Description

WORTH MORE STANDING. Old-growth forests provide a central support system for all life on Earth and serve as critical caretakers in mitigating and resolving the climate crisis. The decisions currently being made about old-growth forests must be reviewed with the full picture of forest ecology in mind.

This print includes a collection of beautiful, rare, and vulnerable species that call the old-growth forest at Fairy Creek home:

• Lettuce lichen: only grows in old-growth forests
• Northern red-legged frog: only found on southern Vancouver Island and in Oregon and California. It is a protected species in the USA.
• Band-tailed pigeon
• Fairy bells
• Marbled Murrelet: an endangered seabird who only nests in old-growth forests or in high altitudes
• Western screech owl
• Rufous hummingbird
• Wapati: the second-largest in the deer family, smaller in stature only to the moose.
• Northern goshawk
• Polypore mushrooms: these tree fungi have potent antiviral properties, especially Agarikon, and are a species which grows almost exclusively in these native forests.

Paul Stamets, an American mycologist, has said that “when we cut down old-growth forests, we are potentially losing genomic libraries that could have a strain of fungi with enormous implications for human biosecurity, and moreover, habitat health. Which is to say, saving old-growth forests can be seen as a matter of international defence against pandemics.”