May 5, 2011

I am going to interrupt my happy meanderings through the fungi of Haida Gwaii to mark two unique events, both of which happened yesterday, 2nd May 2011.

The first (and possibly the more important) was the election in my Federal riding,
Saanich and Gulf Islands, of Elizabeth May, National Leader of the Green Party of Canada, to Parliament, handily defeating the long-standing Conservative incumbent (and Cabinet Minister) Gary Lunn. She is the first Green to be elected in a Canadian Federal election, and I feel proud to have played a small part in her campaign.

The second event was the arrival of four copies of our new book, The Genera of Hyphomycetes. These copies are to be signed by all four authors and distributed among them. This book, the product of 20 years' work, looks just as fine as I thought it would, and I look forward to getting copies to my friends and colleagues as soon as I can. The book is just over 1,000 pages long, and has thousands of illustrations. It will be the standard work for years to come, and I am proud to have been part of the team that produced it.
Here is the cover...

May 2, 2011

For the past 5 years several local mycologists including yours truly have been making extended visits to a group of islands off the Northwest coast of British Columbia called Haida Gwaii (they were called the Queen Charlotte Islands until recently, when the ancestral rights of the Haida Nation were recognized). Haida Gwaii is an archipelago of more than 150 islands with a total land area of just over 10,000 square kilometres.

Our visits were undertaken to collect and identify as many of the fungi of the islands as possible. 
Over the five years, we made eight field trips to Haida Gwaii of ten to fourteen days. In all, 113 areas were visited (53 in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, 12 in Naikoon Provincial Park),
and we made and preserved 2906 collections representing 615 species, and documented 812 species of fungi (not including lichens) from all available sources. We collected on nineteen islands, 17 of which lie entirely within Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve. The islands range in size from 0.5 hectares to the over 648,000 hectares of Graham Island.

In this blog entry, I show pictures of several of the more unusual fungi we found.
We have now compiled our information and pictures into a book 'The Outer Spores - Mushrooms of Haida Gwaii' which will be published very soon and will be available from my little publishing house, Mycologue.

There are lots (hundreds) of pictures, so I have enough to illustrate quite a few blogs...
Here are the first 4 - a rather diverse bunch!