Puu Makaala Natural Area Reserve
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The Puu Makaala Natural Area Reserve is a wet native forest on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was very near our rental house so was only a short outing. The route to the reserve is a narrow road that dead ends and then there is a short walk back along a fence to the reserve’s sign and a ladder stile to get yourself up and over the fence. Inside is a trail maintained by cutting the prolific vegetation – probably with a machete.
The trees in the forest are koa and ohi’a but they are hard to see because there are so many tree ferns. The fronds are very large on these plants and it is easy to imagine what the understory of tropical forests must have been like during the time of the dinosaurs (in fact, limited visibility in this forest because of plant density makes one hyper conscious of the rustling noises in the foliage and glad that there is a fence to keep the wild pigs out).
As usual – I honed in on the fiddleheads that were close to eye level. There were big hairy ones,
Small bristly ones,
And smooth purple spirals.
There was lots of moss around too and most of it seemed to include sporophytes.
Most of the time, the view upward was filled with large ferns…but there was always a hint of the higher layers of the forest.
I was only able to see the huge trunks of those larger trees.
On the way back to the car – outside the fence – I notice some camellias that must have been planted along the road. The texture and color of the dried fern fronts with the flower that had recently fallen caught my attention…a nice ending to the outing.
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