There can definitely be a romantic bend to the earliest stories of Axis deer in Hawaiʻi—the image of a tiny herd being ferried over the milky cyan of the Ganges Delta, on its way to Molokaʻi and a Hawaiian king; a rogue band of escaped cervids dotting the legendary slopes of Lēʻahi, Diamond Head; an early-morning outfit of cowboys driving deer out of Kawākiu's shallow ravines, their colts racing, their lassoes sailing, a sampan waiting to float their catch across the Kalohi Channel to Lānaʻi. Romance.
These evocative beginnings, though, would slowly give way to a more complex and contentious legacy of deer in Hawaiʻi.
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Axis deer on Molokaʻiʻs East End.
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There are other stories, perhaps more tragic than romantic, that we could tell—the image of a handful of Chilean sharpshooters brought in for the first large-scale cull of runaway deer numbers, wasting thousands of animals on the West Molokaʻi plains; Hawaiian statesmen in hot meeting rooms in Honolulu shouting, unsuccessfully, against the continued Territorial legislative protections of closed deer hunting seasons; a lone botanist named Otto, returning to a rare patch of Lānaʻi's pristine native forests atop Waiakeakua Ridge only to find it gone, criss-crossed and cut-through with deer trails. (See Partʻs I, II, and III of our Deer History Series for more details.)
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ʻAʻohe wānana—there was no foretelling—in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just how prolific and problematic this particular species of deer would be on Earth's most isolated island chain.
By mid-twentieth-century though, we knew enough.
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And yet…the 1950's saw territorial legislators pushing forward with bills to introduce deer as prime game animals to both Hawaiʻi Island and Maui. On Hawaiʻi, this sparked six decades of extraordinary political theater—scientific studies, legislative battles, court challenges, and gubernatorial interventions. (See Part IV of our series.)
While legislators and hunters, ranchers and conservationists waged their public war over deer introduction to Hawaiʻi Island, a much quieter chapter of Hawaiʻi's deer history was unfolding on Maui.
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Aerial view of Pu'u o Kali, Maui. Photo by Forest & Kim Starr.
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On a seemingly unremarkable Friday in September of 1959, five Axis deer—two bucks, two does, and one fawn—were flown to Maui via Military Air Transport Service and quietly released near Puʻu o Kali. No newspaper debates, no coalition of opposition, no court challenges.
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Their introduction only made the papers when they escaped the hog wire of their 1-acre acclimation pen in less than 24 hours, with a deer sighting in Kīhei by Saturday afternoon.
Hawaii Tribune-Herald, September 29, 1959, Page 3.
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In July of 1960, four additional deer—one buck and three does—were introduced near the 1959 release site (again, without any fuss) to continue to stock the island for a State-mandated hunting program.
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What followed were three invisible decades in which Maui's rural Upcountry deer population grew steadily, quietly, and relatively unnoticed by the wider public, press, and policymakers.
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The spell broke in May of 1995 with a Hawaii Tribune-Herald article titled "Maui Deer Raise Concerns"—the first major piece acknowledging the seemingly overnight explosion of the population. Mark White of The Nature Conservancy reported deer droppings in the Waikamoi Preserve. “Without a comprehensive plan,” said White, “I don't have a prayer of keeping them out of the preserve and the East Maui watershed.”
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By August, the Department of Land and Natural Resources declared open season for Axis deer on Maui's public lands, a season that has never been closed since.
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Hawaii Tribune-Herald, May 27, 1995, Page 3.
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A year later, the first of several of Maui's deer management groups, the Maui Axis Deer Task Force, was formed in the hopes of building an organized response to the growing deer issue. By the year 2000, deer population estimates were between 3,000-5,000 animals, with a predicted doubling every four years by the Task Force's hired wildlife biologist, Steven Anderson, who reported that “the deer [had] spread throughout the island, from Hāna to Kapalua.” (Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Aug 25, 2001, Page 4.)
Soon the local newspapers were awash with increasingly dramatic headlines: “Axis deer causing grief on Maui,” “A growing nuisance,” “Skyrocketing deer populations,” “Deer count spiraling out of control,” and even the “Axis of evil.” Agricultural damages escalated in parallel to population growth and by 2010 damages to farms, ranches and resorts were estimated to be about $500,000 per year and climbing. (Honolulu Star-Advertiser, May 12, 2012, Page B2.)
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And yet... even as deer populations were mounting into an agricultural crisis, they simultaneously offered up a valuable source of nutrient-dense protein for Maui’s recreational and subsistence hunters, hunters who had played the biggest management role on Maui for decades.
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This duality—feral challenge AND food resource—has proven central to our own work on Maui.
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Herd of Maui deer beside endangered Hala pepe and Olopua trees. Photo by Asher Koles.
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Following our three-year hunt on Hawaiʻi Island, our tiny team was contacted in 2014 to help remove deer from a forest restoration area within ʻUlupalakua Ranch. In our very first days working on Haleakalā, we were already forming the beginnings of a crazy notion to build a possible solution for the unique challenge of Axis deer on Maui, a self-sustaining one that would work to fully utilize every deer harvested for food.
And so we got to work. The regulatory path was complex. We tirelessly navigated federal food inspection service requirements, built processing infrastructure, and established supply chains. In July of 2016, we secured our first USDA-certified wild-harvest.
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Despite years of State and deer management group efforts, despite the sizeable impact of our hunting community on populations on public lands, and despite six years of our own growing harvest program on private ranch lands, our 2021 aerial FLIR survey covering Haʻikū to ʻUlupalakua —the core of Maui's deer populations—found over 43,500 deer, putting the total estimated island-wide population at over 60,000, with exponential compounding growth continuing to loom.
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There was much work to do and a very small window in which to get it done...
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Stay tuned for a surprise! final installment of this series, covering the most recent four and a half years of our work, insights from Jake on the challenges and triumphs of helping to balance Maui's deer numbers present-tense, as well as our sturdy hopes for the story we might get to tell yet—a story maybe a little less romantic than the old persistent ones, definitely less tragic, and maybe, somehow, bigger and more beautiful still; a story written alongside community and customers, full of re-membering and re-imagining, of good hard work and good food, of collective abundance nō hoʻi!
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Pīpī holo ka ʻao,
and the tale runs on,
Kuʻulani Muise
Brand Lady & Co-Founder
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In Case
You Missed It
NEW TO OUR NEWSLETTER?
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This is already our 22nd Volume of what has been described as the longest Newsletter ever. We have archived Volumes 1-21 for anyone who might love some backstories and extra long-form content.
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