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There they were! I’d spotted the dark shapes of the flying foxes hanging by their feet in the ironwood trees by Pago Pago Bay. I’m always amazed and thrilled to see these large native fruit bats (peʻa) when I visit the Samoan Islands. Later that day I saw them soaring overhead with their three-foot wingspan exceeding that of the white-tailed tropic birds gliding alongside.

I’d come to the islands for three weeks to visit both American Samoa and (Western) Samoa. In 2007-08 I served in the Peace Corps in a small village on ʻUpolu Island. I had an amazing adventure and became part of my Samoan family. In the spring of 2023, I was finally able to visit for the first time since the islands’ borders were closed for more than two years due to the worldwide pandemic. The half hour flight from Apia to American Samoa was highlighted by stunning views of the coral reefs and aqua seas below.

Read more: Three Weeks In Samoa, by guest blogger Donna Barr

Aloha, my name is Keith, and I am on the HPPA team at two of our Haleakalā National Park store locations, on the island of Maui. I learned about the Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in our training at Haleakalā National Park about the history of the park captive nēnē breeding program.

The staff were absolutely ecstatic about the Makana the Nēnē Plush I brought for them. They want to add Makana to their store as they have many plush toys. I also took our Kahoʻokele Petrel Plush and shared our remarkable story of success on Maui, especially since they lay only one egg a season. I took national park brochures and HPPA membership brochures with me, along with chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.

Read more: Keith and the English Nēnē

The Next Generation

All of the carvings we see at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau today are a modern recreation and restoration of what was once there. In 1823 the original kiʻi were removed by William Ellis, who then auctioned them off in Prussia to collectors. He fortunately made a lithograph first, which is now the park's best reference material. The site fell into disrepair in the 1800s, and restoration efforts started back up with the National Park Service in the 1960s. Chief among carvers for the restoration was Anton Akoni Grace, who came from a line of South Kona carvers nine generations long. Because Ellis’s journals describe the original carvings and scene in detail, the many-year restoration project felt accurate, and by 1971, Hale o Keawe and the heiau on which it stands were complete. Several carvers worked under Grace, including the venerable Sam Kaʻai from Maui. As has always been tradition, all of the trees were large ʻōhiʻa found and collected on nearby slopes.

Read more: From Tree to Kiʻi, The Transformation: Part 2 of 2

The Transformation

Let us take ourselves back, say, 500 years ago, when a solemn group of people stood in the cool, deep forest on the flank of one of Hawaiʻi Island’s volcanoes. A massive ʻōhiʻa tree rose before them high into the shifting green of the canopy. Deeply resilient, impressively patient, ʻōhiʻa trees are able to generate even on barren lava flows and slowly grow to massive proportions as the ecosystem builds around them. Birdsong looped through the branches. A ritual began with chant and offerings. This tree, eight to ten feet in circumference and an elder of the Hawaiian forest, was about to be transformed. After being cut with gratitude and skillfully carved onsite, then carefully transported downslope to the village on the coast, it might stand on or near a heiau, a Hawaiian temple. Wherever the new carving was to be placed, it would now be tasked with the important job of holding the mana, the life force, of a Hawaiian god whose powers and attributes would contribute to that location and undertaking. It would become a kiʻi.

Read more: From Tree to Kiʻi, The Transformation: Part 1 of 2

Most young adults have no idea how one becomes a national park service ranger.  
 
The Big Island of Hawaiʻi is home to four national park sites including massive Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park (HVNP). Despite this density of parks in the island community, most island teens grow up unsure how to begin national parks careers. The National Park Service structure can look intimidating from the outside and the processes for hiring seem complex, with layers and levels and different statuses, permanent and seasonal positions, terms of one or four years. Getting to that uniform seems hard and confusing. Most teens turn to simpler jobs and forget about the park service. That youthful energy and idealism becomes directed elsewhere. 

Read more: So You Want To Be A National Park Ranger

National park sites in Hawaiʻi protect more than famous lava flows, beaches, waterfalls and lush forests. In Hawaiʻi, national parks also protect and preserve Native Hawaiian cultural sites rich with meaning, history, and even mystery. One of the most intriguing mysteries swirls around the meanings of those most Hawaiian of symbol systems: petroglyphs.

Petroglyphs are shapes made by pecking into stone using very hard rock tools to break through the shiny volcanic crust of a lava field. In pre-contact Hawaiʻi, where there was no writing, no paper and ink, petroglyphs may have been meaning-laden public messages, possibly a way to commemorate a place, event, or person. The word for petroglyphs in Hawaiian: kiʻi pokahu.

Read more: Stone Stories: The Mystery and History of Hawaiian Petroglyphs

The Arrival

Uncountable generations ago, a seed or seeds from a plant in the sunflower family landed in a favorable spot on the as-yet-unpeopled Hawaiian Islands. The soil was adequate, the sun and rain were as well, the seed may have been deposited by a bird and, therefore, have arrived with a little bit of its own fertilizer. Eons would go by before humans arrived in their canoes, eons that afforded these sunflower-family plants the time to do something truly marvelous and absolutely spectacular: in this all-new environment, they evolved. And wow, did they evolve into something breathtaking.

Read more: The Story of Silverswords

National park resource managers, who are biologists, ecologists, and botanists, act as stewards for some of the rarest plants and animals on earth. The national parks sites in Hawaiʻi, justly famous for their lava flows, ocean views, stargazing and coastal trails, are also entrusted with the cultural legacy of the Native Hawaiian people.

Read more: The Amazing Women Who Work In Resources Management

Rhonda Loh is the fiercely intelligent and unfailingly kind Superintendent at HPPA partner Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park (HVNP). She knows the park the way you only can by having walked, and studied, hundreds of miles of its terrain over decades. For Loh, this is home territory. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes has been her home, and her career anchor, since she first volunteered here in the spring of 1989.

Read more: Get To Know Rhonda Loh

January is officially Volcano Awareness Month in Hawaiʻi, an island state built completely of volcanoes old and new. Hot and fluid magma circulating in the planet’s mantle seeps up to and through the crust as a plume, and emerges on the seafloor in the middle of the Pacific Plate, where it methodically builds up a shield volcano. The plate is moving N/NW and subducting under Japan/Russia at a rate of about 5-10 centimeters a year. Like a great, slow, patient conveyor belt, the plate drifts over the “hot spot” of the mantle plume and volcanoes are built, one after the other.

Read more: Volcano Awareness Month is Every Month