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At the southern tip of Galiano Island, a diagonal 18-mile-long strip of land hanging off the coast of southern British Columbia, the Douglas-fir thicket thins to a small clearing overlooking Active Passage. A layered view of dark green islands in the Persian Gulf—the archipelago of which Galliano is a part—stretches out in all directions. Directly below the view, the sound of a ferry horn alerts us to a boat full of passengers heading for the nearby city of Vancouver.
“This is the place,” 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: small spears of common coniferous moss springing from their leaves stuck together in the soil and bedrock. Then I spot a yellowish moss, crisped by a dry summer, and ask Simon if that’s the one we’re looking for.
He frowned. “No, it’s Niphotrichum elongatum,” he says. This is another of the more common rock mosses along the Pacific Northwest coast. Simon brought me here in search of Triquetrella californica, a much rarer moss. “It’s a small, unnoticeable thing,” he says. “But it’s beautiful.”
I look around for a few more minutes before declaring that I give up. Simon is on his hands and knees, the tip of his nose inches from the ground as he holds his walnut-colored hair. “Look at the abundance here!” he says. “We see it everywhere.”
Among the discoveries on Galliano Island, British Columbia, is Triquetrella californica, one of Canada’s rarest mosses. 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, moss is made to be hydrated. At Simon’s suggestion, I pour a swig of water on the dried twigs and they instantly spring to life into a miniature forest of mauve-green spiers with leaves growing in rows of three—hence the three in Triquetrella. The nondescript plant not only came back to life, but also, with Simon’s help, erupted into my consciousness.
The author, right, and slime mold expert Pam Jansen add water to Triquetrella californica to watch the dried moss rehydrate and grow. Photo by Shanna Baker.
“You’ve found the rarest moss in Canada,” says Simon. “Here’s your sensational headline.” Simon is jocular—a demanding scholar, he wouldn’t want to read an exaggerated assessment of humble moss. Yet his superior degree was true. At the time, this rocky outcrop was the only place where the plant had been found north of the Canada-US border. A friend of Simon’s has since discovered a spot near Comox on Vancouver Island.
As we head back into the forest, I test Simon’s knowledge further by pointing out plants along the footpath. He enthusiastically rattles off the Latin names of each species. When I naively point out a slender bush with what looks 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 a wave of shame that I do not know even the most common plants. Although life abounds all around us, most of us can hardly name 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 macro-lens, point-and-shoot forever around his wrist, has been on a kitschy mission to document every last sight on Galliano Island, from the lone pair of moose I swam ashore one day to another from the islands in the Persian Gulf, to orb spiders guarding glittering webs, to oysters clustered under the tides. His project 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 any bird that flies above it. Biodiversity Galiano, better known as BioGaliano, is among the more ambitious, comprehensive and mass biological inventories carried out anywhere on Earth.
Andrew Simon, the naturalist leading the Galliano Biodiversity Project, uses his camera’s macro lens to inspect the smallest details on a sample of lichen. Photo by Shanna Baker.
From a scientific point of view, BioGaliano is a great register of scientific knowledge and a baseline against which to measure ecological changes in the future. In its first few years, the project has already documented numerous species that have never before been recorded on the island, and in some cases, such as Triquetrella californica, are completely new to Canada.
At least as important, Simon has given the likes of sideband snails, snow berries, and fairy slippers a place in the conscious minds of the human inhabitants of Galliano Island. Naming something is a fundamental act of recognition—the starting point for the kind of intimate connection that can inspire us to protect the natural world. Judith Winston, a former member 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 will never be saved.
Simon may know about an impressive number of things living under the forest canopy now, but his dedication to understanding nature didn’t kick in until his early 20s. Growing up on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, he was always interested in wildlife, but as a young man he became what he describes as a disillusioned “political activist type.”
He spent his late teenage years and early 20s volunteering with Canada World Youth and on organic farms, traveling to destinations such as Brazil, Hawaii and Mexico. Finally, in 2007, it landed on Trevor Goward’s property in the arid parts of British Columbia near Kamloops. Howard is an avid gardener, self-taught lichenologist and researcher at the University of British Columbia. He calls himself a bit of a recluse, but Howard is kind and affable, the kind of big-picture thinker who can connect any modern crisis to the greed of the capitalist worldview.
One of the tasks that Howard assigns to Simon is to transcribe voice recordings that Howard makes while in the field. Parmeliopsis ambigua, Candelaria concolor, Agonimia tristicula. As the euphony of Latin names rolled over him, Simon found that the role of scribe offered an unexpected gateway to Howard’s worldview.
“I met Trevor and realized there are so many more stories than the human story,” says Simon. Learning the names of mosses and lichens allowed him to focus his attention outwards on the abundant wealth of diverse living things on the planet instead of focusing on his inner discontent.
A burning passion for biodiversity eventually led Simon to focus on environmental studies and cognitive science at Quest University Canada in Squamish, British Columbia, and his experience with Goward helped him land an internship on Galliano Island in 2010. After a summer, spent pulling weeds, propagating native plants and teaching environmental education classes for the Galiano Conservancy Association, a local non-profit organization dedicated to ecological farming, Simon set out to conduct biodiversity surveys on the island.
Simon’s fascination with nature eventually led him to Galliano Island in 2010, where he delved into the island’s biodiversity by doing research for the Galliano Conservation Association. Photo by Shanna Baker.
It turned out to be a fascinating place for a budding naturalist. Tucked away in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island and Washington State’s Olympic Mountains, Galliano 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 changing alignment of the planet gradually moved the archipelago to the north, and about 5000 years ago the coast of BC was flooded with rain. Because Galiano Island was still sheltered between mountain ranges, it has retained some of the species and ecosystems of its warmer past.
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