A Bird, A Homeland, A Mirror: How the Kōlea Found Me

February 5, 2026

A poetic research essay exploring the kōlea bird’s migration, its connection to Turkic origins, and how this informs Studio Kōlea’s art practice

Cover Photography by Rae Okawa

I. Encounter: The Bird on My Shore

Each year, as the trade winds abate and the atmosphere thickens with pre-autumnal warmth, a diminutive, vigilant shorebird materializes along the coastline proximate to my residence in Hawai’i.

Initially, I registered its presence with the detached curiosity one reserves for recurring yet enigmatic phenomena—recognizable, though unexplained.

Subsequently, I encountered its likeness in children’s literature and animated cinema, contexts in which it had been rendered as spectacle rather than signifier.

Then, without precedent, an interior imperative surfaced:
“Research this bird.”

I could not have anticipated that this directive would unveil a genealogy of origins.

II. Discovery: The Altai Correspondence

What emerged transcended ornithological taxonomy:

Pluvialis fulva, designated in Hawai’i as the kōlea, undertakes an annual migration from sub-Arctic territories—Alaska, Eastern Siberia, and regions contiguous to the Altai Mountains.

Anthropological scholarship identifies Altai as a foundational locus for Turkic civilizations, a geography resonant within the ancestral lineage of my own heritage.

The avian subject I observed here, at the Pacific’s threshold, had traversed landscapes embedded within the collective memory of my people.

I believed I had selected a symbol.
In actuality, the symbol had already claimed me.

III. The Rare Black Sea Detour

Further inquiry revealed that ornithologists periodically document kōlea specimens along the Black Sea littoral—vagrant individuals displaced from their migratory corridor, arriving precisely where my familial origins converge.

Biological discourse categorizes this as accidental migration.
Hermeneutic interpretation names it otherwise:
an axis intersecting geography with psychology, instinct with inheritance.

IV. Migration as Metaphor

Migration constitutes more than spatial displacement.
It represents an ancient choreography of return, a dialectic negotiation between longing and departure.

Diasporic subjects inhabit this condition analogously: they orbit homelands sustained as much through memory as through physical terrain.

The kōlea thus became an externalized architecture for an internal phenomenology—a mirror reflecting belonging suspended between worlds.

V. Names as Ontological Gestures

Across cultural contexts, this bird assumes multiple nomenclatural identities:

Kōlea (Hawaiian)
Pacific Golden Plover (English ornithology)
Altın Yağmurcun (Turkish, though rarely documented)
Азиатская бурокрылая ржанка (Russian, see Russian colonization of Turkic people)
Pluvialis fulva (Latin)

Naming functions as ontological designation—it determines how a culture perceives and situates a being within its cosmology.

That this bird bears a Hawaiian appellation in the place I inhabit, yet embodies a Turkic ecological provenance, suggested an encoded correspondence between my disparate worlds.

VI. Art as Cartography

Prior to comprehending its migratory patterns, I had commenced painting domestic interiors of repose: women adorned in mu’umu’u garments, reclining within liminal spaces—soft rooms poised between worlds, vessels borrowed from Istanbul tea rituals and transposed into Hawaiian settings.

Observers termed this fusion.
I recognized it as instinct.

Only retrospectively did I discern that I was charting what the kōlea already intuited: how culture migrates, how identity establishes provisional nests, how belonging assumes visual form.

The bird had traced these trajectories long before my arrival.
My art was not inventing narrative—it was transcribing it.

VII. Rest as Hereditary Intelligence

The kōlea operates with extraordinary endurance: traversing oceanic expanses, nurturing offspring, navigating existential risk.

Yet it pauses—resting on lawns, shorelines, coastal stones.

While human cultures frequently compel women toward unceasing productivity, the kōlea embodies a counter-narrative:

Rest is not indulgence—it is biological wisdom.

My paintings of women at rest, enveloped in mu’umu’u, suspended between movement and arrival, therefore function not as fantasy but as instruction derived from the natural world.