and good genetics, just reinforcing that behavior is always that's, that's how you get a good dog.

 Stan: I never had a bird dog, but it's great for the owners to see the dog working. Yeah, they don't even have to shoot anything, except sometimes they do have to shoot it, because the dog works so hard at finding that bird and that dog would be disappointed if you missed and, oh,

 Patti: Now, are there, in terms of where you would go hunting, or your favorite spots to hunt, is that, like, a secret type of thing where, sort of, like, fishing, fishing spots, like, people don't like to give up their fishing spot. Like, is that same for hunting type thing?

 Nick: Yeah, the behavior is there. Or the idea of that is people want to, like, keep their hot spots to their selves, or at least for me again, for like, bird hunting, I always like taking new people out. If I see somebody that you know is like, standing around the parking lot doesn't know what they're doing, I just, you know, I tell them you can tag along with me for today and try to show them. You try to educate them so they're not either, like, you know, it's a safety issue, right? If they don't know where they're going, or if they go on the wrong side of the trail, or they trespass private property, you don't want them to do that. So I always tend to try to show people around, but it depends. I mean, I know other people have, like, their honey holes that they're not going to show anybody. 

Stan: Yeah, very true. Yeah, yeah, exactly like fishing spots. But, you know, and like throughout the years, you know, people have their favorite spots. And in the morning, when everyone goes out and they they see that someone's at their fishing, I mean, their hunting spot, oh, they get really disappointed. (laughter) Even though they're there like, you know, 3:30-4 o'clock in the morning, it's interesting on where people hunt.

Patti: So turning to a little bit a little bit more serious topic, not super serious, but you know what, what is the balance between having enough animals to hunt and also managing, like the feral animal population? So animal control versus, you know, game, being able to be out there to hunt game.

 Stan: Well, if you take a look at what's feral, everything in Hawaiʻi is invasive. But if you look at, look at that at a at another angle, you know, it's our food source. You know, a lot of people you know hunt to to, you know, sustain their their cost of buying groceries. They did a study back in Lānaʻi when they first started introducing animals to Lānaʻi, and in that book, it said that, you know, the animals have to be balanced with the vegetation. If you have too much animals, you're going to have less vegetation. If you got too much vegetation, that means you have too less of an animal population. So you want to keep that balance. And you know nowadays, you know the animals help with fire mitigation, because a lot of the grasslands need to be controlled. So, in essence, you know, it works hand in hand, you know, feeding, feeding the people with the game that you hunt, and also being safe and making sure that vegetation is not as much to to promote a bad fire incident or any safety hazards.

 Nick: I would say that for Forestry and Wildlife, the way we try to balance everything out is like we have a shared mission statement. It's protecting our natural resources but also trying to enhance and develop recreational opportunities, right? So it is a little complicated, but I feel like public hunting kind of fits both in both of those areas, in spaces where there are native ecosystems and natural resources that we got to protect right watersheds, we, hunting is always considered a tool, conservation tool, where we try to allow public hunting opportunities, wildlife control permits, access, just in general, just so that we can balance those issues of like pigs right uprooting and causing erosion, or goats causing erosion into an area. The other side of it too is that we do have areas in in Hawaiʻi where we just want to have hunting, which is our game management areas, right? That's where we try to promote as much hunting we we offer seasons, we offer hunting lotteries, things like that, where we try to promote as much public access and public hunting opportunity for people to be able to harvest meat, for recreation, for subsistence, all those types of things. So I think that's where we where we lie on is it's a it's a balance, it's just, it's a tool, and it just depends on where, where that where public hunters are needed. That's how it we try to, like, take care of the at the game populations.

 Patti: Yeah, I'm thinking about O’ahu, and they have the group, the pig hunters of O’ahu, who, if there's a nuisance pig, for example, that makes its way into a neighborhood, those guys provide a resource where they're going to help maybe trap that animal and remove that animal from the place that it's causing because, I mean, you don't want a pig in the middle of a neighborhood, right? So they'll come and assist. So there's definitely a lot of situations where I think we have hunters who are playing an enormous role for helping control some of the population. 

Nick: Yeah, that's like, that's what I like to consider our wild wildlife, urban interface. We have a lot of that, especially here on Oʻahu, where it's just, there's residential areas where pigs are either smelling food or, you know, people are feeding the animals, and pigs are going to find any resource where they can right? So, yeah, we're finding a lot of those instances increasing, especially once houses are being built more like up in the mountains or anything like that, we are going to have more like, wildlife incursions that way. But for the most part, that's where hunters can come in, right? That we can use them as a conservation tool, or some kind of, some kind of way to help manage those populations, either by trapping them, or, if it's near a state public hunting area, you know, we should probably get, we should promote that hunting area like, hey, you know, we having more pig problems here. We should get hunters in this unit to harvest the meat.

 Patti: Yeah, and how do you do that? Like, if you get a pig out there in the field, what do you do with it?

 Stan: So you know, some of the pigs got ticks and stuff like that, so you got to be very careful when you process the animal. Say, you shoot it in the hunting area. When you harvest an animal, most people debone it, or they take it out whole, and then they process it later. But to debone it, meaning they have these bags that they cut the meat off the bone, and they put them in these bags, and they haul that out. They leave the carcasses and the guts and the skin and whatever left there, you know, for fertilizer that ends up as fertilizer or food for other animals. So it's just, just like a cycle, and from that pig, you can make a lot of stuff. A lot of people make smoked sausages. They smoke the meat. They make smoked pig. And that's very famous at parties where people love having fresh smoked meat. 

 Patti: Oh yeah.

 Stan: Yeah. As far as pigs, they multiply a lot, so it needs to be controlled. I don't think we have that much of a of a nuisance, like how they have it in the mainland, lot of the hunters hunt to eat the meat. Something that is really known, but not really repeated, is that Hawaiʻi has a two week supply of food, say the if the barges were to stop coming in, we're done in two weeks. So these animals will help sustain life in Hawaiʻi. And you know, the animals, as far as the ocean, we got a lot of natural resources that we can depend on. And that's what they did in the old Hawaiʻi. So, you know, no one in the old Hawaiʻi depend depended on a boat bringing food in. Well, right now we're so dependent because we're the lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific, and everyone comes to us for resources.

 Patti: As far as processing the meat goes. Do people pretty much do that in on an individual basis, or is there like somebody on each island you could bring the animal to? Or how does that go? 

 Nick: I would say it depends on who you know, for the most part, hunters are just processing the animals out in the field, like Stan was saying, you know, you know, you can quarter your animal. The more times that you hunt you get used to seeing what looks normal and what doesn't look normal. So sometimes you got to monitor that, right? You got to know the health of your of the game, meat you're harvesting. There are places, or, I'm pretty sure there are places that are known where you can go to your uncle's, you know, garage, or they have, like, a little meat processing center where people will help you clean up the meat. And I know there are businesses that do that on Lānaʻi.

 Stan: There is a business on Lānaʻi that, you know, takes the animal and they'll process it from head to toe. They hunt mostly for trophies. So that's get that they have to cape it out and really, you know, detail, the knife skills of doing that, that cape and that would be shipped out. The meat would be processed and put in, labeled and put in vacuum sealed bags, and they would ship it. So say, like the guys from the mainland would come, they would ship it, FedEx, you know, next day, air to them. I believe there is also co ops on different islands that will take animals and, you know, process those animals.

 Patti: Letʻs just that kind of take a look at all the different islands. But what are some of the issues that are facing hunters on each island? I'm sure it's different. 

 Stan: I think the biggest concern is access, access to hunt because of land owners, liability requirements, insurance requirements. There's a lot of hunters that want to access animals to hunt. But you know, there's, they're hunting in places that is real dense with population. You know, of people or houses, you got to have your your weapon of choice to hunt in those areas. There is legal areas or legal people in Oʻahu that has, like, a federal permit that can access, you know, government land and all that kind of stuff. One of the biggest issues, especially in Maui, which has a lot of lot of animals, as far as deer, axis deer and it's access, you know, access to hunt those animals. And you know, there's more hunters that that's waiting to find access because, you know, they just love the deer meat.

 Patti: And what do you hear, Nick, what do you what are a lot of the questions that you're getting,

 Nick: Same, same thing. So a lot of, whenever we host GMAC meetings, or if we have informal public meetings, a lot of the hunters are requesting increased opportunity, more access to hunting areas. The hard thing is, is that right now, I mean, this forestry and wildlife manages almost, like a million acres, close to a million acres of public hunting areas. So it's not like we don't have. The issue is, is that a lot of these animals, especially for like axis deer, they don't follow geopolitical fences, right boundaries. I mean, they'll even jump a physical fence, once they jump that fence, and it's not in the public hunting area. Now it's like private land. Now it's residential. Now you canʻt have a firearm right there, right there's a school right over there. So a lot of these issues come with the movement of the animal, which is normal behavior. The animals gets pressured in one public hunting area. They're going to leave that unit to go into a safer zone. Maybe there's more food resources there. Maybe there's water. One of the projects, and one of the main goals that I always try to focus on and work on is getting private landowners working with with public hunters. We we had a pro we had a project here when I was the Oʻahu game biologist where we worked, we had a special project where we worked with farmers on the east side of Oʻahu. We had funds to be able to trap pigs on their land, and we removed the pigs from them, right from there, from those traps. It was a really good program, because then we started introducing hunters. We made like, a hunting list, or a call a call sheet, where whenever there was like, 12 pigs in a trap, we'd call them up and be like, hey, we have 12 pigs. And like, yeah, we'll take three of them and we'll go to the next person. So that's the type of relationship, what we want, where eventually we left - our program ended, but the relationship between the landowner and the hunter was still there, and so the hunter started managing those traps, and that's what we'd like to see. And hopefully we can do that with deer. We can do that with any, any game animal that poses an issue on private land and land that we don't manage as public hunting.

 Patti: Yeah, it's kind of a nice collaboration, for sure. I do think I've exhausted all my questions, but like, is there anything else? What am I missing? Like, anything else that we should be discussing?

Stan: Hunting starts at a young age for most people, and the state has a real good program with the youth hunt program. You know, we do have a lot of disabled hunters, and you know the state tries to accommodate rules that would make it easier for them to access hunting areas, especially if you know you hunted all your life and something happened. You know, life changes, and you still want to hunt. You have that drive. You know, I took my dad hunting all the way till he was 93 years old. 

 Patti, Nick: Wow.

 Stan: I would set up a table, set up a chair, and have him shoot. And, you know, in the end, it wasn't about shooting an animal. It was about being out there and not just being out there in nature, hunters are. What's that word I'm looking for? Are a unique group of people. Wherever you meet hunters, you have some kind of connection from all over all over the world. I meet hunters, and our main connection is hunting and and how they hunt, and what animals they hunt. You look on the hunting channel, you see how all these guys hunting, but that's, that's the part in the mainland, they can hunt only in seasons, which is most times in the fall. In Hawaiʻi, you can hunt the whole year. And that's a good thing for Hawaiʻi. You know, hunters are the best conservationists around, the state does put a lot of money in taking care of its natural resources. So it may not seem like they're doing enough, but if you look at the bigger picture, we're doing a lot more than other places.

 Patti:  How about you Nick Any final thoughts?

 Patti: Yeah, I think I'd like to touch back on, like the recruitment, maintaining recruitment, maintaining Hunter interests. I mean, we have a lot of resources out there. We, we would like to see the younger generation, you know, take up these types of activities, and thus our Forestry and Wildlife we we do try to have these types of programs where we encourage the younger generation to like link up with people that that know how to hunt, that have the resources. A lot of the times too kids can't, you know, they don't know they don't have money to buy a gun or they don't have money to buy a bow. So it's always good to learn from an uncle an auntie that knows how to hunt or has the ability or the resources and the knowledge. So that's how that I mean, that's how I was taught. I never grew up hunting. I only started hunting here in Hawaiʻi, and it only took, you know, a couple of my friends and uncles that were just nice enough to show me they take me out. So that's what I would like to see, is just more people providing the opportunity for the younger generation. That way we can keep the we can keep the culture. We can keep the the the concept of subsistence hunting, knowing where your meat comes from, taking care of yourself and your family. Those are the kinds of things that I feel like we should keep perpetuating. Along with the whole recreational side too, hunting is a great way to stay healthy. You get good meat out of it. I think one of the greatest things in Hawaiʻi is, like, just the places you get to go. You can hunt all the way up Mauna Kea, you know, above 10,000 feet. And then you can even hunt on Oʻahu, where everyone just thinks it's just hotels. And you know, tourism, I mean there, there are wild places up there, and it's great.

 Patti: With that, that wraps it up for us today. Mahalo Nick for joining us and mahalo to you Stan and your fellow commissioners for serving. Appreciate you.

Nick and Stan: Mahalo. Thanks for having us, mahalo. 

 Patti: All right. Our theme music is provided by Kawika Kahiapo. Thanks for listening to Hawaiʻi Conservation Kuleana A hui hou, 

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