Hand tools and figured woods

The last load of firewood came, astonishingly, with quite a large amount of flame birch, a kind of curly grained, shimmery yellow birch wood. I’ve been saving whatever pieces I see, either big ones for a woodturner friend or smaller ones for my own purposes. Something tricky about figured woods seems to be that they can’t be carved with ordinary knives, planes, and so on, as far as I can tell—do this and the grain starts to split. I have had success with files and saws so far, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.

How do you work with these difficult but beautiful woods?

Wow, just today I was cutting firewood when I noticed one of the logs had a heart-shaped cross section. So I made some coasters.
No tools needed besides a bow saw. These can be used for a lot of things.