Editor:
Since I moved to the Coast 25 years ago, I’ve looked forward to autumn as a time to tramp our mountain trails and perambulate my neighbourhood to observe and occasionally collect mushrooms. Starting in September, they have appeared in forests, lawns, hedgerows and on dead and decaying logs in different sizes, colours and abundance.
This fall, there are almost none. That is to say, where I usually see variety and abundance of fungi equivalent to marine life in the Great Barrier Reef, I can count on one hand the varieties I’ve spotted to mid-November. Only one – a little white Fir-Cone mushroom (Strobilurus var.) – is abundant, but other than that there are no “fairy rings,” amanitas, “shaggy manes,” chanterelles, pines, “lobsters” or “pigs ears.”
There are not even any slime molds or coral mushrooms poking up. Russulas often blanket forest floors like extraterrestrial eruptions but this year I’ve seen exactly one.
This isn’t just an an event to shrug off: fungi are vital components of terrestrial ecosystems, acting as nature’s first recyclers of biotic detritus, they provide vast mycelial networks that provide critical chemicals to plants and trees, and they are food for animals and insects, and a few humans, too.
Nature’s playing a very fickle hand in an unpredictable turning of events this year. It would be very foolhardy to pretend to know how this will play out in the future.
Michael Maser, Gibsons
