Honu Nesting Beach Ceramic Art Tile
— — the warm afternoon the honu come up to sleep.
Not only on a wall.
“On the black-sand beaches of Hawaiʻi's southern shore, the honu (Hawaiian green sea turtles) come up out of the water in the long afternoons to sleep in the sun. They are old animals doing an old thing. A roped distance keeps the basking ground unbothered, and people on the beach drop their voices without being asked. The sand is warmed lava, fine and black. The turtles arrive and stay. A few of the older females return in season to nest. The light is gold by four, and the wind smells of guava and salt.
Honu Nesting Beach Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The black-sand beaches of Hawaiʻi Island are the closest most visitors get to a honu basking ground. The most accessible is Punaluʻu, on the Kaʻū coast of the Big Island, where Hawaiian green sea turtles haul out to rest in the sun beside coconut palms. The sand here is not weathered shell but fragmented basalt: black grains created when molten lava from the Mauna Loa and Kīlauea systems entered the sea and shattered. Hawaiian green sea turtles, an endemic genetic population of Chelonia mydas, were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1978 and are still recovering. Most of their actual nesting, about ninety-six percent, happens at the French Frigate Shoals, six hundred miles to the northwest.
Honu nesting on the French Frigate Shoals peaks between May and September, with the largest concentrations in June and July. Females haul out at night to lay clutches of about a hundred eggs in soft sand above the high-water line, and the hatchlings emerge roughly sixty days later. On the main Hawaiian Islands, basking happens in every month and mostly during the warm hours of the afternoon. Hawksbill turtles (honuʻea), a separate species, nest at a small number of Hawaiʻi Island sites including Pōhue Bay and Kamehame between May and December. East Island in the Shoals, where most green turtles laid, was largely destroyed in October 2018 by Hurricane Walaka, and the population has been adapting.
NOAA Fisheries asks visitors to stay at least ten feet, about three metres, from any basking honu, and never to touch, feed, or photograph with flash. The turtles are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and Hawaiʻi state law, with fines for harassment. At Punaluʻu, a Hawaiʻi County park, signage and roped sections mark the rest area, and locals and trained volunteers often help orient first-time visitors. Parking and restrooms are free. Swimming is permitted on the open beach, though strong rip currents can develop, and the calmer hours are early morning. The honu themselves come and go on their own schedule. Some afternoons there are three on the sand; some afternoons there are none.