By ERIN NOLAN/Honolulu Civil Beat

Lahaina’s iconic Indian banyan tree has been off limits to visitors since the August 2023 wildfire tore through the historic community, but some Maui County officials are hopeful that they might soon be able to restore public access.

Arborists from all over Maui — as well as a few from Oʻahu — will be organizing an extensive assessment of the tree’s health, the results of which will help determine when Lahaina Banyan Court Park might reopen, said Duane Sparkman, the chair of the Maui County Arborist Committee and the co-founder of the nonprofit Treecovery Hawaiʻi.

While many people hailed the famous tree’s survival as a symbol of hope and resilience, that initial optimism did not reflect the burn damage festering beneath the tree’s scorched bark, Sparkman said. Arborists discovered fungus inside a branch that snapped earlier this month and want to be sure the tree is not sicker than it appears.

“We really don’t know what’s under the skin,” he said. “It’s still trying to survive the fire, and it’s still trying to heal.”

The assessment is expected to be extensive and fairly invasive, Sparkman said. Arborists will tug on and throw ropes with weighted attachments over individual branches to see how much tension they can withstand, he said, and they will drive stainless steel spikes into the tree’s flesh to make sure it still produces sap and that there is a functioning cambium, a layer of tissue inside trees that is essential for growth and regeneration.

If the tree is healthy enough, Sparkman said Lahaina Banyan Court Park could reopen before the end of the year, but he did not want to make any predictions about what the arborists will find.

“We have to watch how any damage has healed over and what areas are safe,” he said, explaining that unhealthy branches could be at risk of falling on people and causing injuries. “Then we have to actually remove what’s not safe.”

Before arborists and officials determine when to reopen the park, they will also discuss whether to implement precautions to protect the tree and educate the public on how to behave so they do not further threaten it, Maui County Arborist Timothy Griffith Jr. said.

A fence currently prevents passersby headed to the recently reopened Lahaina Small Boat Harbor from getting too close to the famous tree, with signs warning against trespassing.

FILE – The 150-year-old banyan tree, damaged by 2023 wildfires, is seen with new growth in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Saturday, July 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)

‘It’s In The ICU’

Lahaina Banyan Court Park is surrounded by reminders of the fire — the charred shell of the Old Lahaina Courthouse, melted lamp posts, vacant lots where restaurants and shops once stood — but the tree itself and the wooden benches around its trunk appear remarkably normal.

The fast-moving blaze skipped right over the park, Griffith said. Still, a large section of the famous tree was “superheated” near the intersection of Front and Hotel Streets, he said.

“The heat just dried out everything inside, almost like putting it in a kiln,” he said.

The upcoming assessment, which was authorized last week by the Maui County Arborist Committee but has not been scheduled, will help experts better understand how deep the damage runs, he said.

In the months after the fire, arborists went through the tree’s many trunks and branches and removed everything that had been dessicated by the fire, Sparkman said. Griffith said about 40% of the tree was removed in the year after the fire.

Treecovery — which cares for trees that survived the 2023 Lahaina and Kula wildfires and grows new trees to replace those that were destroyed — has worked alongside county officials and other volunteer arborists to water the banyan tree, inject hundreds of gallons of compost tea into nearby soil and prune dead or unhelpful roots and branches. So far, 22 trunks have already been removed, Sparkman said.

In some areas, aerial roots had begun to grow between the bark and the core — or heartwood — and allowed tiny beetles called twig borers to infest the tree, he said.

The tree has been treated for the bugs and no longer has any sign of beetles, but it is still very vulnerable, Sparkman said. During the islandwide rainstorm earlier this month, an 18-inch-diameter branch fell and revealed that there was fungus growing inside the tree.

“It’s a natural reaction for fungus to show up when it’s time for trees to break down, and in some cases, fungus spores can be on the bore beetles and the bugs that are in the tree itself,” Sparkman said. “We have concerns that it could be in other places in the tree, so that’s where the assessment has to come in.”

If fungus spreads enough, “it’s kind of over for a tree,” he added, and there is a much higher risk of branches falling on people and causing injuries.

The fire put a lot of stress on the banyan tree, Sparkman and Griffith said, so arborists are working hard to give it everything it needs to bounce back.

“It’s in the ICU. It’s like it’s been in a car crash and it’s injured, but it’s on its way to recovery,” Griffith said. “It’s still in recovery, so we’ll keep an eye on it. When it needs some TLC, we’ll be there.”

An Important Gathering Place

William Owen Smith planted a banyan tree sapling in the heart of Lahainatown in 1873. A century and a half later, it stood roughly 60 feet tall, had dozens of trunks and boasted an impressive network of limbs that stretched over two-thirds of an acre.

The shade created by the tree’s sprawling canopy made Lahaina Banyan Court Park a natural gathering place for generations of locals and tourists alike, said Theo Morrison, the Executive Director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation.

“Shade is really, really important in Lahaina, and the tree gave that to people in a central location,” she said.

CORRECTS YEAR TO 2026, NOT 2025 -Lahaina, Hawaii’s historic Banyan tree is seen on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026. (Erin Nolan/Honolulu Civil Beat via AP)

For years, the community kicked off the holiday season with the lighting of the banyan tree, and the park was the site of annual events like the International Festival of Canoes and Kamehameha Day celebrations.

Though the banyan tree is one of Lahaina’s most recognizable landmarks, many people also see it as a representation of the ways colonialism shaped the community and erased Native Hawaiian history. Smith, who planted the tree, came from a family of missionaries and played a role in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation, which for decades cared for the surrounding park using grant funding from the county, cares about the tree’s survival, but it does not celebrate its controversial history, Morrison said.

“It’s a beautiful tree, and it produces all that shade. That’s the value to the community,” she said.

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The shadow cast by the banyan tree has become even more valuable since the fire, Morrison added. Lahaina once had about 25,000 trees — monkeypod, ʻulu, plumeria, kukui nut and more — lining the streets, but only about 1,000 to 4,000 survived the fire.

When Lahaina Banyan Court Park finally reopens, the tree will undoubtedly look different because so much had to be removed, Griffith said. Arborists hope that they can one day restore it to something close to its pre-fire shape by strategically pruning and planting propagated cuttings from the tree.

“It’s something that you have to plan in terms of decades, not just years,” he said. “You’ve got to let the tree do its own thing.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of environmental issues on Hawaiʻi island is supported in part by a grant from the Dorrance Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

 

By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, AP Science Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Horses whinny to find new friends, greet old ones and celebrate happy moments like feeding time.

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How exactly horses produce that distinctive sound — also called a neigh — has long eluded scientists.

The whinny is an unusual combination of both high and low pitched sounds, like a cross between a grunt and a squeal — that come out at the same time.

The low-pitched part wasn’t much of a mystery. It comes from air passing over bands of tissue in the voice box that make noise when they vibrate. It’s a technique similar to how humans speak and sing.

But the high-pitched piece is more puzzling. With some exceptions, larger animals have larger vocal systems and typically make lower sounds. So how do horses do it?

According to a new study, they whistle.

Researchers slid a small camera through horses’ noses to film what happened inside while they whinnied and made another common horse sound, the softer, subtler nicker. They also conducted detailed scans and blew air through the isolated voice boxes of dead horses.

The whinny’s mysterious high-pitched tones, they discovered, are a kind of whistling that starts in the horse’s voice box. Air vibrates the tissues in the voice box while an area just above contracts, leaving a small opening for the whistle to escape.

That’s different from human whistling, which we do with our mouths.

“I’d never imagined that there was a whistling component. It’s really interesting, and I can hear that now,” said Jenifer Nadeau, who studies horses at the University of Connecticut. Nadeau was not involved with the study, which was published Monday in the journal Current Biology.

A few small rodents like rats and mice whistle like this, but horses are the first known large mammal to have a knack for it. They’re also the only animals known to be able to whistle through their voice boxes while they sing.

“Knowing that a ‘whinny’ is not just a ‘whinny’ but that it is actually composed of two different fundamental frequencies that are created by two different mechanisms is exciting,” said Alisa Herbst with Rutgers University’s Equine Science Center, of the study in an email.

A big lingering question is how horses’ two-toned calls came to be. Wild Przewalski’s horses can do something similar, as can elks. But more distant horse relatives like donkeys and zebras can’t make the high-pitched sounds.

The two-toned whinnies could help horses convey multiple messages at the same time. The differently pitched neighs may help them express a more complex range of feelings when socializing, said study author Elodie Mandel-Briefer with the University of Copenhagen.

“They can express emotions in these two dimensions,” Mandel-Briefer said.

Associated Press video journalist James Brooks contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

After splitting a pair of home games against ranked Big Ten opponents last week, the Minnesota’s women’s basketball team jumped a spot in the Associated Press poll, to No. 22.

It’s the second appearance in the top 25 this season for the Gophers, who beat then-No. 10 Ohio State last Wednesday at Williams Arena before falling to then-No. 18 Michigan State on Sunday.

The Big Ten has seven teams ranked in this week’s poll. The others are No. 2 UCLA, No. 8 Michigan, No. 9 Iowa, No. 13 Ohio State, No. 14 Maryland and No. 15 Michigan State.

Washington and Illinois received votes. The Gophers end their regular season at Illinois on Sunday.

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By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Writer

When sifting through the seemingly endless collection of documents in the Epstein files gets to be too much and Ellie Leonard needs a break, she takes a walk outside. Then it’s back to the computer.

The New Jersey mother of four is among hundreds of citizen-journalists, or sleuths, absorbed by the material connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein. She’s determined to learn the stories behind his illicit sex ring and relationships with some of the world’s most powerful people, and publish what she finds on Substack.

“I like a good puzzle,” Leonard said. “I like an investigation. I like things that we have to solve and looking for clues.”

Professional news outlets immediately went to work, sometimes in tandem, when the Justice Department released over three million pages of documents and tens of thousands of visual images on Jan. 30. Hundreds of journalists at The Associated Press, CBS, NBC, MS NOW and CNBC are collaborating to examine the files and share what they find.

Dozens of journalists at The New York Times alone are assigned to examine the documents, using artificial intelligence to speed the process along. Still, the newspaper said last week it had examined only a small percentage of what is there.

That’s where people like Ellie Leonard come in.

There’s plenty of material for the professionals — and amateurs

A steady stream of news stories has emerged as more is found and people and institutions react. Some result in resignations or job losses — the chief legal officer at Goldman Sachs, executive chairman at Hyatt Hotel, chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, government officials in Slovakia and Norway.

SmartNews is one of the independent places selling itself as a reliable source to sum up the reports. “CNN is focused on one angle, Fox is pushing another, Twitter is a mess,” a narrator said in one of its social media ads. “I’m seeing the same story with completely different narratives … Who do I trust?”

With all that, there’s plenty of room for people like Leonard. She’s been journalism-adjacent for much of her career, running a business that offered transcription services until AI rendered it largely obsolete. She worked briefly in education and wrote about politics and social issues on her Substack, The Panicked Writer.

But after seeing the interest generated when she started looking at Epstein documents a few months ago, she began devoting all of her professional time to it.

She describes her glee in spotting, at 1 a.m. after an evening of scrolling, a document involving lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Virginia Giuffre, who alleged sex abuse by several men who knew Epstein. In recent Substack postings, she wrote about what was in a young victim’s journal and email conversations between Epstein and Sarah Ferguson.

Leonard said she looks for nuggets of information others may not be talking about and likes to show how things within Epstein’s wide circle tie together. “I’m putting four kids into the world,” she said, “and I don’t want to see something like this happen again.”

Journalist Wajahat Ali, who runs the Left Hook Substack, said he admires Leonard’s work and often features her on his site. Some of the Epstein citizen journalists gather on livestreams to talk about what they’ve found.

Over the past decade, Ali has watched the growth of a subculture of people obsessed about true crime stories who love to comb through evidence and advance their own theories. Authorities involved in the Arizona search for the missing mother of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie have complained about distractions caused by amateur sleuths.

The Epstein files are “the mother lode,” he said. “If you love conspiracy theories, if you love true crime, this is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of true crime. It is the unfortunately sordid gift that will keep on giving.”

A story that fascinates and repulses

Like Leonard, Anne P. Mitchell and Kassandra Mable Costa have professional backgrounds that have helped them with the Epstein files. Costa, from North Carolina, is accustomed to research in her marketing job. Mitchell is a former law professor from Colorado with an expertise in hunting down legal documents and explaining what they mean in plain language.

Fascinated and repulsed by the story, Costa was drawn to the source material. She doesn’t write about what she’s found. Instead, she uses her skills to help others, collecting evidence for a friend who is trying to get the name of former Maine Sen. George Mitchell removed from an elementary school. The former politician has denied wrongdoing, but the files show he maintained a relationship with the sex offender.

“I am not really politically active,” Costa said. “There are ways that I try to help and ways that I try to create a better world. But I’m not overly political. I’m not looking for conflict, I’m not looking for controversy.”

Anne P. Mitchell’s “Notes From the Front” Substack serves as a connector for Epstein sleuths; she holds chat groups and offers access to a multitude of documents to the few thousand followers who have a paid subscription. “We may have just found a smoking gun,” she writes of a file she’s offering of images that appear to show men with victims. Both Mitchell and Leonard offer some material to followers for free, and sell some to the more obsessed.

Mitchell applauds people who are working through the Epstein files. “The more people who are doing it, the more that is going to come to light,” she said. “But I’m guessing that the more people who are doing it, the more it’s not going to be good for their mental health.”

Unproven accusations emphasize the need to verify facts

Matthew LaPlante, a journalism professor at Utah State University, said having more citizens using reportorial skills — whether they know it not — can benefit society. He cited Minneapolis residents who used phones to document immigration enforcement efforts.

The downside, he says, is that few of these people are trained in the painstaking task of verifying facts — or, for that matter, who understand the legal implications of publishing rumors. The New York Times, in a story that explained to readers how it is examining the material, stressed this need for care. “We don’t publish anonymous information that we can’t verify ourselves,” the newspaper said.

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LaPlante pointed to one Substack post last week with more than a dozen videos from the file, most partly redacted and making little sense without any context — like one of two unidentified men writing on a sex doll.

Many unproven accusations, some outlandish, are included in the Epstein files. How much of that unvetted material will find its way into the public discourse — to say nothing of false or doctored information created by the unscrupulous?

“What is in the files is damaging enough,” Ali said. “You don’t need to indulge in conspiracy theories. It would be a disservice to the survivors and would hurt the credibility of what is already there.”

There’s enough to keep the curious occupied — professional and amateur alike. Potentially, there’s more new or unredacted material to come.

“I hope I’m around for 15 or 20 years,” said Mitchell, who is largely confined to her home due to health issues. “Because I really think it’s going to take that long for the full extent of this to be exposed.”

David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.