The Smaller Kalopa Ohi'a Lehua

Pick a lehua blossom, the saying goes, and it will rain before you get home, because the flower and the tree that carries it were lovers the volcano goddess parted. The tree is the ohi'a. The red brush of a flower is the lehua. This is the second of the two large ohi'a on the Kalopa loop: 3.84 metres round, about 22 metres tall, in excellent condition by the state's reckoning, and a little smaller than its neighbour in every direction. Between them they are the reason the trail looks the way it does. Ohi'a builds the canopy of Hawaiian wet forest and its flowers are the main food of the native honeycreepers, so an old stand of it is not only a roof, it is what keeps birds in the air above you. Kalopa holds about a hundred acres of that forest and roughly twenty-five native species along 0.7 miles of path, several of them down to a single plant. This tree's register entry, like its neighbour's, gives measurements and no address, so it sits here on coordinates that match the rest of the park's listed trees. Its age is unrecorded, as it is for all six. Ohi'a thickens slowly and this trunk has plainly had time, but nobody has counted, and if you have, we will take the correction.