Photo by Joern Rohde

The Whistler Naturalists would like to thank everyone who was part of our 18th annual Fungus Among Us Mushroom Festival.

For our virtual event this year, we held our first ever Fantastic Fungi Photo Contest. Thanks to Joern Rohde and Andy Dittrich for judging the contest, we definitely needed pros to help choose winners from all the fabulous entries. 

Congratulations to winners in each category: Captivating Colour – Kali Talmon-Longden; Weird and Wonderful – Kate Siegel; Already Occupied – Monica Petrich; Mushrooms Magnified – Liz Barrett; and Fungal Fun – Johanna Aldred. These photos and other entries can be viewed below.

We’d also like to thank our presenters who were part of ‘Talks with Gurus’ on Friday: Veronica Woodruff for sharing ‘An Enthusiasts Guide to Mushroom Picking’; Bryce Kendrick for opening our eyes to the ‘Marvellous Microscopic World of Spores’; and Andy MacKinnon and Paul Kroger for their presentation on ‘A Natural and Cultural History of Magic Mushrooms in BC’.

Chef Bruce Worden did an amazing job of presenting ‘Cooking and Preserving Wild Mushrooms’. If only we could convey the smell of the wonderful dishes he was preparing! His recipes are available to download on our website. If you missed either the talks or cooking demo, recordings will be available for a limited amount of time on our website here. 

For the local schools, in addition to limited in-person presentations with our gurus, we put together a scavenger hunt activity and accompanying video. After all, knowing the proper name of a mushroom isn’t as important as finding something interesting about it just by looking at it! The activity sheet and video are available on our website here for anyone else who would like to check them out.

On the science side of things, we had a small number of gurus here in person to help with the 2020 inventory. Even though some fungi need to go back to the lab for a full identification, we know already that at least a few of the fungi found are new to the master list compiled by the Whistler Biodiversity Project. This is pretty amazing since not only are there already over 900 species on the master list, but some new finds were in areas like the Emerald Forest which has already been thoroughly inventoried. This is a good reminder that you can go back to the same place every year and still find new discoveries.

Finally, the Whistler Naturalists would also like to thank our key sponsors: The Whistler Community Foundation, AWARE and RMOW.  Thanks also to Nesters Market, Legends Creekside, Whistler Bike Co., Milestones, Armchair Books and Whistler Biodiversity Project.

See you next year, as always, the weekend after Thanksgiving!