Rancher Keith Robinson works to preserve last Niihau sandalwood

MAKAWELI — This is a story about persistence.

Fifty years ago, a botanical team surveying on the island of Niihau found something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Niihau, like Kahoolawe, was understood to be an island where no sandalwood grew. Kahoolawe had once had sandalwood, but it was extinct there. Niihau was never known to have sandalwood.

Yet at the edge of a steep coastal cliff, where clouds of salty mist drift up the slopes from the breaking sea below, the team spotted a pair of 3- to 4-foot sandalwood plants.

Rancher Keith Robinson, who was part of the initial botanical team, climbed the cliff one or two years later with a young Niihau man, Kuramatsu Opio Shintani. The sandalwood plants were gone, probably browsed to death by cattle or sheep.

But 20 feet away, a lone small