Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Under the Wolf Moon


On the night of the full moon in early January, we walked down to Hanalei Bay, the quiet side, where visitors rarely go.

The only tracks on the sand were those of sand crabs and a lone Ulili (Wandering Tattler) who is over- wintering on the beaches and wetlands here. Say u lee lee lee lee lee and you’ll have an impression of his voice as he flies low over the water. I got a picture of the remote mountain streams where they go to nest in Canada and Alaska, and it reminded me of the remote stream I lived beside for 10 years in the Pacific North west, where a dipper nested - another lover of untouched wilderness.

Ulili (Wandering Tattler)
Wintering in Hanalei from the frozen North 2008/9, after a 2500-mile flight over the ocean.

There was still the fiery afterglow of sunset when the moon appeared above the horizon in the east. It was huge, and dwarfed the Norfolk pines in front of it; they could have been mosses, illuminated by some ancient planet. This was the closest to the earth the moon would be this year. The rain clouds had thinned and formed pink bands that settled horizontally across the lower half, and beneath it, were pale rounded shapes squatting like elders. The Hawaiian people remember a lot of their cloud lore. To our ancestors in other places, this was known as the Wolf Moon. We watched it rise and give the illusion of shrinking. It doesn’t really shrink, it ‘s just that the sky is so big. It was dark enough now to see the first stars, and a bat hunted over the edge of the ocean. As it flew over a jagged bit of reef, there was ulili, relaxed and settled for the night, sharing the view.

I’d been working on a drawing of the nene nest, the moment of hatching, and wanted to include the potential of these perfect white eggs, trying to show their winged forms as an after image behind, but now the moon became important too, they were “ born under the wolf moon”, as were some of the monarch butterflies that kept fluttering past as I watched the nest. Now there is a unique Kauaian monarch, that has evolved here since they are said to have been introduced. It is a darker brown, with pale under-wings, which reminds me of the finch that has lost its orange coloring since coming here because of changing diet.

So all month the picture has been growing, and still has some things that need resolved. I’ve been mixing media too, still trying to come to grips with tropical colors and climate.


Born Under The Wolf Moon ... work still in progress

The nene are growing fast. The two younger ones developed nasty pox-like sores, beside the beak and on the legs - the places where mosquitoes bite - and some birds are lost this way every year, but…… they seem to have healed. It is possible. The older one glows with health. I wish I could share the softness of his long gray down, that’s shedding now as his feathers grow in. His mother, Oma’o mum, is the only parent so far to have moulted, losing nearly all her flight feathers in one day under the old lichen-hung plumaria tree. I have nene quills, if anyone needs them for calligraphy.



The Nene twins from the nest ... now about a month old


Oma'o gosling ... a few weeks older than the twins

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