CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Hello and welcome to Nature Fix with me,
Claire Hickinbotham. Every month we take you with us as we meet
the people who spend their time outside and join them in a place
that most inspires them.
The morning sun is just about peeping over the spectacular
hills of Hardcastle Crags in West Yorkshire and I'm in search
of Steve Hindle. A man who spends a lot of time with his
head down looking for rare and unusual and often very brightly
coloured fungi.
Steve didn't train for this job but a natural intrigue and
regular dog walks in the area meant his passion developed and
eventually led to his hobby becoming a full-time career. So
let's catch up with Steve and his mushroom hunting dog on a
fungi hunt.
We've parked up at the top of a stunning valley. It's the end of
November but it's one of those crisp winter mornings. It's so
still and so quiet and there's just a smattering of farm
buildings and farm cottages.
This is the epitome of a rural remote landscape and Steve is
somewhere around here.
Hi, you must be Steve.
STEVE HINDLE: I am, hello.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Nice to meet you.
And who's this you've brought with you?
STEVE HINDLE: So this is Meg.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Hi Meg.
STEVE HINDLE: She's my mushroom hunting dog. Well, I wish.
Generally she's just wandering around looking for a carcass to
gnaw on, but she keeps me company and she's very good.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: She's a lovely thing. Is she a lab?
STEVE HINDLE: She is, yeah. She's a black lab, 11 years old,
still in fine fettle.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: She's very pretty, aren't you? You're a
very pretty doggy.
So when you go about trying to find fungi, the field that we're
stood in at the moment has a few sheep in it, a few sheep
droppings, a lot of grass and a few mounds. So what's the
starting point?
STEVE HINDLE: Well, the idea is a lot of walking around. So I
basically start at the bottom of the field and I walk across the
field and then I turn around, go up a meter maybe and I go back
across the field and I'm just staring at the ground.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So you're scouring a crime scene almost.
STEVE HINDLE: I am. It's very, very CSI.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So can we find something today?
STEVE HINDLE: Absolutely. So, I've been here surveying this
morning and we've got some amazing species in here. So
we'll just have to have a little look around, see if I can
remember where I saw them and then hopefully we'll see
something.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What exactly are we looking for? What
does it look like? Is it fairytale red and white?
Halloween, you always hear about the..... is it witches' fingers
that look like fingers coming out of the ground?
STEVE HINDLE: There is dead man's fingers and dead mole's
fingers. And the one that you're talking about, the fly agaric,
the red and white one, they're all woodland species. So the fly
agaric is a mycorrhizal species with pine and birch trees.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What does mycorrhizal mean?
STEVE HINDLE: Mycorrhizal means that there's an association
between a tree and the fungus. So they're in a symbiotic
relationship. The tree's providing sugars for the fungus,
the fungus is providing nutrients. The dead man's
fingers, for example, and the candle snuff fungus, they're
decomposers, so they're rotting down wood.
Most of the ones that we're looking for are symbionts, so
they're like mycorrhizal, but they're in relationships with
grasses, flowering plants, and they're restricted to ancient
grassland.
And that's grassland which has not been disturbed, either
physically or chemically, for hundreds of years, basically. So
the best fields that we find have been, in this kind of
management, grazed, or there may be hay meadows, and that's been
going on for generations. Maybe medieval period or even before
that.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Let's walk on but I'm really interested to
hear about how you got into this line of work. Have you always
done this?
STEVE HINDLE: So no, actually for most of my adult life I've
been involved in circus kind of stuff.
Basically prior to this I was making circus equipment but
predominantly hula hoops because once people realised that the
kind of hoops that I was making for circus performers were
actually good for exercise, then... you know that business
started to take off.
But prior to that i was running a circus shop teaching circus
skills and that's my background
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So how do you make the leap from teaching
circus skills and making specialist hula hoops yeah into
identifying rare species of fungi?
STEVE HINDLE: I'd always had dogs when i was younger and i
got a dog and i started going out for walks in the countryside
and then when you're doing that You're seeing things all the
time.
So it started off with me just thinking, why do I know the name
of some of these trees, but I don't know other ones? So I got
a little guidebook and started to learn about trees. And then I
started to learn about flowers and grasses and ferns. And then
autumn comes around and then it's like, what are all these
mushrooms, you know? And again, some of them I knew, but most of
them I didn't.
So I started studying, learning, collecting. That was all really
woodland based because that's the place that you think of the
fungi as being.
But then I came out into some of the grasslands and started to
see all of these amazing fungi that we've got in the
grasslands. And I just kind of got a little bit obsessed with
them, actually, and never really went back into the woods again.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: You live locally then, and this was your
patch to walk the dog, and that's how it all started?
STEVE HINDLE: That's it, yeah.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And then how do you go from it being your
dog walk to it being your entire life, your job, your career?
STEVE HINDLE: So I joined the local natural history group, the
Halifax Scientific Society. Then I started going out with the
council biodiversity officer to carry out surveys of sites that
they were looking at. People here at the Trust knew of me as
a local person who was interested in these fungi. And
so when the job application came along, I actually just got in
touch to say, whoever you get in this role, I can help out with
that.
And Craig, who put the role forward, said, so do you not
want to apply for the job? And I was like, no, I'm self-employed,
got my own business. I don't have a qualification in ecology,
which it says you need. And he came to talk to me and said,
well, you know, when you put out a job advert, you can't get
everything that you want.
And actually the most important aspect of this is probably
somebody who's really good at identifying these species. So
eventually I thought, right, OK, I'm going to apply for the job.
And then I got the role.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Here you are.
STEVE HINDLE: Here I am. But it was a big step. You know, you've
got to close up your own business. Although I do still
make a few hula hoops now and again but yeah.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Any regrets?
STEVE HINDLE: No, I get permission to go into the fields
that I've been eyeing up for many years and look around and
find amazing things so it's absolutely fantastic.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So should we start moving across the
field?
STEVE HINDLE: Sure. Definitely I know I've got something that I
can show you over here.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Okay so how big is this one that we're
looking for? Am I going to see it or are you going to point it
out?
STEVE HINDLE: I'm going to point it out to you, but when you see
it, you will know.
It's purple.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Purple?
STEVE HINDLE: Yeah, we've got quite a few purple ones,
actually. And it's an unusual colour to see in nature, so when
you see it, it really stands out to you.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh, wow.
STEVE HINDLE: So this is called Violet Coral.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Yeah, so I was going to say it looks like,
yeah, coral. It's almost a clump.
STEVE HINDLE: Exactly. So you might think of fungi as being
mushrooms, generally. But in these ones that we're looking at
we've got quite a lot which are clubs, spindles, corals, and in
these fields we've got a number of different named corals but
this one is a really rare one.
If you were to Google this you would find lots of newspaper
headlines saying rare fungus found in such and such place. So
although there are quite a few records across the UK, actually
the UK is one of the most important places in the world
for these kinds of fungi because we've got the habitat for them.
We've got that temperate influence coming across the
Atlantic we get all the rain but it's fairly mild. So in the UK
we've got more of these than anywhere else in the world. And
this in association with a few other species I'll be able to
show you tells you it's a really incredible site.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: We're not just here to see the violet
coral it supports lots of different fungi.
STEVE HINDLE: That's right and these species tend to form a
community. So this particular one, the violet coral is the
only one of the corals which is on the International Union
Conservation of Nature red list. So that's the global red list.
So you might hear about species that threaten with extinction
like a polar bear, snow leopard, giant panda.
This is in the same category of those. This is vulnerable to
extinction. So in this area, West Yorkshire, I've recorded 32
species which are vulnerable to extinction. Two species which
are endangered. So these are really, really special.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So these are as rare as a snow leopard?
STEVE HINDLE: They're as threatened as a snow leopard. So
the population may be less or more. There is a species which I
found in a nearby field which there's only one record of in
the world.
But we don't know how threatened it is because we've not been
able to monitor population trends. So that's what the
threat level tells you.
It's about how quickly that population is declining. So
these are disappearing fast.
So it's only when somebody who knows what they're looking for
comes in, looks around and can find these things that we then
start to learn the value of these sites and what we've got.
And it's really important that we do that.
So if people are out and about in grassland, particularly, and
see red mushrooms, yellow mushrooms, orange mushrooms,
they're going to be the waxcaps. And it's really important that
they try and let somebody know about that. Or Plantlife have an
app called the Waxcap app, and you can record then the colours
that you're finding.
So you don't need to know what the species is, you just need to
think, that's a red one, that's a yellow one, that's a green
one. And then they are able to use that information to kind of
map and find out where the hot spots are. And then somebody
like me can go into those hot spots, do a survey, and then we
get a real sense of what the value is of that site.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Got you. Let's move on. But as we go
across the field and we start zigzagging back and forth, just
tell me what a waxcap is.
STEVE HINDLE: So the waxcaps are mushrooms and they are the kind
of classic example of these kind of fungi. So, some of them are
quite large you can see them from the road and they're also
the easiest to identify. And in fact I've created an app which
you can get for iPhones and Android which is called Peachy
Steve's UK Waxcaps and if you think you have a wax cap that
will help you then to identify which one it is or give you a
pretty good idea.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Can I ask you a question that someone who
was more au fait with fungi and mushrooms probably wouldn't need
to ask. But why are they so brightly coloured? Why are they
so unusual in their shape? Why are they so different in nature
to anything else?
STEVE HINDLE: It's a really good question and it's one that we
don't have the answer to. It may be that some of them may rely on
a relationship with an insect, potentially, that's attracted to
them. But I really don't think we know the answer to that. And
the colours can change.
So the Parrot Waxcap is typically green and yellow. If
we have a look on my app, if we go to the Parrot Waxcap entry,
this is a Blue Parrot Waxcap. It's a very rare colour form.
Yeah, this is the typical form, the green and yellow.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Green and yellow, they're quite bright
colours again, aren't they? And they've got that, the underside
of it is the same as you'd see in a mushroom that you bought in
the supermarket.
STEVE HINDLE: Yeah, so they're called the gills or lamellae.
And in the waxcaps, they tend to be quite widely spaced. So if
you compare that to your field mushroom, it's got very, very
crowded gills. Here you can see the space in between each one.
But one that I'd found, it was on a frosty day and the frost
seems to change the colours of things. And this one had every
colour of the rainbow in order from top to bottom.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: In order?
STEVE HINDLE: In order. When we think of the colours of the
rainbow, that's to do with light being refracted. But why should
these pigments... Go through that same colour change in
order. That makes no sense to me.
I just want to show you one of the waxcaps. Now, the waxcaps
generally are brightly coloured, but this one isn't.
It'd be very easy to mistake this one for a lump of dung.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It does look like a lump of dung,
doesn't it?
STEVE HINDLE: It does, yeah. So, but when we turn it over, then
you can see...
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: The gills.
STEVE HINDLE: The gills. We've got the gills, we've got this
mushroom form, and actually... If we just bruise the gills a
little bit, these are still grey, then we can see them just
start to turn red.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: We've moved into another field.
STEVE HINDLE: We have. This field is particularly good,
actually, for one of the waxcap species, which is the crimson
Waxcap. And the crimson waxcap is another species which is on
the IUCN vulnerable list. So this one, again, is vulnerable
to extinction. But It's one which can be quite abundant, and
particularly in this field, there can be loads of them.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So it's not very different from the field
where we've been?
STEVE HINDLE: It's not, no. And I couldn't tell you why it is
that we would find one species predominating in one field and
not in another field. It could be something to do with the
hydrology, you know, the way the water's moving, or nutrient
levels, the depth of the soil, there's all kinds of factors.
But actually, just over there, on the brow of the hill, those
big kind of red things yeah can we get a bit closer let's hone
in on those and have a close look at them.
Right, ok. You can see on the top, they've got this kind of
quite fleshy coloured...
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It's like a tongue. It looks like a tongue
to me.
STEVE HINDLE: Yeah, well, that's it. They're very kind of fleshy
coloured. But as they fade, they can look quite visceral. And in
the way that you're saying it looks like a tongue, that's
because it's got a greasy kind of feel to it. And that's to do
with the cell structure on the top.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: But also the kind of shape of it as well.
It's not a perfect circle, is it?
STEVE HINDLE: Some of them are nice and round, some of them are
a little more kind of off kilter. But if we just pick one
out here and turn it over, just look at the stem with all of
these kind of red fibrils on. And that's a really distinctive
feature of this species. Most of them have got a smooth stem.
There's a few with a kind of, this is called fibrillo stem,
but this one with the kind of yellow base and then these red
fibres over the top of it. Very specific to this species. So
that's the Crimson Waxcap. And in fact, I've got one other
thing that I'd like to show you, because I think this one's going
to blow you away.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Okay. I'm starting to understand why, when
you talked about how you started walking Meg here, the dog, and
you started noticing the nature around you, and you saw a tree,
you knew what it was, and then you moved on to something else,
and then you moved on to the fungi. They're so varied from
one another, aren't they? They're so pretty, and the
colours are so bright and vibrant.
STEVE HINDLE: Exactly, yeah. I mean, the forms and the colours.
Yeah I'm not sure exactly what it is that's so captivating
about them but just hooked me in and some of them as well have
got incredible smells so there's one which is called the
Cedarwood Waxcap and actually we had a staff day and we do a kind
of show and tell so we all bring something in.
And this Cedarwood Waxcap, what I tend to do is to help with the
training sessions when I find one I stick it in a little tin.
And then after a couple of days, I take it out of the tin, and
then I stick another one in the tin, because I'm finding them
quite a bit.
And the tin then takes on this smell. And so, in our show and
tell, I passed this empty tin around, and said, so, you know,
what does this smell of? And interestingly, about 50% of
people just can't smell anything at all.
So they're just, nothing, there's nothing there. But those
that can smell it, it's absolutely amazing. And it's the
smell that they used to use toasted birch oil to cure
Russian leather. And they use that in some men's luxury
fragrances.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What's the reason why we don't know why
they smell?
STEVE HINDLE: So some of them smell of honey. There's quite a
few that have a honey smell. And there's one that they say smells
of bedbugs.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Nice.
STEVE HINDLE: Which fortunately most of us don't know what
bedbugs smell of. But it's a kind of oily smell. And then
there's the Garlic Waxcap which has a little bit of a smell of
garlic. They're just so kind of sensory, you know, with the
feelings and the smells. And some of them have got taste to
them as well. And the caps are going to be slippery or
glutinous or dry. And yeah, it's just great.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Well, we're nearly back to where we started.
Have you got anything else you need to show me?
STEVE HINDLE: This one last thing that I want to show you,
which I just found today. It's a really rare one. It's absolutely
stunning. Let's see if you can spot it over there in the grass.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Okay, so, I mean, there's a little speck of
blue among the green grass, so I'm guessing that's what we're
heading for. That's it, yeah.
STEVE HINDLE: So this one is called Entoloma Madidum, or the
Brightsky Pinkgill. It's a really kind of intense blue. Now
this one's a nice, young, fresh one, but you can also see, if we
turn it over, you can see that kind of pink colour in the
gills.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So it's very fleshy pink, isn't it?
STEVE HINDLE: Yeah, and so they're called the Pinkgills,
but the gills don't start out pink, but the spores are pink,
much like the field mushroom, which when you get a young one,
it's got pink gills, but then they turn dark over time. That's
because it's got dark brown, black spores. This has got pink
spores.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Let's just, can we just for a moment talk
about the vibrancy of this blue. I mean, that is a blue you would
not expect to find in nature, is it?
STEVE HINDLE: It's not, no. And again, you asked before, why?
Why do we have these colours? And we just don't know. You
would think if you were trying to mind your own business and
drop your spores without getting eaten or squashed, being bright
blue wouldn't necessarily be a good idea.
But it may be that animals go, bright blue thing, that's not
edible. So I'll ignore it. I'm not entirely sure. You come for
a look Meg.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Hi Meg.
STEVE HINDLE: You like these as well don't you?
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Is she good at sniffing them out if they've
got...
STEVE HINDLE: Terrible, absolutely. She's no interest in
mushrooms whatsoever.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: But you've just talked about the smells and
in theory that's what dogs do.
STEVE HINDLE: Well, so interestingly last year my
partner and I were out and she found a really rare waxcap
called a Scaly Foot Waxcap.
It was absolutely amazing and I took it home and dried it out
and I had it lying down on the table and I got in touch with
Martin Ainsworth at Kew Gardens and said look I've got this
fantastic sample of this rare waxcap would you like the
specimen and he said looks amazing please send it to me I'd
love to have that in our fungarium and I went into the
room the next morning gone. Meg had eaten it.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: No. So she sniffed that one out then.
STEVE HINDLE: She sniffed that one out. And she did eat a
couple the other day, which have got a bit of a honey scent. So
she maybe thought, they smell sweet, I'll have those. But
otherwise, generally, she's not interested.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh, bless her. Right, my knees are getting
soggy, so shall we stand up?
STEVE HINDLE: But again, this is another one which is threatened
with extinction. And this was one which was known as the Big
Blue Pinkgill, Entoloma Bloxamii. But then they noticed
that actually there were quite a few different forms of this.
And so they did DNA work and they split it into four
different species. And those four different species, we've
recorded three of them in this area. But this one is certainly
the most amazing one to look at.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It's incredible, isn't it? It's
almost like a Smurf.
STEVE HINDLE: Yeah, it is like a Smurf. I never thought of that,
but yeah, that'll do.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Well, it's been amazing to meet you. Thank
you so much for showing us what you do.
STEVE HINDLE: Yeah, pleasure.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: I guess we're going to leave you to
zigzag some more, are we? Yeah. And I'll head back.
STEVE HINDLE: Sure.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Where I came from.
STEVE HINDLE: Enjoy your day.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Thank you so much. It's been really
interesting.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Nature Fix. If you
love your nature, why not check out our other nature podcast,
Wild Tales, with Rosie Holdsworth and Ajay Tegala. And
I look forward to seeing you next month as we head outside
again for another fix of nature. Bye for now.