David Shepard’s Aloha Shirts

BirdNote®
David Shepard’s Aloha Shirts
Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.  

As a kid, artist David Shephard would sketch all the flora and fauna he saw. His true love was for plants. But when he moved to Hawai‘i to study botany, he realized...  

David Shepard: Hawai‘i is special because its main character is birds. Birds are the dominant species in terms of animal life. And so all the plants really co-evolved with the birds. You can see that in just how specific the beaks of different species are to the shapes of the flowers here. And so that became part of my art.  


Mark Bramhill: David now designs Aloha Shirts featuring the native plants and wildlife of Hawai‘i. One design features the ‘i‘iwi, a Hawaiian honeycreeper.  


    [‘I‘iwi song]

David Shepard: So the ‘i‘iwi birds dart from flower to flower to flower very quickly. Well, the Hawaiians saw this and they thought of a metaphor, that it was like procreation. A metaphor for the health of the forest, because only in its procreation can it exist.


Mark Bramhill: Then, hidden among the trees, David has drawn kāhuli, or native land snails.

David Shepard: Their existence in the forest is special because if they were around, it was said that the forest would sing. And songs are also a very important element of Hawaiian culture because it's how things are passed on from generation to generation. It's how you communicate what the world is.

So these snails are singing, right? And then you have the birds that are symbolic of procreation. And so the combination is that this is Hawai‘i. This is the perpetuation of it.  


Mark Bramhill: See pictures of David’s designs at our website, BirdNote dot org. I'm Mark Bramhill.

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Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Iiwi ML5859 recorded by Doug Pratt. 
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2024 BirdNote June 2024
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# ShepardD-01-2024-06-05    ShephardD-01

Reference:
Ohia Lehua “most ubiquitous tree”
https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/forestry/plants/ohia-lehua/
https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/blog/2022/05/24/nr22-071/

‘I‘iwi as metaphor
https://kaiwakiloumoku.ksbe.edu/article/mele-iiwi-ao-hilo

Sam ‘Ohu Gon: 
"In Hawaiian song, the ‘i‘iwi is often the symbol of an ardent male lover, eyeing the flowers in anticipation of the enjoyment to be had in their sweet nectar. The procreative mana inherent in the explosion of life to be found in native forest is encapsulated in the interaction between the ʻiʻiwi and the flowers of the forest. A friend of mine once said 'no forests, no aloha.'"