Yesterday morning I was walking in the forest (no, not looking for mushrooms) checking out the tree branches with an eye peeled for Owl. As usual. It had been almost exactly a year since I’ve spotted one. Walking along the loop trail I became aware of a commotion up ahead – a group of birds, swooping and yelling, clearly very upset. I stopped and without even bothering to scan the trees or look through my binoculars, I reached into my bag, pulled out my camera and changed to my long lens. I knew exactly what I’d find.
It’s always a thrill. I hung around watching and photographing the action for a long time. There were several songbird species coming in to sound the alarm, they were seriously pissed off and didn’t let up on harassing that owl. Not for a minute. They screamed and yelled, always on the move, flying from one branch to another, perching on branches as close as they dared, getting up into the owl’s face and even flying in close to peck the owl on the head. The owl moved perch three times but other than that sat there looking completely unperturbed, ignoring them while scanning the ground below.
While I was standing there a family came walking along the trail towards me. Among them were two young sisters, maybe aged about 9 and 11, and as they passed behind me I heard the youngest speaking earnestly to the other about what needed to be done to help the planet. She was describing the packaging of a loaf of bread she’d seen that had a cardboard tie instead of a plastic one, and how important that was. As they passed she looked at me and I smiled.
Her mother came along then with other members of the family and stopped to see what I was doing. I pointed out what was going on, gave them my binoculars and stepped aside. The girls doubled back and there were then three generations of this family watching owl and the other birds, passing the binoculars back and forth between them, phone cameras out (the mother took a picture with her phone through the binocs). They were all thrilled and it was a delight to see them share my own feelings about it. As they were leaving I told the sisters, who were beside themselves with excitement, to make sure that they listened to the birds when they were in the forest as you never know what you might find.
As they left, I turned to watch them go and heard the youngest sister say to her family “I love life!”
I thought my already ecstatic heart would explode. THERE’s our future.
For some time now I have been in the midst of a wonderful new (to me) exploration of a vast kingdom, whose species are greater in number than those of the plant and animal kingdoms, mostly unseen to the human eye, barely explored and a world that we walk over and past everyday without registering its existence. Fungi.
Although I’ve been photographing mushrooms in the forest for years now and enjoying their colours, textures and the delight of finding them, and although I was vaguely aware that below these visible fruits lay mycelium networks hidden below the surface of the earth I Had No Idea of what was really going on. Interest sparked by the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi, a film that makes “the invisible visible”, I have gone down the rabbit hole (perhaps pun intended) of this fascinating story of this world that is so complex and so key to life on this planet. This film is on the top of my Hot Tips list – the cinematography is amazingly beautiful and its stories are eye-opening, if not mind-blowing.
I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on, books and articles, listening to interviews, watching other documentaries and generally having a fine time with those whose enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. People who work in the growing field of mycology are an interesting bunch.
Merlin Sheldrake in the introduction to his book Entangled Life describes this fascinating world :
“Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere…Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over 90% of their species remain undocumented.”
Here’s what I’ve been learning.
FUNGI 101
The mushrooms I’ve been searching for and photographing on my walks are only a tiny, visible part of the fungi kingdom.
All mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi produce mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of certain fungi that surface from underground to release the spores, carried away by wind and creatures to reproduce themselves. Only a fraction of the fungi species reproduce in this way, others have different ways of getting the job done. Fungi themselves are masses of long, thin filaments called “hyphae” and a collection of these hyphae in a single specimen are called “mycelium”. Fungi grow by lengthening and branching the hyphae – creating a vast network. When I stand on the forest floor, I am standing on these masses of entangled strands of mycelium that if stretched out would reach out for miles.
Scientists believe that there are probably millions of species of fungi on earth (estimates of plant species are 320,000-380,000 and living animal species number about 1,500,000) but only a fraction of that have been “discovered” and named and of these only a few tens of thousands produce the visible and easier to find and categorize mushrooms. New species are continually being added to the lists of what is known, as the field of mycology itself is growing.
Unlike plants, fungi cannot produce their own nutrition. Some obtain it from decaying organic matter (decomposers), some by growing on their host plant (parasites) in some cases harming them, some are predators of nematodes and bacteria, and some form partnerships with plants, getting their nutritional needs from them via carbon in the atmosphere in exchange for providing water and minerals from the soil.
THE WOOD WIDE WEB
This latter relationship has been revealed as one of the most fascinating areas of current research. The plant-fungus symbiosis (mycorrhizae) is one of the most common ways the two interact for their mutual benefit. Over 90% of plants take on mycorrhizal fungal partners and without them would stop growing or die. Without their plant partners, almost all mycorrhizal fungi will die. This inter-connected relationship is one of the most important in sustaining life on the planet.
In this relationship the plant produces sugars through photosynthesis and feeds the fungus through their roots. The fungus absorbs water and minerals and other chemicals from the soil and feeds these to the plants. A single tree can have several different fungus species partners and a single fungus can attach to the roots of numerous trees. This underground network of plant roots and fungi mycelium supporting each other has been called “the wood wide web”, and has caught the imagination of both scientists and popular culture (think of James Cameron’s movie Avatar and even Lord of the Rings}. What happens to one, affects all.
Image from The Fascinating Social Network of Trees by Macrina Busato in Medium.com
It’s been a few decades since the scientific research has been revealed that shows that it is cooperation not competition that drives the relationship between tree species in the forests where trees share nutrient resources with each other via fungi and the implications this has for forest management and clear-cutting and monoculture replanting practices. Industry and government policy makers have been slow to change, no surprise there. Interesting how vision clouded by attachment to old ignorance and pursuit of money keeps on keeping on.
As I walk in the forest now, my imagination is caught by the ground under my feet, as I think of all the action taking place there. When I look at the trees I don’t just focus on a single tree or an indistinguishable mass of them. Instead I think of how they are all connected, sharing nutrients and passing chemical signals between them all through these vast, mycelium fungal networks.
My neighbours have become used to seeing me wandering around with eyes lifted looking for owls. Now I’ve been caught in the act of bending on one knee, poking around on the forest floor, sometimes with flashlight in hand, searching for the pale, thin strands of mycellium in fallen tree trunks and limbs and the outward signs of hidden fungi – their mushrooms. It’s all there to find, if you look.
Next: Fungi decomposers and what happens when fungi meets human imagination
At the beginning of July, with falling Covid rates and increased vaccinations, the provincial government loosened restrictions in British Columbia. For months people had been prohibited from traveling between regions or coming in from outside the province. No one could travel by ferry across from the mainland for “non-essential travel”, and masks and distancing requirements were still in place. Things were pretty quiet around here.
All that changed and our little summer tourist town was transformed in an instant. Masks are no longer mandatory and social distancing has downgraded to what appears to be a suggestion.
We took advantage of the lifting of travel restrictions and Number One Son Steve and Rosie the Dog came for a visit last weekend. I hadn’t seen him in a year, although he lives just a 2 hour drive away in Victoria. I got to hug my son at long last and it was Bliss.
After such a long time of peace and quiet the immediate flood of people from the mainland and elsewhere descending on us was something of a shock. That first weekend I went to the Saturday Farmers Market to find it packed with visitors, just as it used to be in summers pre-pandemic. It was disorienting after such a long time of constriction and I found it completely unsettling. “Staying in your lane” was out the window and social distancing was crumbling. Some wore masks, some didn’t. Yesterday at the market, a month since the tourists descended, I notice that even more are now maskless, despite the crowds. I am not one of them. I look to my right and I look to my left and I wonder “Are you not wearing a mask because you are double vaxed or because you are never gonna be vaxed?” Twilight zone.
Worth More Standing
News on the island these past months has been about the protests against old growth logging, centred around Fairy Creek on southern Vancouver Island, where protesters have been blocking access to the area to stop the logging companies from going in to rip ’em out. They’ve been camped at the watershed for a year now and since the companies got a court injunction against the protesters 500 have been arrested. This hasn’t stopped them. The government has responded with some temporary halting of cutting and promises to come up with a plan for old growth (and other) forestry changes. Right.
To put this in perspective, on Vancouver Island all but about 1% of old growth forest has been destroyed and trying to save these ecosystems of what little is left is not insignificant. Timber companies continue to cut 10,000 hectares of old growth forest every year. The trees cannot save themselves, it is up to the humans who care to do that. I care. So what can I do? How do you stop the machine?
Old growth remnant, saved by chance. A tree called Big Lonely Doug – 70 metres tall, ~1000 years old, the size of a 20 storey building – note the human at the base of the trunk (magnifying glass may be required). Photo TJ Watt
I heard about a rally and mini-march to be held in our little town in support of our old growth forests and decided to go, more from a sense of helplessness and despair than anything else. I can’t go and get myself arrested at Fairy Creek but I can spend an hour or two to add my body and voice to the count. We were maybe 120 people. It was also the first time I’d been in any kind of group of people in a very long time, which was mildly uncomfortable. I kept my mask on. And lest I become discouraged over our small numbers I have to remind myself that this gathering of people who care, in this little town, was echoed in rallies in other towns and cities as well.
Heat Dome
I think many have heard about the record breaking heatwave we experienced in British Columbia at the end of June. Five days. Over 600 people dead. Shellfish cooked along the shores.
In our backyard the highest temperature reached was 38C. “Normal” temperatures for this time of year (although there’s no such thing anymore) are usually mid-20’s, with overnight temps in the teens. We have no central air, nor do most people around here. I spent 3 of those days more or less staying in one place in front of my own air conditioning system. $30 from Canadian Tire…
BC is on Fire – Again
The town of Lytton in the interior became a violent metaphor for climate change. During the heatwave it earned the painful record of being the hottest place ever recorded in Canada. For three consecutive days long standing national records were broken – the highest temperature clocked at 49.6C. On the fourth day the town literally exploded when forest fire took the entire place out in a matter of minutes.
Lytton after the fire
There are now 240 fires burning on the mainland. Friends of ours in Osoyoos in south Okanagan were forced to evacuate their home a week ago due to fires that reached within half a kilometer from their property. We visited them several years ago and I can appreciate the terrain and the danger they are in high up on Anarchist Mountain. (See Road Trip-A Change of Scenery.)
So far there have been no major fires here on the island. We have had no rain since June 15th. All month we’ve had nothing but clear blue skies and sunshine, then this past Saturday and Sunday it was overcast but not from rain clouds. The smoke generated from the interior fires has made its way to Vancouver and some of this headed across the Strait in our direction. So far, over here we can’t smell the smoke yet, but the skies were hazier and we keep an eye on wind direction as well as everything else in the weather forecast.
My new motto is ‘we’ll see what happens next’.
So it is now a month since the province’s public health re-opening. I continue to take baby steps into the world. A visit in the back garden, coffee with a new friend on a restaurant terrace, taking in the new art exhibitions at our local arts centre – the latter particularly happy-making as the place was closed for over a year and I am SO over looking at art only on a computer screen.
However, a month after relaxing public health orders, we now see new Covid cases in the province again on the rise, and have tripled in the last 10 days, no surprise there. This sign in a local independent grocery store says it plain and simply…
