The pen Tony shows, looks like it, although the color is wrong. Looks like a camera issue, where the camera isn't capturing the color right. I use staghorn all the time for intarsias and for pens. Like everyone says the color is great. It's quite stable when dry. It is a very soft wood. It's "fuzzy". Some times I can sand it all day with really fine grits and it just stays fuzzy. Once a coat of finish is applied, it's much easier to remove fuzzies.
If you have a sumac in your yard, you can cut it down 6" from the ground and the tree will not die. It will regrow, many times bushier than before and in no time at all. Plowing the stuff with a tractor just makes more sumac from the root pieces! Osage Orange does the exact same thing, although a totally different tree/bush. Osage starts as a bush, then grows to be a tree...thus the farmers used to plant is as hedge rows to keep the cattle in the field. Worked great until the bushes turned into tree's, the lower branches then fall off leaving it open for the animals to escape. That takes awhile of course as the osage grows really slow. The farmers came back all angry and cut all the osage down, but they wouldn't die. So they would pull the stumps and plow up the roots. This lead to further frustration as all the root pieces would become osage bushes! The only way to stop them is to continuously mow them or burn them out. One last interesting thing is the concentration of silica in osage. If you turn off all the lights and cut a piece of osage with the chop saw..you can see sparks. It's one of those woods that really trashes the tools fast.
There's so much sumac up here in the north you can't give it away!
