South Vancouver Island Mycological Society
Breaking news! In Telluride, Colorado, on Sunday, August 18, 2024, SVIMS ex-president Andy MacKinnon received the Lincoff Award for Significant Contributions to American Mycology.
Previous receipients of this award include David Nichols and Paul Stamets.
(Accompanying photos are from the 2024 Telluride festival parade.)
NEW General Meeting day of the week and time:
7pm arrivals; 7:15pm start.
1st Thursday of the month, September to May except January.
Guests welcome! Bring your mushrooms to be identified.
St Luke’s Hall
3821 Cedar Hill Cross Rd, Victoria, BC V8P 2M6
And our first speakers of the new season are
Ann McCall is a mycology enthusiast with a particular interest in taxonomy and ITS barcoding. She joined SVIMS in 2022 to connect with a community of like-minded individuals while advancing her understanding of mycology.
With a background in engineering and a life-long passion for the sciences, Ann finds joy in deepening her knowledge of fungi while actively contributing to citizen science. She regularly participates in citizen science initiatives aimed at documenting all macrofungi in North America, and hopes to make DNA sequencing more accessible to SVIMS members.
When she’s not exploring forests in search of mushrooms, Ann can be found baking tasty treats or adventuring in her self-converted campervan.
Mo is a third year student studying forest biology at the University of Victoria. She has been apart of SVIMS since 2019, and has been doing nature photography since 2017. Her dad and older brother taught her to use a camera, and through lots of trial and error she has slowly improved over the years. She enjoys finding unique species of fungi all over Vancouver Island to photograph. Alongside photography, Mo enjoys reading, writing, and painting.
We caught mushroom fever around 2015, having no formal mycology training, we began learning about and hunting mushrooms every chance we got. We moved to Vancouver Island in 2020, largely to chase a longer mushroom season than Manitoba has.
Josh was so fortunate as to come across the first of the Ophiocordyceps on a Western Carpenter ant in 2021 and we later found a large number of specimens at that site.
Treasure hunting for edibles in the forest has been a deep passion for both of us and we hope to have many more mushroom hunting years ahead of us.
Mushroom Identification workshop with the iNaturalist program and website.
Sunday, July 21st, 2024
10am-12pm
Sign up link and Victoria location is in an email to members from SVIMS President on Friday, July 19.
2. Special General Meeting
your vote counts, as we are a membership-driven club:
JULY 22nd, Monday
at 7pm
ZOOM ONLY – 15 minutes, max
The link to the meeting is in an email to members from SVIMS President on Friday, July 19.
Just one week left to submit your photos for the 2025 SVIMS Calendar.
Send your photos to Jaz Grenier email link . (This link is live, but the email address in the poster below is not.)
SVIMS members made one final spring outing, this time to Royal Roads. About 20 people, under the leadership of Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther, searched diligently for mushrooms for almost 90 minutes, but not many mushrooms revealed themselves. A recent spate of dry weather had ended the spring mushroom season early.
About a dozen species were recorded (iNaturalist records are here). The mushroom in greatest abundance was the Panther Amanita, Amanita pantheroides. About 15 caps of it showed up. Some were small and old and had only a slight resemblance to the mushroom seen in field guide pictures.
A big thanks to all the event organizers. Photos by Steven Strybosch.
SVIMS is sad to hear of the passing of mycologist Dr. Jim Ginns. He died on April 29, 2024.
Jim and his wife Anne retired to Penticton, BC in 1997. He has made presentations to SVIMS several times and was a member of the Pacific Northwest Key Council. He is the author of numerous scientific publications including Polypores of British Columbia.
Anne died in January of this year. The South Okanagan Naturalist’s Club has published a tribute to Anne and her work.
Jim and Anne were also noted conservationists. For nearly 50 years they owned an ecologically diverse 23-hectare parcel of land bordering Thetis Lake Regional Park. It was their goal to see the land permanently protected. The Ginns donated a significant portion of the value of the property to our regional land trust Habitat Acquisition Trust (HAT) to achieve this goal.
In 2018, they also donated their 42-hectare property in Gatineau, Quebec to the municipality of Cantley as a nature reserve, now called Parc écologique Ginns.
SVIMS organized a 2024 spring foray at Metchosin Wilderness Park. About 30 people, including two foray managers (Steve Strybosch and Denise Furst) and two foray leaders (Kem Luther and David Walde), gathered at the Clapham Road entrance on Saturday, April 20, 2024, to spend two hour hunting down fungal fructifications. About a quarter of the group were on their first organized foray.
This was the third consective year for a foray at this season and place. Kem Luther, one of the leaders, handed out a list of about eighty mushrooms that had been identified in the earlier forays. By the end of the day, despite the dryer conditions, participants had found about 18 of the previously seen mushrooms. They also found about seven that were not on the list.
Results from the foray were recorded on iNaturalist with the help of Elora Adamson and Ann McCall, who were especially careful to take multiple photos from many angles and distances. As usual, the exact counts may change as experts from around the world weigh in on the iNaturalist posts. One of the most interesting specimens — probably a species of Inocybe that needs a new name — was vouchered.
Photos by Steven Strybosch.
