North Kerry Waxcap Survey 2012 - the Northern Ireland Fungus Group

Summary Results
There are 41 x 10km squares in the North Kerry study area although some of these have very
small amounts of lands within them. 78 sites in 31 x 10km squares were visited and a distance
of 754 miles was covered within the survey area in the process. Many of these sites were
small churchyards but others were large and took most of the day to survey. Due to time
restrictions as I was trying to cover as large an area as possible, sites were not visited that
involved long walk ins or if it was difficult to organise permissions onto the land. Weather
conditions prevented visits to the islands of Great Blasket, Inishvickillane and Illauntannig
which were planned and permissions had been obtained for these islands. This was a great
shame as these were possibly the best sites in the study area. Details of all the sites and the
species found are shown in Appendix 2.
The headlines from this survey are:
• Overall, this was the poorest survey in this series along the Irish west coast
• Only 237 records were made of the target species compared to 430 in West Galway
(Mitchel, 2010), 524 in West Cork (Mitchel, 2007) and 546 in West Donegal (Mitchel,
2009).
• Fairy Clubs and Entolomas were almost absent apart from a few common species
• The best site (Glennahoo) had 15 species of waxcap and there were only 5 other sites
with over 10 species.
• Glennahoo is now the 32nd best site in Ireland
• Six species new to the Republic of Ireland were found with five of these being new to
all Ireland.
• The species new to all Ireland were:
o Amanita betulae
o Arrhenia griseopallida
o Galerina atkinsoniana
o Hebeloma collariatum
o Pluteus nanus
• The species new to the Republic of Ireland was:
o Geoglossum uliginosum
• 48 species were recorded as new to Kerry
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