Pyrographic presents

As the end of the season approached, and it came time for us seasonal field technicians to say goodbye to NEON, I decided to make some little gifts for all my coworkers. Between moving and work I didn't have a lot of time to think about it (or make things) so I settled rather hastily on some small wood-burning (pyrography) pieces. Since I get bored of doing the same thing over and over I decided to do a unique design for each person based on what I knew they liked or enjoyed about the work we did. I've grouped them into a few categories below:

1. Plants

ʻĀhinahina (silversword) and Peperomia sp.

I did these for two coworkers who mentioned these plants as being their favorites. On the left is a Mauna Loa silversword (Argyroxiphium kauense), or ʻāhinahina in Hawaiian. We were privileged to see some of these that were outplanted in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (out of reach of voracious ungulates!), and they're just as beautiful as the Mauna Kea species.

Leaves of Peperomia sp. from beneath

The disk on the right shows leaves from a species of Peperomia (using the photo above as reference). There are over a thousand recognized Peperomia species (at least twenty-two in Hawaii alone), and there are thought to be more since they can be hard to tell apart and positive identification can be very difficult. While we normally would (and could) identify most plants to the species level with confidence, we simply couldn't identify any peperomias we found to better than the genus level. They're pretty plants, though, with strikingly-colored undersides to their leaves.

2. Beetles

Mecyclothorax neonomas and M. rufipennis

As part of the work we did we collected, identified, and preserved various Carabidae beetles. Members of this large and varied family are found around the world, with both native and invasive species present in Hawaii. Shown here are two native species from the genus Mecyclothorax, M. neonomas on the left and M. rufipennis on the right. M. neonomas was actually discovered just a few years ago at our site from the kind of collection work we did (one of two such species), which is pretty neat! We didn't find any new species this year (beetles in general were scarcer than the previous few years), but there could be more out there waiting to be discovered…

3. Birds

Nēnē, ʻiʻiwi, & ʻalalā

Birds ended up being the biggest category, as we got to see a lot of endangered and rare native birds in the Natural Area Reserve. Nēnē were a very common sight; we would often see between ten to twenty on any given day. (This was the first one of these wood-burnings that I made, so it's a bit less polished than the others as I was relearning it on the fly). In the middle is an ʻiʻiwi, a striking native scarlet honeycreeper with a dramatically curved bill. I modeled this after a photo of one perched on a māmane tree, and while I didn't get its front quite right I like the contrast with the black wing and tail feathers. (The light was at a poor angle for this disk specifically, so I had to play with it a bit in GIMP to get it to look better.)

The third bird is one which I haven't actually seen personally, and isn't currently at the site: it's an ʻalalā, the Hawaiian crow. By 2002 there were no known wild individuals, with just a few remaining in captivity. Intensive breeding and rehabilitation programs have increased the captive populations to the point where some individuals were released into the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve several years ago…where they were unfortunately quickly predated by ʻio, the Hawaiian hawk. One of my coworkers, before joining NEON, was part of this effort and used to track the birds around the reserve, so I made this for him. (Amusingly, he immediately could tell from it that I'd used a reference photo of a not-quite-adult bird ­– something I didn't know – as its head was still a little big for its body.) In some good news, around a dozen ʻalalā were recently released in the wild on Maui where there are no ʻio, so hopefully they'll be able to re-establish a wild breeding population there and eventually bring them back to the forests of Hawaiʻi.

4. Tower

The fourth and final category has just a single disk, but it's probably the one I'm most proud of. I made it based on a photo I took of the top of our instrument tower seen through the trees along one of our trails, and I managed to get a lot of details in there. Here's the photo in question, for reference:

Funnily enough, this photo is now out of date: two weeks ago, during my last week with NEON, some site infrastructure people came out and moved one of the boom arms visible on the left to the other side of the tower to better sample the prevailing wind direction. When the tower was originally built in 2018 it was laid out using data on wind direction from Pohakuloa up on the saddle, and no one seems to have thought to question if the wind patterns were the same for a different site. (Spoiler: they aren't.) Our tower had thus, for its existence, had the wind-sampling equipment off to the wrong side for the prevailing winds. It wasn't a huge problem by any means (the tower being in the way probably wasn't affecting things too much), but it's good that it's fixed now.

And that's it! It was nice to have motivation to pull out my wood-burning kit again; when I originally got it I imagined I'd be doing a bit more than I have (so far it's pretty much just been the two pieces in this previous post). Several people said I should sell these, which…with some more practice…we'll see if that goes anywhere, I suppose. A hui hou! (And if any of my coworkers are reading this, thanks for being such an awesome group of people!)

P.S. Also, after a week of intensively cleaning my old place, I'm finally fully moved out, and can concentrate on things around the new place.