At the southern tip of Galiano Island, a 28km diagonal strip of land hovering off the coast of southern British Columbia, a thicket of Douglas fir thins to a small clearing overlooking Active Pass. A multi-layered view of the dark green islands of the Gulf – the archipelago of which Galiano is a part – stretches in every direction. Just below the vantage point, the honking of a ferry’s horn alerts us to a load of passengers bound for the nearby city of Vancouver. “That’s the point,” says Andrew Simon, a naturalist. “I’ll let you find it.” A mosaic of ground cover plants makes a living carpet. I recognize only one of them: tiny spears of common cushion moss poking out of their leafy layer, patched together in the dirt and rock. Then I spot a yellowish moss that has become crunchy from a dry summer and ask Simon if that’s what we’re looking for. He furrows his brow. “No, that’s Niphotrichum elongatum,” he says. It is another of the most common rock mosses of the Pacific Northwest. Simon brought me here in search of Triquetrella californica, a much rarer moss. “It’s a small, inconspicuous thing,” he says. “But it’s beautiful.” I look around for a few more moments before giving up. Simon is down on his hands and knees, the tip of his nose inches from the ground as he holds back his walnut-colored tresses. “Look how plentiful it is around here!” He says. “We see it everywhere.” Among the discoveries on Galiano Island, British Columbia, is Triquetrella californica, one of the rarest mosses in Canada. Photo by Shanna Baker. On this sunny July day, Triquetrella californica looks like little more than a sprinkling of dried ramen noodle crumbs. But, like ramen, mosses are made to hydrate. At Simon’s suggestion, I pour a sip of water over the dried sprigs and they instantly spring to life into a tiny body of green spines with leaves growing in rows of three – hence the tri in Triquetrella. The non-descript plant has not only come back to life, it has also burst, with Simon’s help, into my consciousness. The author, right, and slime mold expert Pam Janszen add water to Triquetrella californica to watch the dried moss hydrate and unfold. Photo by Shanna Baker. “You found the rarest moss in Canada,” says Simon. “Here is your impressive headline.” Simon is frivolous – a discerning scientist, he would not want to read an exaggerated assessment of the humble moss. However his superlative was true. At the time, this rocky outcrop was the only place 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 walk back into the forest, I further test Simon’s knowledge by pointing out plants along the hiking trail. He enthusiastically rattles off Latin names of all kinds. When I naively point to a spindle-shaped bush with what look like black beans hanging from its otherwise bare branches, Simon informs me that it is Scots broom, Cytisus scoparius, a widespread invasive species. I feel an embarrassment that I do not know even the most common plant. Although life abounds all around us, most of us can barely put a name to the nearest animal, vegetable or mineral. When Simon walks in the forest, he is among old friends. For the past six years, the lanky 36-year-old with an Olympus point-and-shoot macro lens forever around his wrist has been on a quixotic mission to record every last species on Galiano Island, from the lone pair of moose that swam ashore one day from another of the islands of the Gulf, in the orb-spiders that guarded glistening webs, in the oysters that gathered beneath the tides. His work covers animal, plant, fungal and protozoan life forms and includes marine life up to a kilometer offshore and up to a reef 120 meters below the surface, as well as every bird that flies overhead. Biodiversity Galiano, better known as BioGaliano, is among the most ambitious, comprehensive and essential biological inventories carried out anywhere on Earth. Andrew Simon, the naturalist who leads the Biodiversity Galiano project, uses his camera’s macro lens to inspect the small details in a lichen specimen. Photo by Shanna Baker. Scientifically, BioGaliano is a formidable ledger of scientific knowledge and a basis for measuring ecological change in the future. In its early years, the project has already recorded a number of species that have never been recorded on the island, and in some cases, such as Triquetrella californica, completely new to Canada. At least as important, Simon has given the likes of snails, snowberries, and fairy slippers a place in the conscious minds of Galiano Islanders. Putting a name to something is essentially an act of recognition—the starting point for 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 naming of animals, puts it bluntly: “If a species doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t have a name, it’s never going to be preserved.” Simon may know about an impressive number of things living under the forest canopy now, but his dedication to understanding nature didn’t begin until his early 20s. Growing up on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, he always had an interest in wildlife, but as a youth he became what he describes as a disillusioned “type of political activist.” He spent his late teens and early 20s volunteering with Canada’s Global Youth and on organic farms, hopping to destinations like Brazil, Hawaii and Mexico. Finally, in 2007, it landed on Trevor Goward’s property in BC’s dry interior near Kamloops. Goward is a passionate gardener, a self-taught lichenologist and a researcher at the University of British Columbia. He calls himself a bit of a recluse, but Goward is kind and gentle, the kind of big-picture thinker who can connect any contemporary crisis to the avarice of a capitalist worldview. One of the tasks that Goward assigned to Simon was to transcribe voice recordings that Goward made while in the field. Parmeliopsis ambigua, Candelaria concolor, Agonimia triisticula. As the euphony of Latin names rolled over him, Simon found that the role of scribe offered an unexpected doorway into Goward’s worldview. “I met Trevor and realized there are so many more stories out there than the human story,” says Simon. Learning the names of mosses and lichens allowed him to focus his attention outward on the exuberant wealth of the planet’s diverse living things instead of dwelling on his inner discontent. A burning passion for biodiversity eventually led Simon to focus on environmental studies and cognitive science at Canada’s Quest University in Squamish, BC, and his experience with Goward led him to an internship on Galiano Island in 2010. After a summer spent pulling weeds, propagating native plants, and teaching environmental education classes for the Galiano Conservancy Association, a local nonprofit dedicated to ecological stewardship, Simon began working conducting biodiversity surveys on the island. Simon’s fascination with nature eventually led him to Galiano Island in 2010, where he delved into the island’s biodiversity doing research for the Galiano Conservancy Association. Photo by Shanna Baker. It turned out to be a fascinating place for a budding naturalist. Tucked in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island and Washington State’s Olympic Mountains, Galiano is the driest of the Gulf Islands, but it used to be even drier. Nine thousand years ago, the tilt of the Earth’s axis placed the islands at a more southerly latitude than today, giving them a semi-arid climate. The shift in the planet’s alignment gradually drove the archipelago northward, and about 5,000 years ago, the coast of B.C. flooded with rain. Since Galiano Island was still sheltered between mountain ranges, however, it retained some of the species and ecosystems of its warmer past. Today, the island is a patchwork of rain-loving evergreens like western red cedar and dry grasslands like Garry oak. The island lies within the unclaimed territories of the Penelakut and other Coast Salish nations, but settlers from elsewhere began arriving in the 19th century. Most of the 1,400 current year-round residents have made homes out of scattered cabins in the woods, and in the summer months the island is packed with visiting kayakers, campers and hikers. Come nightfall, eerie darkness envelops land and sea, and morning is greeted by the scent of evergreens and the chorus of thrush and thrush. At first, Simon wanted to…
