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At the southern end of Galiano Island, a 28-kilometer-long strip of land suspended off the south coast of British Columbia, a Douglas fir grove thins to a small clearing with views in Active Pass. A layered view of the dark green Gulf Islands, of which the Galiano archipelago is a part, extends in all directions. Just below the lookout, the sound of a ferry horn alerts us to a passenger-laden ship bound for the nearby city of Vancouver.
“This is the place,” says Andrew Simon, a naturalist. “I’ll let you find him.”
A mosaic of ground-covered plants makes a living carpet. I only recognize one: small spears of common moss sprout from its leaf bed, glued together against dirt and rock. Then I see a yellowish moss that turned crunchy from a dry summer and I ask Simon if that’s what we’re looking for.
He frowns. “No, this is Niphotrichum elongatum,” he says. It is another of the most common rock mosses on the northwest Pacific coast. Simon has taken me here in search of Triquetrella californica, a much rarer moss. “It’s a small, unobtrusive thing,” he says. “But it’s beautiful.”
I look around for a few more moments before declaring that I surrender. Simon crouches down with his hands and knees, the tip of his nose a few inches off the ground as he holds on to the new colored shots. “Look how abundant there is out there!” he says. “We’re seeing it everywhere.”
Among the discoveries on Galiano Island, in British Columbia, is Triquetrella californica, one of the rarest mosses in Canada. Photo of Shanna Baker.
On this sunny July day, Triquetrella californica looks like little more than a few crumbs of dried ramen noodles. But like ramen, moss is made to hydrate. At Simon’s suggestion, I pour a sip of water on the withered branches and they are instantly encouraged in a miniaturized forest of lime-green needles with leaves that grow in rows of three, hence the choice in Triquetrella . The indescribable plant has not only come back to life, but also, with Simon’s help, has exploded into my consciousness.
Author, right, and silt mold expert Pam Janszen add water to Triquetrella californica, to see how the dried moss rehydrates and unfolds. Photo of Shanna Baker.
“You’ve found the rarest moss in Canada,” Simon says. “Here’s your sensationalist headline.” Simon is being mocked: a demanding scientist, he would not like to read an exaggerated assessment of the modest moss. However, his superlative was true. At that time, this rocky outcrop was the only place where the plant was found north of the Canada-US border. Since then, a friend of Simon’s has found a patch near Comox on Vancouver Island.
As we head back into the woods, I test Simon’s knowledge, pointing out the plants along the hiking trail. The Latin names of each species explode with enthusiasm. When I naively point to a thorny bush with what look like black beans hanging from its otherwise bare branches, Simon informs me that it is the Scottish broom, Cytisus scoparius, a widespread invasive species. I feel ashamed for not knowing even the most common place of plants. Although life surrounds us, most of us can barely name the nearest animal, plant, or mineral. When Simon walks through the woods, he finds himself among old friends.
For the past six years, the slender 36-year-old man with an Olympus macro lens aims and shoots forever around his wrist has been on a quixotic mission to document all species on Galiano Island, from the lone pair of moose that swam ashore one day from another of the Gulf Islands, to the orb spiders that protect the bright webs, to the oysters clustered under the tides. His project covers life forms of animals, plants, fungi and protozoa, and includes marine life up to a kilometer from the coast and up to a reef 120 meters below the surface, as well as all the birds that fly above. Galiano Biodiversity, better known as BioGaliano, is among the most ambitious, comprehensive, and basic biological inventories being conducted around the Earth.
Andrew Simon, the naturalist who heads the Galiano Biodiversity project, uses the macro lens of his camera to inspect the meticulous details of a lichen sample. Photo of Shanna Baker.
Scientifically, BioGaliano is a formidable book of scientific knowledge and a baseline with which to measure ecological change in the future. In its early years, the project has already documented a number of species never recorded on the island, and in some cases, such as Triquetrella californica, completely new to Canada.
At least as important, Simon has given space to the conscious minds of human residents of Galiano Island to people like side-band snails, snow berries, and fairy slippers. Giving a name to something is fundamentally an act of recognition: the starting point of the kind of intimate relationship that can inspire us to protect the natural world. Judith Winston, a former commissioner of the Singapore-based International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the body that oversees the scientific designation of animals, says bluntly: “If a species has no name, it does not exist. If it doesn’t have a name, it will never be preserved. “
Simon may know an impressive number of things that live under the canopy of the forest now, but his dedication to understanding nature did not begin until he was 20 years old. He grew up on Lake Huron in Ontario, always interested in the wild world, but as a young man he became what he describes as a disillusioned “political activist type.”
He spent his late teens and early 20s volunteering with Canada World Youth and on organic farms, bouncing around destinations like Brazil, Hawaii and Mexico. Finally, in 2007, he landed on the Trevor Goward property in the dry interior of BC near Kamloops. Goward is a passionate gardener, self-taught lichenologist and researcher at the University of British Columbia. He calls himself a bit of a hermit, but Goward is kind and affable, the kind of big thinker who can link every modern crisis with the greed of a capitalist worldview.
One of the tasks Goward assigned to Simon was the transcription of voice recordings that Goward did while on the field. Parmeliopsis ambigua, Candelaria concolor, Agonimia tristicula. As the euphony of Latin names passed over him, Simon discovered that the role of scribe offered an unexpected door to Goward’s worldview.
“I met Trevor and I realized there are a lot more stories than just human history,” Simon says. Learning the names of mosses and lichens allowed him to focus his attention outward on the exuberant wealth of the various living things on the planet rather than being in his inner discontent.
His passion for biodiversity led Simon to focus on environmental studies and cognitive science at Quest University Canada in Squamish, BC, and his experience with Goward helped him do internships on Galiano Island in 2010. After a past summer weeding, propagating native weeds. plants and teaching environmental education classes for the Galiano Conservancy Association, a local non-profit organization dedicated to ecological stewardship, Simon set to work doing biodiversity surveys on the island.
Simon’s fascination with nature took him to Galiano Island in 2010, where he delved into the island’s biodiversity by conducting surveys for the Galiano Conservancy Association. Photo of Shanna Baker.
It turned out to be a fascinating place for an evolving naturalist. Hidden in the shade of the rain from Vancouver Island and the Washington State Olympics, Galiano is the driest of the Gulf Islands, but before that it was even drier. Nine thousand years ago, the tilt of the Earth’s axis placed the islands at a more southern latitude than they are today, giving them a semi-arid climate. The changing alignment of the planet gradually moved the archipelago northward, and about 5,000 years ago, the BC coast was flooded with rain. Because Galiano Island was still protected between mountain ranges, it retained some of the species and ecosystems of its warmer past.
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