The Highland Naturalist - Number 8 - May 2012

John Philip Blunt (1943-2011): An Appreciation

Ian Evans

John Blunt has often been referred to, in my notes from Assynt and further afield, as our local mycologist. He died suddenly on 8th December 2011, when we were on our way to some winter fieldwork, and I should like to put on record a brief account of his life and interests.

Figure: John Blunt, with a large bolete, Balblair Wood, Bonar Bridge, 9.9.2011.

John was born in Nottingham on 1st April 1943, son of a sawyer, who was serving in the Royal Navy. He had a younger brother and lived in the suburb of Bilborough for the first twenty years of his life. He was educated at the local primary and secondary schools, leaving at 16 to take up a five year apprenticeship with the Boots Pure Drug Company. During this period he joined a youth 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 brought him up to Assynt for the first time. John left Boots in 1965 to join the staff of the School of Agriculture of Nottingham University at Sutton Bonington, where he eventually became Senior Technician. lt was there that he met Val, his future wife, who was a technician in the same department; they married in 1969. John was first 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 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 started recording fungi some years previously and gradually built up a good working knowledge of the ascomycetes, a group not many amateur mycologists tackle; they remained his primary interest within the fungi. After several holidays in Sutherland, John and Val sold up in 1981, and moved up to the small township of Nedd, on the north coast of Assynt. Here they acquired two crofts and, with the help of a local shepherd, built up their own flock of sheep. These animals were known for their excellent condition and fetched good prices at the Lairg sales. However, it is difficult to get a living out of sheep, so John supplemented their income with electrical contracting and a variety of other part-time work, including some on the local fish farm.

Pat and I had our first holiday in Assynt in 1982 and visited John and Val whenever we later came up, helping out on one memorable occasion with the hand clipping of their sheep. ln the late 1980s, they let us know that a house plot was available in Nedd, on which we had a house built, and into which we moved two days after my retirement in 1991. John erected the deer fence round our half acre that allowed us to cultivate a garden, and gave us much practical help in the following 20 years. We reciprocated by passing on to him any interesting-looking fungi we came across, so that for two decades we had a fungal identification service (condition permitting) on the doorstep, hence the frequent references to fungi in my writings.

Sadly, Val died of cancer in 2005, and John developed back and heart problems which latterly prevented him from driving. However, he continued actively to pursue his mycological 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, one customized as a laboratory, supplemented by sheds he built himself. ln what proved to be his last year, he joined Pat and I on a number of enjoyable excursions to the north and north-west coasts of Sutherland.

John was a careful mycologist, with the very considerable skills in microscopy that the reliable identification of fungi requires, and which he had developed over the years. He corresponded with many of the authorities at Edinburgh and Kew, and his Highland voucher collection will eventually find a home at Edinburgh. By the end of 2010, he had accumulated over 6660 records of some 1500 species of fungi, mainly ascomycetes, but more recently including basidiomycetes.

He had transferred the records to a computerised data-base (not his favourite occupation), which he forwarded to the British Mycological Society for incorporation into the national records, and he kept his records up-to- date until the day he died.

ln the winter o12010-2011, I started working with him on a summary of more than 3000 records of the 900 species he had recorded from Assynt, word-processing the text from his manuscript notes. We had obtained a grant from the Sutherland Partnership Biodiversity Group for its publication. I hope to be able to complete this project in his memory and as a tribute to his expertise. John was diffident about publication, even of his most noteworthy discoveries, but he had made contributions on his finds to the Wildlife of Scourie (2006) and the Wildlife of Rogart (2007).

His natural history interests were not restricted to fungi, and he passed on to me specimens or records of anything else he thought might be of interest, hence the inclusion of his name in the list of contributors to the recently published Atlas of Highland Land Mammals.

John was extremely capable, and held strong views on environmental and other issues; he did not suffer fools gladly and had some heated battles with bureaucracy. However, he was generous with his expertise, both practical and mycological, and opened my eyes to the beauty, diversity and importance of fungi. I shall miss his very individual take on life and the natural world.