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The Highland Naturalist- Number I - May 2012 Yes, there are still gaps where records are few John Philip BIunt (1943-2011): An and far between because of a lack of recorders, Appreciation but these are gradually being filled by people willing to spend their time and effort to visit and lan Evans record. And yes, there are also gaps in our knowledge John Blunt has often been referred to, in my due to a lack of recording species which we think notes from Assynt and further afield, as our local are common, such as house mouse and rat! mycologist. He died suddenly on 8th December 2011, when we were on our way to some winter But I believe that the Group as a whole has fieldwork, and I should like to put on record a become respected for its professional approach brief account of his life and interests. to recording even if it is done largely by amateur volunteers. No longer do you find something and think "l wish I could find out what that is". lnstead we can find a "man who does" (or woman of course) and we can use the forum. And I suppose that is the Group's great strength. At the AGM there was a lovely informal lunch and we all had time to chat to like-minded people and this is how we develop friendships and colleagues that we can turn to. So what would I like to see over the next 25 years? We need to be encouraging more recording in the young people of our region, in Figure: schools and colleges, as they are the next John Blunt, with a large bolete, Balblair Wood, Bonar Bridge, 9.9.201 1. generation who have to take on the responsibility for our fauna and flora. And if we develop in the John was born in Nottingham on 1st April 1943, same way as we have already done, the Group son of a sawyer, who was serving in the Royal will go on to become an even stronger force for Navy. He had a younger brother and lived in the biological recording in the Highlands. suburb of Bilborough for the first twenty years of his life. He was educated at the local primary And finally on a personal note, I was incredibly and secondary schools, leaving at 16 to take up touched by the wonderful gifts presented to me a five year apprenticeship with the Boots Pure at the AGM. lt has been a pleasure and a Drug Company. During this period he joined privilege to be with the past a Group for the 25 youth years. club that specialised in outdoor pursuits. lt was through the club that he first took up caving, a pastime at which he excelled, and which r! brought him up to Assynt for the first time. John *.tr left Boots in 1965 to join the staff of the School &x.** of Agriculture of Nottingham University at Sutton Bonington, where he eventually became Senior d Technician. lt was there that he met Val, his r:., future wife, who was a technician in the same department; they married in 1969. John was first ,3*d introduced to the uses of fungi in the antibiotics factory at Boots, and was later encouraged in their study by the mycologist Dr Tom Hering of the School of Agriculture. Fungi became the all- absorbing interest of his life. I I first met John and Val in the mid-1970s, when they were living in Leicestershire and working as volunteer wardens on the largest of the county's nature reserves, Charnwood Lodge. John had Figure: Grace receives her presentation from the started recording fungi some years previously Chairman at the 25h Anniversary meeting, 26 November 2011 Photo: David McAllister and gradually built up a good working knowledge of the ascomycetes, a group not many amateur 32 The Highland Naturalist- Number I - May 2012 mycologists tackle;they remained his primary occupation), which he forwarded to the British interest within the fungi. After several holidays in Mycological Society for incorporation into the Sutherland, John and Val sold up in 1981 , and national records, and he kept his records upto- moved up to the small township of Nedd, on the date until the day he died. north coast of Assynt. Here they acquired two crofts and, with the help of a local shepherd, built ln the winter o12010-2011, I started working with up their own flock of sheep. These animals were him on a summary of more than 3000 records of known for their excellent condition and fetched the 900 species he had recorded from Assynt, good prices at the Lairg sales. However, it is word-processing the text from his manuscript difficult to get a living out of sheep, so John notes. We had obtained a grant from the supplemented their income with electrical Sutherland Partnership Biodiversity Group for its contracting and a variety of other part-time work, publication. I hope to be able to complete this including some on the local fish farm. project in his memory and as a tribute to his expertise. John was diffident about publication, Pat and I had our first holiday in Assynt in 1982 even of his most noteworthy discoveries, but he and visited John and Val whenever we later had made contributions on his finds to the came up, helping out on one memorable Wildlife of Scourie (2006) and the Wildlife of occasion with the hand clipping of their sheep. Rogart (2007). ln the late 1980s, they let us know that a house plot was available in Nedd, on which we had a His natural history interests were not restricted to house built, and into which we moved two days fungi, and he passed on to me specimens or after my retirement in 1991 . John erected the records of anything else he thought might be of deer fence round our half acre that allowed us to interest, hence the inclusion of his name in the cultivate a garden, and gave us much practical list of contributors to the recently published Atlas help in the following 20 years. We reciprocated of Highland Land Mammals. by passing on to him any interesting-looking fungi we came across, so that for two decades John was extremely capable, and held strong we had a fungal identification service (condition views on environmental and other issues; he did permitting) on the doorstep, hence the frequent not suffer fools gladly and had some heated references to fungi in my writings. battles with bureaucracy. However, he was generous with his expertise, both practical and Sadly, Val died of cancer in 2005, and John mycological, and opened my eyes to the beauty, developed back and heart problems which diversity and importance of fungi. I shall miss latterly prevented him from driving. However, he his very individual take on life and the natural continued actively to pursue his mycological world. studies, using the often less-than-reliable public transport systems in the north-west, reaching as far east as Lairg and south to Ullapool. He had a brief period in sheltered housing in Lochinver, but then returned to the quieter surroundings of Nedd, where he set up house in two caravans, Dragonfly Atlas of the UK: Last Year one customized as a laboratory, supplemented of Field Work by sheds he built himself. ln what proved to be his last year, he joined Pat and I on a number of Jonathan Willet enjoyable excursions to the north and north-west coasts of Sutherland. Work on the UK Dragonfly Atlas is entering its finalfield season, lots of new records have been John was a careful mycologist, with the very collected and the knowledge of the distribution of considerable skills in microscopy that the reliable the species in the Highlands (and the UK) has identification of fungi requires, and which he had never been so good. The Highlands for all its developed over the years. He corresponded large area and relevantly low number of with many of the authorities at Edinburgh and recorders is pretty well covered. There are still a Kew, and his Highland voucher collection will few squares, marked dark grey on the map that eventually find a home at Edinburgh. By the end have no records since 2000, or have never been of 2010, he had accumulated over 6660 records recorded. Some of these are tiny bits of land at of some 1500 species of fungi, mainly the coast whose 1Okm square is made up mainly ascomycetes, but more recently including of sea and can be discounted; and some are in basidiomycetes. He had transferred the records remote areas of Sutherland and Caithness that to a computerised data-base (not his favourite are hard to get to. However there are quite a 33.

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