Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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Yes. I liked to walk the high contour (9,500’-10,000’)… [chuckling]
Of course. [chuckles]
The high one, it’s a shorter walk. We did this twice a year, for twenty years or more.
Wow! You know, in 1856 there was a really interesting communication between Kanehoa
one of the Young-Davis descendants and Keoni Ana, in 1856, he was talking about the
sheep on this mountain. One of the really interesting quotes he gave was that, “they are
animals with poisonous teeth. Where forest once was…”
Yes. they kill the forest.
Yes, the forest is gone. He says there would be only grass, nothing else. So, even in the
1850s they saw that there was going to be a problem.
And that’s the reason for the fence, because, the sheep would bed down in the high
elevation, the timber line, in the pu‘u. The bare ground offered security from dogs.
That’s right, wild dogs even that time, yeah
Wild dogs, from time immemorial on Mauna Kea, the sheep. The habit of bedding down,
feeding down hill to fill the bellies, and then move up.
Wow!
Large flocks. They’d head for the tree line, the bare ground as an escape route. So, it
was suggested that sheep were a resource that the hunters valued. We got the idea
that…
Bill Graft, I guess the Biologist in California suggested that we introduce mouflon which
would hybridize readily with feral sheep. The mouflons characteristics are, they don’t go
in by flocks, they’re not a herding animal so much as family groups, and they head for
cover and not bare ground. So, we figured it can’t do any worse than feral sheep. So, we
got a hybridization program.
This was Graft, in the late ‘50s about, do you think
Yes. The Board of Agriculture and Forestry approved the program, and the Legislature
gave us the money as a hunting resource they could sustain…theoretically, it was a
sustainable Hunting Program on Mauna Kea. At the same time, we put mouflon on
Mauna Kea, we got rid of the sheep on Läna‘i, and put mouflon on Läna‘i. And if the
mouflons habits were similar to the feral sheep, they would head for the pineapple
fields—the bare ground—but they didn’t. That was a real expectation, but they didn’t do
it. They headed for the brush.
Where did they go
They headed for the koa haole, for the brush, the gulches, and they were good game. No
problem with the pineapple, poking holes in the tar paper or the mulch paper. They didn’t
have any problems. They anticipated the problem but, we promised the pineapple
company we’d get rid of the sheep if that happened.
It’s really amazing! So, the whole idea of that program though, was to foster a game
hunting program right Recreational…
The original thing...the CCC boys, when it was a kapu area. The original Forest Reserve
Program was a very simple one, establish the area for executive order, build a fence,
eliminate the destructive feral animals, and plant eucalyptus trees [chuckling]. That was
the Forestry Program.
And the reason for this program was
That lasted through the war. (eliminate the sheep and increase the forest.)
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:325