Hi, its all go for fungi now as you can imagine so what have I been upto….?
As a challenge to myself I set up a number of forays, talks and workshops to lead over the autumn with local wildlife groups, countryside rangers and the general public and I’m about half way through these – at once totally scary and brilliant fun! I have discovered I love this kind of public education work and hope that this might be the “natural talent” I can contribute to Scottish mycology when my apprenticeship finishes.
The learning curve still continues though in terms of identifying fungi, I reckon I have about 100 UK species down….8900 to go! I went to an Identifying Fungi residential course at Kindrogan Field Studies Centre near Pitlochry for a week and can at last do a gill trama section under the microscope (which involves cutting a tiny piece of mushroom gill to see the layout of the cells). Progress!
I’ve spent time over the last few months work shadowing Liz Holden, a freelance mycologist working in Scotland, who has been showing me different survey techniques. We have been site condition monitoring at Glen Tanar, near Balmoral, particularly looking for tooth fungi, which have UK protection as they and/or their habitats are under threat. We did surveys for Trees for Life at Dundreggan, near Loch Ness and last week we were over on the west coast in Sunart and then Oban to do some surveying for fungi in oakwoods. I have never seen so much rain! The oak trees have this annoying habit of hanging off steep slopes so it was inevitable I would do something spectacularly stupid and I did – rolling head first down a slippery slope finally stopping by whacking my back off a rock. So I have decided to write a book called “Extreme Mycology” which I’m hoping will fly off the shelves!
Sam Ranscombe – BTCV Natural Talent Mycology Apprentice