November Nature Walk Saturday November 6, 2021: Mushroom Madness

Fall is a great time to get outdoors and enjoy what nature has to offer on the trails of Pender Island. Please join us on Saturday, November 6 starting at 9:30 am at the trailhead of the Found Road Trail on Clam Bay Road as we seek out the multitudes of mushrooms that proliferate there at this time of year.

Mushrooms are mostly dormant during the dry summers but as the fall rains start, they produce fleshy reproductive fruiting bodies that pop up through the duff on the forest floor. You might be interested in knowing that there are estimated to be about 3000 varieties of fungi found in British Columbia. However much of the time they exist only as the mycelium that proliferates underground. Mushrooms appear in certain seasons because it this is the time that the fungal mycelia have the inclination and the energy to reproduce sexually.

While we do not have an expert mycologist to lead the walk, there will be conservancy members participating who have some knowledge of mushrooms. We plan to use several methods to identify the mushrooms we find along the trail. We will be using an app called iNaturalist, and its companion app called Seek. Each of the apps compare a photo that a user takes with images stored in their database. We will also make use of another technique described in the newly published book entitled Mushrooms of British Columbia by Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther.