Dave HuggardI spent a good part of 2024 learning the species within an hour or so’s walk of our cabin at Hollyburn. My target was anything I could photograph and identify, with help from the astounding resource of iNaturalist. I ended up with 614 species, plus or minus, I’m sure, a few misidentifications. Flowering plants, mosses, insects, and mushrooms made up the majority, along with a lot of everything else ranging from slime molds to leeches to large carnivores.
Much more than a long list of species names, the year gave me a greater sense of place. Like growing up in a village, I started to recognize many of the faces I walked by, even if those “faces” had eight eyes or were the 1-millimeter-long leaves of a moss. With that recognition came an appreciation of how things vary up and down the mountain, in this unique spot versus that one, and as the seasons circle round. It was like a blurry picture getting sharpened, and resolving itself into all sorts of previously unnoticed patterns and delights. And it also brought those joyful moments when I would say – yes, out loud – “Hello, beautiful stranger, who are YOU?” This was heard by many new lichens/bugs/mushrooms/etc, and fortunately not, as far as I know, by any disconcerted passing hikers.
The year started out strangely – although, of course, strange is the new normal – with no snow on the ground. For a mountain in coastal BC, this is alarming, but it gave me a great opportunity to start learning some mosses, which are happy as can be with liquid precipitation. A plant ecologist from California once asked me how many species of trees were in this area, and I sensed a bit of disdain when I answered “7 or 8”. However, I would like all to know, there are 180 species of mosses in just this area (versus only about twice that many in all of California). Embarrassingly, though, I knew approximately one of those species, and that’s only because it looks like a pipecleaner and is called “pipecleaner moss”. So off I went with camera, tweezers, collection bag, inadequate toy microscope, field guides, the earnest but often misguided AI recognizer and incredible volunteer experts on iNaturalist. Most helpful of all was the enthusiasm and respect for these little guys that I got from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Gathering Moss”. I still know only a few species, but it is so much better than seeing them as just a vague smear of greenishness.
When the snow finally came in late January, a big surprise was how many insects, spiders, and other little creatures were walking around on it. Some of them undoubtedly fell out of trees or arrived by other misadventures – but in nature, one creature’s misadventure is another creature’s dinner. Other animals depend on the snow, including winter stoneflies . They clamber up 2 or 3m tall snowbanks beside mountain streams and wander about on the snow on warmer days. They are beautiful sleek creatures, fairly large, quite common, and I had never seen them in many years’ of my own wandering around on the snow. Amazing how you just don’t see things if you’re not looking…
The snow did eventually get deep. (Not as deep as in the oldtimers’ days, of course, but it will probably never get that deep again, and perhaps it never actually did get that deep then either). Lichens flourish on the trees in the cool, wet, old-growth mountain forest, but they don’t like getting buried. There is a distinct trim line with few lichens below about 2-4m, reflecting the common mid-winter snow depth (and a way to check those oldtimers’ stories). Peak snowpack acts like a ladder to help learn some lichens up in the trees. Though, I have to say, lichen identification is a bit of a dark art, with keys including things like “partially lacking sorediate isidia”, “faintly yellow in a 5% alcohol solution of p-phenylenediamine”, or “turns greenish-purple in the presence of eye of newt”.
Once snow comes to the mountain, it stays. And stays. And stays. I would be seeing pictures on iNaturalist of all the spring flowers in Texas or California, and then later at low elevations in Vancouver, while I was slogging around in sleet on 2m of wet snow. It was bit disheartening, and I thought of changing my study area to, say, Costa Rica. But then I found a patch of coltsfoot flowering along a lower roadside, then noticed the willow flowers opening, new insects fluttering on the snow, new bird calls in the trees, and then the first violet. Spring started arriving, like popcorn starting to pop.
The dramatic change of spring after the long wait of late winter gives a real tangible feeling to what “biodiversity” means. One of the great pleasures is standing in a sunny patch of flowering mountain-ash in spring, sheltered from any cold mountain winds, and watching the parade of pollinating insects. The place is literally abuzz. Unlike earlier-flowering blueberries, where bees frustrate photographers by waving around upside-down and only staying for a second, mountain-ash provides a floral catwalk with easy views of the models. Any one patch only blooms for a week or so, but happily the Great Buzzing takes six weeks or so to make it’s way up to the top of the mountain.
Mid-summer is the halcyon time. Just when mountain lake-swimming becomes a pleasure, rather than a badge of courage or craziness, insects that overwinter as larvae or eggs start to emerge – first the dragonflies appear on sunny lakesides, a bit later the grasshoppers on grassy openings. Butterflies are on the wing, and moths start showing up at lights in the evening. The excitement of chasing all these zipping, dashing, jumping creatures helps mask the subtler realization that the spring flowers are now gone, even at the top of the mountain, and holes and brown patches are showing in leaves that were perfectly new not long ago.
Along with the outburst of biodiversity, we also had a great summer eruption of king bolete mushrooms (aka porcinis, cèpes, steinpilz, and other terms of adulation). In places, you had to pick your steps around them. Why there are these rare years of superabundance is a mystery. Mushroom afficionados’ theories are marvels of story-telling, weaving together any number of weather events this year and last (“dry late summer last year, then warm in early May, but rainy until mid-June, followed by one heavy rain three weeks later…”) One man told me, in a commanding east European accent, that bolete super-eruptions happen every 17 years. It would be wonderful to have such a long attention span to pick up that pattern! Along with the boletes, there were also outbreaks of other rare and exotic summer fungi, including a red gastrobolete with its spore-releasing pores inexplicably on the inside of the mushroom. Are those also on a 17-year cycle, or maybe their 13-year or 42-year cycle just happened to coincide?
As I gained a nodding acquaintance with many of the plants and some of the small creatures of the mountain forest, I came to appreciate how much extra diversity lives in a few special places – Very Beary Bog, Magic Marsh (so named by me because it has knee-deep water on a 10-degree slope – the physics of this remain mysterious), creek gullies, the small areas of rocky alpine, and little patches of forest that are particularly rich for reasons known only to the past centuries. These are the places you can go day after day, thinking “OK, what’s it going to be today?”, and it is always something extraordinary.
Late summer is the fruiting season, when plants produce the nuts and berries that are their ticket to doing it all again next summer. It was also when I resolved to finally learn some grasses and sedges. My knowledge at that point was pretty much confined to “Sedges have edges”. I was frustrated trying to key out my first grass – until I realized that it was actually a sedge (at which point I was frustrated by the sedge key). By the end of my sessions with lemmas and bracts and perigynia, my knowledge had grown to… well, let’s just say that I left ample opportunity for wonderful enlightenment in the future.
I made the mistake of telling a passing hiker in early August that I hadn’t seen a bear yet this year. As our ancestors knew, uttering the b-word is a peril, conjuring up the beast itself. And so it was, as I saw at least one bear on almost every hike for the next 6 weeks. Which, no disrespect to those ancestors, is a marvellous thing. There is a reason bears have a name like “bear”, rather than, say, “Symphyotrichum foliaceum var. parryi”. Bears reside in an ancient part of the human brain. It is invigorating to know that there is someone bigger, faster, stronger, and just as irritable as yourself out there, and that you will likely be engaging in negotiations with them at some point. And, of course, everything turned out peacefully – I left the bears to their blueberries, and they left me to my Symphyotrichums.
Fall is a fading away for many things – no more butterflies, no more flowers, no more bees. But it is a Fabulously Frantic Fruitapalooza for our fungal friends (What is it about mushrooms that inspires goofy alliteration?) Identifying the multitude of brownish mushrooms used to be difficult. Now, with technology like DNA sequencing, it is impossible. DNA-based species may better represent evolutionary history – except no one ever actually tells those stories – but now naturalists can only identify and report mushrooms at the genus level. To keep track of what species are where and when, I resorted to the Goofy Alliteration Naming System: the Tricky Tricholoma, Corpulent Cortinarius, Lascivious Lactarius…
With the first snowfall in November, the area returned to its resting state, literally for the many species that persist as seeds or spores or eggs under the snow. But the insects and spiders that live on the snow surface were back, almost before the first flakes stopped falling. And in the fresh snow, a year-end gift, tracks of a bobcat heading down the mountain. Its path was an efficient route with a clear direction, following human trails when those went the right way, angling off on subtler animal trails when those were more direct, using logs to cross small streams and aiming directly at a wooden bridge to get over a larger one, passing near and even under one cabin (was it just in the way, or attractively rodent-scented?) I’ve only seen one bobcat “in person” but felt that I knew that one well for an hour or so. And the same for the other 613 species in my diverse and eventful year.
