Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

Visit to a Hemlock (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2012-01-17T22:48:00.006-05:00

5 January finds me on a snowy forest road, walking toward a Sugar bush I was told about, just off Gravel Hill Road north of Monkland, Ontario. I've stopped to paint less than a kilometre in from the red gate, because the sun will set soon. My painting gear and my cushion, blanket, and ground sheet are all piled into a plastic recycling box to pull it behind me like a sled. Deer tracks precede me, the toes punched deeply into the snow and the dew claws making two pointed marks behind each print.

Close to the left hand side of the forest road a tall Hemlock about 50 cm across leans a little toward a younger tree and the two seem to be in silent dialog. A squirrel has left its tracks about the base of the larger tree, and drifted snow picks out the pattern of its grooved bark. Looking up I see broken stubs of branches to half the tree's height, and then a healthy, finely needled, forked crown, broken off bluntly at about 20 metres.

Sitting on the overturned box I spread my blanket across my lap, tuck it around my legs, and begin to paint - this one needs a rich burnt sienna underpainting. Though the forest is young here, and mostly Maples, it is presided over by scattered old Hemlocks, their trunks massive in contrast with the slim Maples' grey bark.

As I work, Chickadees are busy, flitting and peeping in the shadowy copse of young Hemlocks behind me, finding tidbits that they hid in crevices last summer. That's a lot of hiding places to store in their tiny clever brains - but Chickadees only retain the memories of their food caches for one year. Research has shown that each spring they start with a clean slate!

As dusk falls and I pack up, I'm more aware of the rushing of the highway as it echoes beyond the dark conifers to the northwest. Earlier the flaming sunset glinted like blown embers between their trunks from across open land. I glance up as I turn to go, at the moon peeking owlishly from between dark Hemlock boughs as it rises in the east, early full. The forest track is broad and white and easy to follow in the growing dark and I avoid taking wrong turns by retracing the faint drag mark of my box sled back to the van.

This is the S.E corner of the "old sugar bush" owned by South Nation Conservation since 1966. I've been told that only the stumps of the mature sugar maples remain along with the sugar shack; a new succession of 30-40 year old sugar maple, hickory, white ash dominates the natural forest. This is an upland forest situated on the bouldery phase of the Eamer soil series and likely marginal for agricultural purposes. The numerous stone fences that divide the property into 10-acre fields are evidence of the effort that was expended in the attempt to cultivate the land. The property was one of the early acquisitions of SNC and the cropped areas were planted to White Pine, White Spruce and Jack Pine.

When Fred was young, the ecology texts envisioned the eastern North American forest coming to a steady state climax of shade-tolerant Hemlock Tsuga canadensis), Beech (Fagus grandifolia), and Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum), and he wrote youthful poems about the stability of these forests. The deforestation of eastern Ontario in the 19th century was so complete, pests and diseases introduced from Europe so stressful, and the approaching climate change so overwhelming, that there's no way we're going to be able to look forward to stable climax forests within the next century.

Aleta

Spruce With Winterberry Holly (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2012-01-08T19:10:00.010-05:00

2 January 2012 finds me at the Long Swamp Fen on County Road 15 north of Brockville, Ontario, painting through the window of the van. It is raining. The little Spruce at the edge of the Long Swamp Fen is bright yellow-green, haloed by crimson Holly berries. It stands in a group of Cedars, so close that it's hard to tell which trunk is whose. The Cedar's leaves are like flat hands gesturing every which way, all a rich ochre colour with barely a hint of green. In this painting, the masses and movements are expressed in colour rather than tone or line. I could so easily be overwhelmed by the fine detail in this scene, as the whole view is filled with twigs and branches, like threads in a tapestry. But threads are not what I want to show - so I unfocus my eyes, searching for masses of colour and direction of movement, and try to keep my fine strokes at a minimum. In the foreground, pale, touselled winter Cattails poke from the snow of the roadside ditch. As I paint from the front seat of the van, Fred surveys the roadside vegetation, especially the clones of Narrowleaf Cattail that we've noticed spreading into the open part of the fen.

One of the finest features of eastern Ontario is the muskeg-like Long Swamp Orchid Fen that's crossed by the North Augusta Road, 2 km NNW Manhard, 44.69421N 75.74379W. After a series of purchases of land by Nature Conservancy Canada, the site "is currently undergoing regulation under the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act. Once the regulation is completed, it will be a provincial park." (Corina Brdar, by e-mail, 5 Jan 2012).

We have worried for decades about the progress of invasive Narrowleaf Cattails, Typha angustifolia, along the roadside ditches there, and then massively into the fen, which is a muskeg-like wonderland of small twisted Cedars and Tamaracks, with a wide variety of Bog Ericaceae, and other bog flora, including Pitcherplants, wonderfully diverse lichens, and, if you're there in the right season, the Orchids for which it is named, and also a rare Pondweed in the interior.

Fred writes:

"T. angustifolia generally favours drier, higher-calcium, sites than other Cattails. It hybridizes with the native Typha latifolia to produce the robust Typha x glauca, which makes up most of the plants in many marshes. Long thought to be a native species -- albeit spreading inexplicably northwest during the 20th century, and inexplicably absent from the fossil record -- it has recently been concluded that T. angustifolia was likely an early invader from Europe, though more recently doubt has been thrown on this (Shih, Jessica G. and Sarah A. Finkelstein. 2008 http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1672/07-40.1 ).

"It's not clear why T. angustifolia is moving into the peat of the Fen so aggressively, but it first spread along the margins of the road embankment, where conditions at the edge of the embankment may have been drier than in the Fen, and may be favoured by road salting, and mobilizing nutrients and calcium from rhizome-oxidized peat as it moves into the Fen. The presence of scattered T. latifolia in the Fen shows that T. angustifolia has some substantial advantage over its congener here.

"As Aleta painted, the warm temperatures, shallow snow, and solid ice made it convenient for me to waypoint the perimeter of the Cattails in the bog, to compare with a few previous waypoints of their spread. This survey was confined to the east side of the road, the only area where the fen is an open muskeg, presumably because the North Augusta Road impedes the westward flow of drainage, and allows trees to grow up in the downstream west side of the road, while enforcing bog-like conditions in the impounded east side. I headed north along the road, first waypointing the few Broadleaf Cattails in the roadside ditch, and then going into the interior, waypointing the outliers of the stand in the fen, sheltering my notebook inside my jacket from the rain, and coming out to the road where the Cattails end at the brushy border of the Fen.

"When I came back out onto the road, the Narrowleaf Cattails were a solid stand, and as I walked back south to the van where Aleta was painting, I refound a small stand of invasive Phragmites that she'd tentatively noted in the early fall, but which we haven't managed to notice in drive-by visits. They're on the east side of the road embankment, near the new plastic culvert which was installed not long before June 2008, so it's plausible to associate the establishment of the stand with earth-moving during the installation of the culvert.

"This is only a 6 m stand of 28 heads, but I hope that whichever agency will be managing the Fen won't want to see if the Phragmites can outdo the Cattails in obliterating the fen and its flora. The stand could be removed by shovel work this spring and summer, though each subsequent year this will get more difficult, and once removed they'd need annual checkups to be sure no rhizomes remain."

Fred.

Because Typha angustifolia mostly displaces other Cattails, and because it's been around for so long, it is not generally controlled, but in this case, where it's marching into such a diverse plant community, increasing landscape homogeneity and displacing rare species and a distinctive community, control would seem to be warranted, whether it's originally a native species of restricted range or a European introduction.

It would be interesting to send a team of Typha-pullers into the bog each August, and pull up the tonne or two of the most peripheral shoots, which, because there's a 30m wide fringe of sparse shoots, might effectively hold back the advance.

Cedars With New Snow (oil on canvas 12 x 16 in.)

2011-12-28T13:56:00.007-05:00

26 December finds me climbing over the paigewire fence into our woodlot. This is easier than going in where the Ash and icestorm-broken Trembling Aspen grow by the gate. Here the trees are taller, shading open spaces where I can walk - the paths made by Fred and Jennifer as they salvaged wood after the 1998 ice storm. I follow Hare tracks until they join another Hare track where the snow is trampled beneath a low-hanging Cedar branch. Young Cedars are filling in an old opening, their leafy boughs cloaked with new snow, right to the ground. This will be my painting.

Having established my woodsy studio with ground sheet, cushion and blanket, I lean against the springy dead trunk that serves for a back rest, looking up at the lively shapes in my chosen composition, and begin to plan how to paint it. This takes several minutes of motionless contemplation. My breathing is the only noise in the still cold forest space, muffled by snowy branches.
Finally a decision... burnt sienna will support the bright snow of the background treetops, while contrasting nicely with a pale violet base coat for the shadowed, heavily laden boughs in the foreground.

The upper part of the painting, behind the darkly shadowed tops of the near Cedars, is taller Cedars, their brownish olive foliage dappled with snow, and glowing in the early morning sunshine. I lean back against my tree, squint my eyes, and exaggerate all the colours in my mind. . . . they are there! It's really impressive how different the painting would be if I'd begun with a violet underpainting rather than the contrasting colour. It would be much cooler and more sombre - almost colourless, as all the twigs and branches that show, are blackish, or brownish or greyish, and with the foliage being nearly grey itself, the only colour would be the snow - and without the warm contrast, it wouldn't be very exciting. I did a couple of paintings like that in my early days of winter painting - not far from the location of this one. Lets just say that my snow paintings became more exciting when I began to use warm colours for underpainting!

After an hour or so of coaxing thick paint from brush to canvas, I hear Fred's coat, brushing past dead branches as he finally arrives with the turpentine I'd failed to find before setting out. He sits and watches as I apply warm white paint to the treetops, but neither of us has a vial in our pockets or gear, so he heads back to the house to get a vial from which the turps can be used. . .

FWS: 102h0 -3, sunny, calm; back home on the quest of a vial for the turpentine. I came back along a path through the interior of the stand, past the pasture-grown Acer saccharum (Sugar Maple) that died around 1989, and is now a standing rotten stub. Then out to where there was a path paralleling the road, but the gaps we cut, years ago, between the clumps of Cedars are all filled in, and snow on foliage makes it hard to trace or refind paths back along the edge, and even the site we cleared for the Museum building is grown up; this whole end of our land has been neglected since we were given the Store.

FWS: 10h41, WAYPT/123, back with a vial . This is a painting of regrowth in what we take to be the lane cut into the area in the centre of the bush that the Weirs told us had been clear-cut in 1960. Lots of Thuja are bent down into the lane a bit west of here by the 1998 ice storm. Here, on the south side of the lane, the woods were wracked by the 1998 ice storm, and 14 years later there's both bent-over and tipped trees, some struggling and some dead, and with the tipped ones at all angles from nearly vertical to 15 degrees with the ground. There's also broken tops at all degrees of descent from the canopy, dangling, leaning or flat on the ground. They're breaking up now with algae and lichens and internal fungi.

Just off to the side of the painting, along the old lane, there's 15-25 cm DBH trees that were too small to cut in 1960, and off on the other (north) side of the lane the pruned and thinned "timber management" area from the 1990's an open interior with little icestorm damage, though the cut logs still crisscross the floor, since we never managed to figure out how to haul them out, nor decided what we'd use them for. There's a little Quercus rubra (Red Oak) in here, which we tried to subsidize, but we can't see that it has thrived. There's a few spindly 1 m Rhamnus cathartica (Common Buckthorn) and more Rhamnus frangula (Shining (Frangulous) Buckthorn) bushes forming the undergrowth, other than that all we can see is at least 3 species of Sedge and Grass: What a crime against nature to not know the names of Graminoids!

AKS: Our Cedars are not in the best of health! Every year now, the leaf miners (tiny moths that are native species) spend the winter snug inside the Cedar leaves as larvae, and emerge as adults in the summer. In former years, they went in cycles, but for the past 5 years or so they seem to be more consistent, and it's hard to find nice green Cedar foliage for Christmas decorations.

FWS: This stand has struggled with spring greying, at least in 2004, 2009, 2011 (we weren't recording this before 2004), and there's a fair number of dead trees up among the canopy - does poor nutrient status make them susceptible to the Argyresthia Cedar Leafminers which are the cause of the greying?

AKS: It's almost 11:00. My toes are getting cold. Snow begins to filter down onto my canvas from the branches above. I should have brought my umbrella. The sun and blue sky have been covered by cloud and now the snow is only shades of grey, and my toes are getting cold. "Dee-dee" comments from a pair of Chickadees who have come to investigate. We "pish"for them and they flit closer, resulting in further snow showers -

FWS: 10h52 2 Parus atricapillus (Blackcap Chickadee) - a pair, not a flock, coming in within 2.5 m, and knocking snow down onto the canvas. A few Cyanocitta cristata (Blue Jay) calls - maybe a response to the Chickadees' calls announcing that they'd found us?

TIME: 1103. AIR TEMP: -2, cloudy, calm. FWS11Dec261103/a, Branta canadensis (Canada Goose) (Bird). 42 adult, call, seen, heard. HEADING:SW fairly low overhead & with little honking.

AKS: My toes really are cold and the light has definitely changed so I decide to finish the painting indoors, leaving Fred to continue his notes. One Crow calls, and also a Blue Jay as I lift my gear over the fence.

FWS: There's a modest number of Hare tracks, and I took a photo of a small frosty pellet cluster at the painting site, but there's nothing for Lepus to eat in the interior of the stand, so they must be eating the skirts of the stand around the edges, and non-Cedar plants around the outside. Tracks & auditions through the visit include NO:Bonasa, NO:Tamiasciurus, NO:Meleagris

(same location) TIME: 1109. AIR TEMP: -2, cloudy, calm. FWS11Dec261109/a, Corvus corax (Raven) (Bird). 1 adult, call, heard. "gurk, gurk, gurk" calls to the NW.

(same location) TIME: 1118. AIR TEMP: -2, cloudy, calm. FWS11Dec261118/a, (not listed) (lichen). 1/common thallus, specimen. pale greenish paint-like splotches on the bark of Thuja. . . . larger trees up to 3 m height.

Wet Snow in the Sugar Bush (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-12-18T18:16:00.005-05:00

13 December finds me walking a sandy trail along the edge of the Agroforestry Sugarbush, south of Kemptville, Ontario. I am looking for a closeup scene to paint, and soon find a charming arrangement of Maple leaves tumbled over a mossy log and patterned by wet snow dimpled with circular depressions made by large drips from the branches above. Some of the leaves are rich and bright like new leather, but others are pale and limp, translucent from repeated freezing.
A Raven, passing above the tree tops, utters four grawks, perhaps in comment at our presence in the 'home woods'. Before I begin my painting Fred and I take a tour to the end of the track. Second growth and wetland lie to the west, and the older forest of the managed sugarbush to the east. A huge White Pine, heavy limbed and massive of girth looms darkly through the Maples and young Hemlock, and a thick little copse of Cedar huddles within the lofty room of the forest interior. The thick shaggy stem of a large grapevine curves like a fantastic Mammoth's trunk near a Cedar. Their bark is of similar texture. Nearby stands a short barkless stump with a little Cedar growing from the exact middle of its sawed flat top. A little farther along a taller stump has a few thin-stemmed baby Hemlocks sprouting from the split between two sawn levels.

Fred points into the woods in the direction where he found the Yellow Spotted Salamander in 2001, and walking back, we talk about Salamanders - how they are absent from woods that were once pasture fields, or where cattle grazed among the trees. These woods feel special to us because we know there are Salamanders. Redbacked and Blue Spotted Salamanders live here, and in 1980 Fred found three of the locally rare Yellow Spotted Salamanders, and another in 1983. Bev Wigney and Eric Snyder found another in 2005. Bev has taken some nice Salamander photos . The Redbacks here all seem to be of the dark-backed ("leadback") colour phase.

This painting is for sale.
To view price, please select dimensions, which you will find with the title at top of page:

2012 Calendar - Aleta Karstad's Plein Air Painting

2011-12-16T13:08:00.008-05:00

We're very pleased to present our new calendar. It has a great feel, sturdy and spiral bound - you can see all 12 months in the preview on www.Lulu.com
You can order it online or contact me karstad("at"sign)pinicola.ca
Lyn Dixson (in New Brunswick) wrote: "Calendars arrived today..they’re wonderful, Aleta...each month is unique and meaningful. What a great tool. The way you’ve put this together has surpassed my expectations!

Happy Christmas, wonderful 2012. LYNN"

Cedar and Juniper (oil on canvas, 5 x 7 in)

2011-12-15T12:44:00.004-05:00

11 December finds me "Out Back" of our house in Bishops Mills, Ontario, shortly after sunrise, doing my first snow painting of the winter, en plein air. This is not fresh snow. The Cedars have shrugged it from their flexible leaves, but the stiff prickly Juniper still holds its burden - the shadowed sides of which I delight in painting blue, as snow brings the colours of the sky to the ground. This is also the first painting of our winter "Landscape Art & Science" project.

In "Winter Woodlots of Eastern Ontario", we will be visiting and painting private woodlots and public forests, guided to special spots by people who are familiar with them, learning the history and management of the woodlots, sharing what we know about the natural history of forests - and especially getting me out in the snow, where it's most exciting to be painting!

At the end of the winter we will publish another blog-based book book like "Art and Science in the South Nation Watershed", which is available online at Lulu.com or you can contact me at karstad (at) pinicola.ca

When I took Fred out to see the site of today's painting, he said, “Oh, that's close enough to the Yellowjacket Board Waypoint [0.2 km SSE Bishops Mills, (50m site), 44.87036°N 75.70016°W] that we won't need to make a new waypoint.” Back at the house, he e-mailed me 15 pages of notes for this site, dating back to 12 July 1981, just after we'd bought this land from the Weirs, when his mother made a synoptic collection of plants centred here for our first daughter. The site is named for Yellowjackets (Vespula) that, around 1995, had excavated a 10cm hole under a cover object he'd placed beside the Juniper in the painting. The hole persisted for years, though the Juniper has spread over it and is now 4 metres in diameter.

Other activities here were the naming of a Dogwood bush beside the Junipers as “Goat Berries,” by the daughter, several episodes of suppression of Cathartic Buckthorn, annual recording the blooming of Taraxacum palustre (Oldfield Dandelion), Senecio pauerculus (Balsam Ragwort), and Penstemon hirsutus (Hairy Beardtongue). Today Fred found a White Pine (Pinus strobus) seedling on the edge of the Cedars (Thuja occidentalis), which he's planning to subsidize with household and garden waste.

So by doing woodlots, we're heading for much more detailed knowledge of the sites painted, and we anticipate that we'll be recording more lore than we will be discovering previously unknown phenomena or populations.

Where The Eels Went Into The Ground (oil on canvas 16 x 20 in.)

2011-11-23T16:08:00.003-05:00

17 November finds me perched at the base of a tree on the steep side of a short deep ravine surrounded by ploughed fields on Laurier Road north of Casselman, Ontario. I can almost see down into the entrance of a cave - the cave where First Nations people say is "the place where the Eels go into the ground". A creek meanders along the bottom of the ravine and disappears under a tangle of sticks and autumn leaves before the cave mouth. Above that a vertical bank rises 10 metres high, a wall of clay laced across by tree roots.

There's not much moss or foliage there - looks pretty gloomy at this end. There are also another couple of charming scenes in that little ravine, and Fred wanders there collecting twiggy litter from the foot of the slopes including and a few small Arion slugs, one Deroceras reticulatum slug, several living small Anguisira alternata snails, and lots of shells, but no sow bugs. Clear water flows from a culvert under the road - the stream that feeds the cave. Staff at South Nation Conservation tell us that the creek emerges again in a neighbours' field. Raccoon tracks decorate the flat clay sides of the stream - most ground cover frosted Ferns, or Viola pubescens (Yellow Violet) with a few berries of Caulophyllum thalictroides (Blue Cohosh) and scattered plants of a Geum that has richly evergreen-looking leaves. And, of course, a scattering of seedling Rhamnus cathartica (Common Buckthorn) to threaten the future. The woods are Tilia americana (Basswood) Acer negundo (Manitoba Maple) and Fraxinus (Ash) with the major trees being 80-90 cm diameter Basswood.

As I paint, thick flakes of the first snow of the year begin to fall, reminding me of the large flock of Snow Geese that we saw when we arrived. They were sitting in the field by the ravine, mixed with a vast flock of Canada Geese, but separated off into their own flock when they all took to the air in a jubilant clamour. These are more Snow Geese than we've ever seen before in eastern Ontario.

Exhibition and Book Launch

2011-11-21T15:17:00.006-05:00

ANNOUNCING

The exhibition of paintings done this fall in the South Nation Watershed will be held at the South Nation Conservation office in Finch on Thursday, as well as a presentation about our field work and the launch of the book!

Date: 24 November 2011
Time: 6:00 - 8:30 pm
Place: South Nation Conservation,

38 Victoria St.,

Finch, Ont.

contact SNC: (877) 984-2948

contact Aleta Karstad (613) 299-3107

"Art & Science in the South Nation Watershed" is a full-colour book of paintings and journal from this fall's travels about eastern Ontario, enriched by 15 years of familiarity with the South Nation River watershed.

In the tradition of the Group of Seven but with the eye of a naturalist, Aleta Karstad paints the Canadian landscape "en plein air". This book showcases nineteen of her jewel-like paintings from the watershed of the South Nation River in easternmost Ontario. Each is accompanied by insightful and lyrical journal entries about the experience of making each painting and about the landscape and its plants and animals. While Aleta paints, her biologist husband, Fred Schueler, makes a scientific survey of the surrounding area, giving special attention to the interactions between native and invasive species. Together, this artist/biologist team works to increase public knowledge of not only the beauty of the landscape but also its biological health and the conservation measures suggested by their observations.

See Aleta's original paintings and have Aleta and Fred both autograph your copy of "Art & Science in the South Nation Watershed". The book can also be previewed and purchased online.

More of Aleta's paintings can be seen at aletakarstad.com

The Biologist And His Dog (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-11-18T21:31:00.004-05:00

8 November 2011 finds us skirting the perimeter of the Winchester Bog, searching for view into it, or a creek out of it. The South Castor River flows out, but the bog itself is hidden, somewhere beyond vast cornfields being harvested by huge combines. The evening breeze brings us the feathers-and-field-corn smell of a chicken farm. We found the South Castor River in a ditch-like groove between the flat fields. The view beneath the bridge span has some nice shapes - a composition of sinuous Manitoba Maple trunks leaning out past the steep grassy bank, and the sky reflection at a stony riffle. Then the Biologist and his trusty Dog, crossing on the stones, complete the scene. Fred plucks a few handsfulls of drifted sticks and snail shells from under the feet of Marigold, dropping them into a long, sturdy plastic bag printed "Popcorn" and "Mais Souffle" in orange and yellow. We inherited what is proving to be a lifetime supply of these bags in the 1980's when the National Museum of Natural Sciences shared a warehouse with a promotions company that failed leaving a large stock of these useful bags, which have become almost a banner for us wherever we go.

Red Maple Trunks (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-11-11T18:38:00.005-05:00

24 October 2011 finds me sitting at the base of a huge old, many-trunked Maple in a grown over fencerow in the woods, near the Sand Road Maple Farm, south of Moose Creek, Ontario. The mossy log that was one of its fallen branches stretches toward me and everything is being sprinkled with falling Maple leaves. Behind me stand several ancient White Pines, all gnarly and some fork-trunked, old pasture trees that grew up twisted because of White Pine Weevil. The pines and this maple flourished, thick- trunked and full-crowned in the open during decades of agricultural use of the ground, as we can see from the branching close to the ground.
The tree I am painting splays its grand cluster of trunks tall and now mostly leafless against the autumn evening sky. Little Balsam Fir grow here among the ferns and clubmosses. There are a few leaves of the Yellow Violet and a single Pyrola spray, which are the only proper forest floor herbs or sub-shrubs. There's Vitis riparia (Frost Grape) cabled up into the canopy of the larger Maples, and fallen bunches of Grapes lying on the forest floor, perhaps cut by Red Squirrels. Perhaps they feel safer chewing up the Grapes on the forest floor than up in the canopy where hawks might see them. The Birches here are fallen and rotten, having given way to the succession of more shade tolerant trees, but on the other side of the old fencerow the woods have the close texture of a coat of hair, as young Maples shoot up narrowly among the already narrow Birches.

Fred found one 25 cm Common Buckthorn, and many Cherry bushes all distorted by Whitetail Deer browsing, as well as White Pine seedlings that also look stunted or browsed back. As I paint, he moves back and forth, in and out of view among the trees, carefully turning logs and collecting centipedes and sow bugs, but no salamanders. Undertaking his standard search for Eastern Redback Salamanders, he turns 100 pieces of cover within a 100 metre area. Before it's too dark to see, he has checked under 84 logs, ranging from long-dead to falling-apart rotten, but he finds no Salamanders or slugs or snails, and only a few Centipedes, Millipedes, and Earthworms. When land has been grazed, the soft forest floor which is naturally full of holes from rotted away roots and punky remains of logs buried in deep leaf litter becomes trampled and compacted. The soil is compressed, leaving no access to underground spaces for salamanders to hibernate below frost level.

All afternoon we've been hearing the local birds, who will stay here for the winter - Blackcap Chickadee, Blue Jay, and Robin. Red Squirrels chirrrr and, a Spring Peeper practices a few territorial peeps. A male Wood Frog hops past, heading for a safe spot to freeze solid for the winter.
As we leave, there's Branta canadensis (Canada Goose) going over or around in various flocks (provoking discussion of how many Geese can be covered by a "gaggle" and whether the proper collective for these huge migratory flocks shouldn't be "clamour"?), with a sky-filling low overflight at 18h00.

Metcalfe's Victoria Park (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-11-01T21:26:00.003-04:00

The afternoon of 12 October 2011 finds me in Metcalfe, in Victoria Park, painting the footbridge that crosses Cassidy Municipal Drain. This is a culvert-fed, turbid rock/rubble/mud stream through a village green lawnpark, a tributary of the Castor River. A man in a plaid shirt walks a brown and white bulldog across the foot bridge and along the brick path to the park bench. When I look up again he is crossing the street to the bank, the dog swinging its tail cheerfully.
Beside the bank, the "Main Bar & Grill has its neon "open" sign lit up in the window and a couple of women stand, talking in front of the door. The next time I look up from my painting they've been replaced by the man with the dog, who has stopped to discuss the dog's special body harness with a woman who has just stepped out of the door. He gestures over his own back and shoulders to explain how the harness goes. The lady leaves and the man waits there with his dog until a woman in black outfit comes out. He hands something to her and they walk along the sidewalk together, talking volubly. They cross the street to the park and follow the brick path toward the footbridge, where they greet a lady who is sitting on one of the park's two purple benches. She rises to talk with them. A man sits in a minivan in front of the bank, reading a paper. When I look up again the parking spot is vacant. Cars and pickups, dump trucks and school buses all slow at the four-way stop and then make their turns or proceed ahead with their various attendant noises - rushes, whirrs, rumbles and roars. The park is not large, but charmingly landscaped with flower beds and bushes around trees and rocks, with a large gazebo in the midst. The banks of the narrow creek have been left wild.

Fred found Pyganodon grandis (Common Floater), Great Pond Snails (Lymnaea stagnalis), native Oroconectes virilis Crayfish, and Champlain Sea fossil Hiatella arctica clams here in 1998, but today the water is too high to search the bottom, since the stretch through the park is uniformly deep, with steep banks, and the only shallows where the bottom can be dimly seen is under the bridge and the culvert. In addition to high clay-turbid water, the bottom is obscured by lots of Elm and Manitoba Maple leaves.

The shrubs along the stream through the park are invasive Rhamnus frangula (Shining Buckthorn) and Lonicera (Honeysuckle), but someone has recently planted a few small native Cornus stolonifera (Red-osier Dogwood), and there are a couple of birdhouses on stakes along the creek.

In 1998 Fred found only the native Orconectes virilis here, but in 2009, after Eric Snyder announced the local discovery of this species' burrowing relative, O. immunis (Calico Crayfish), a resident contacted us about Crayfish she'd found in the drain behind her house in Derby Street, a few hundred metres downstream. This was just before we headed out on a trip around Ontario and Quebec to revisit places where we'd found this species beyond its contiguous range in the 1970s. Fred visited her, and confirmed that she has O. immunis here. She had just recently moved from British Columbia to Ontario, and was "pleasantly surprised" when she found an abundance of aquatic life in this clayey ditch through a Manitoba Maple-dominated riparian strip in an old housing subdivision. It was a delight to Fred to see so much enthusiasm for Leeches and Crayfish, and for one of the little clay-bed creeks of the South Nation drainage which are so often deprecated as "just ditches," but which often have substantial populations of interesting species.

Cobbs Lake Creek (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-10-25T11:33:00.003-04:00

11 October finds me sitting on the edge of an old railway embankment, which is now the "Prescott & Russell Recreational Trail", painting Cobbs Lake Creek. I seldom see a view so distant. The South Nation watershed is full of distant views. In some the soybean fields look like they go on forever. The creek's shadowed western bank shows dark, far into the distance, all the way to the autumn colours of trees near the horizon. Above them I paint the bright blue of hills on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River.
The creek is broad and flat, with dark reddish stands of Giant Ragweed tapering down into the creek bed from its banks like glacial moraines. Blond tassels of Phragmites reed catch the late afternoon sun, and a little farther toward the centre of the creek bed, a stand of cattails glows yellow as its leaves lose their summer green. Water glimmers in wet patches among the autumn-faded grasses in the creek bed. A ribbon of rushes, still green, mark what remains of the central channel.

This land is so flat that during spring thaw it becomes a lake, covering several square kilometres of fields, only criss-crossed by roads and this railway bed. On the tour this was pointed out to us as the place that has the most extreme flooding in the South Nation drainage. The view from this spot every March is "Cobbs Lake", with all the vegetation submerged, waiting patiently for weeks until the spring floodwater finally runs off the clay that supports this rich agricultural landscape.

A perky Song Sparrow, all stripy with a black spot on its breast hops from twig to twig on a leafless Ash tree that stretches its branches across my scene. A breeze blows chill at my back as the sun sets and I pack up my paints and return along the old railroad bed toward the highway. As Marigold and I cross the old railway bridge my eye is caught by the motion of a swimming Muskrat. Then it notices me and ducks beneath the surface, its dark shape briefly discernible in the milky brown water that never completely drops its suspended clay.

The next day Fred went out to identify the plants in my landscape, and determined that this stand of Phragmites is the native kind, unlike most others that are spreading along the ditches in this area.

Autumn Phragmites (oil on canvas 12 x 16 in.) Sold

2011-10-20T16:01:00.002-04:00

10 October finds me sitting to paint Phragmites reeds on the shoulder of County Road 20, at a wetland which is the headwaters of the South Nation River's north branch a kilometre east of East Oxford, Grenville County, Ontario,

This is the closest the South Nation River drainage comes to home, and we've been measuring the height of the tallest stem that's within a few metres of the road here, ever since we took a 4-metre sheaf of it to display like a trophy in the entryway of the Eastern Ontario Biodiversity Museum in 1999.

Fred takes advantage of being tied down to my painting site today, by finally having the opportunity to capture the geographic coordinates of the perimeter of this stand. Bob Woolham's recollection is that it has been here at least since the early 1980's, which agrees with ours, though in those days we foolishly didn't pay adequate attention to this invasive species.

We at first thought that should paint the interior of the stand, but this was very dense with stems (perhaps unusually dense), so I settled on its exterior, viewed against the forest of Large-toothed Aspen and Red Maple that flanks it to the east.

I chose an 12 x 16 inch canvas because I wanted to enjoy the long tapered brush strokes of the leaves and the long subtly arching linear strokes of the stems. With so much space to move in, I actually feel as if I'm flying! As the canvas fills in with breeze tossed reeds and fluttering aspen leaves, the painting appears to be dancing!

Fred returns from his circumperambulation with accounts of hearing Gray Treefrogs and Spring Peepers, and at the stream, discovering a Mud Minnow and some Sticklebacks - and a Green Frog that hopped three metres after the beetles he'd tossed from his net. He found a second stand of Phragmites, not flowering, behind this one in the edge of the woods. Too soon I have to pack up, but look forward to finishing this from my photos.

Riparian Forest at Plantagenet (oil on canvas 12 x 16 in) Sold

2011-10-17T15:02:00.004-04:00

October 8 finds me standing on a mowed lawn in Plantagenet, enjoying the puzzle pieces of the sunlit South Nation River as they peek between dark sinuous trunks of the Manitoba Maples that dominate the downstream third of this island park. The large leaves of Wood Nettle are turning yellow in the tangled, shady woods that slope down toward the river.

Fred is walking the river bank looking for clams, of course. Down there the cobble-clay banks of river-edge rushes have their roots in a substrate that is throughly mixed up with Zebra Mussel shells even though "Zebras" have only been here for a decade. He saw lots of old clam shells eroding out of the matrix of fragmented Zebra Mussel shells, showing what things had been like before the arrival of the scourge: Elliptios and Lampsilis, of course, one Alasmidonta undulata, and also many of the big-river winged species Leptodea fragilis & Potamilus alatus. These incredibly beautiful mussels were all the way down through the South Nation, and nobody knew they were there. There are only four collections of mussels from the South Nation when Fred began to study clams in 1995, and they didn't include any of the spectacular species.

As I paint, standing at my easel at the edge of the woods, a muttering roar sounds from above like a lawnmower moving across the sky. I looked up, and passing overhead was a broad yellow paragliding sail - a curved row of wind-filled nylon tubes, carrying a large propeller, caged like a giant household fan to push it through the air. The seated pilot is a dark silhouette in front of the propeller with arms raised to the cords that steer his craft. It is a perfect day for flying whatever you've got - warm, calm and lovely!

Here is the photo that Fred took of me painting fast as my daylight fails - racing with the onset of dusk! It's times like this when he sings the little song he made up for our daughter Jennie as they walked out in the gathering dusk to call me back to camp on a Vancouver Island beach in 1988. It goes like this: "Your mommy is a mommy who can paint in the dark, paint in the dark, paint in the dark. Your mommy is a mommy..."

Old Bridge at Lemieux (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-10-14T23:44:00.001-04:00

7 October finds me perched on the brink of the concrete and stone north abutment of the old bridge of the now nonexistent town of Lemieux, Ontario, to paint the facing outer  abutment on the south side. The inner portion of the abutment, which  corresponded to the portion we were on, is toppled into the river, with a  dance of Manitoba Maples around it. The river is still creamy with suspended clay, even though we've had a long dry spell.

On 20 June 1993, this bridge was destroyed along with 17 hectares of farmland as the bank of the South Nation River collapsed after heavy rains in a landslide that in less than an hour left a crater some 320 metres wide and 18 metres deep. This event occurred only one year after the last of the residents of the town of Lemieux had been relocated. Earlier soil testing by South Nation Conservation had revealed the likelihood of a catastrophic slide of the deep, unstable Leda clay, and three years later it happened.

Wikipedia says that "an estimated 2.8 to 3.5 million cubic metres of sand, silt and liquefied clay collapsed into the river, damming it for 3.3 kilometers (2.1 mi) for several days."

From the long, sinuous span of the new bridge, the area where the slide occurred can still be seen, but it no longer looks like a landslide, as the generous nutrition supplied by  the clay has resulted in a widespread growth of trees, shrubs, and oversize herbs.

Fred went down to walk the shore below her site, and had what amounted to  an experience. He writes: "There was a trail down to the riverbank under the new  bridge, and when I got there I found Goose feathers and Cocklebur, but  not much else to see but clay. I proceeded upstream along steep  shores, which required one to grip the vegetation to keep from  slipping into unknown depths of clay-opaque water, wrenching one old  Lampsilis shell out of the mud on the way.
Then I struggled up into dense Willow thickets on a clay terrace below  the bridge abutment, and passed beneath Aleta and through head-high  Goldenrod, to a slope down to a little flat area of mud, previously  found by fishermen, as indicated by their rod-support sticks still  standing in the clay on the water's edge. Here there were two old  Elliptio shells, one with adhering Zebra Mussels that suggested that a  fishhook had dredged it from the bottom. Underwhelmed, I gripped  Willows to pull myself to another small patch of flat clay, where an  old Leptodea shell buried in mud was available.
Upstream from here, there were only steep shores in view, and I headed up the slope, for the first 10m or so through Sandbar Willows that  Beavers had thinned by nibbling off many of the stems, and then into a dense stand where the Beavers hadn't penetrated, and the only sign of management was scars of springtime ice abrasion. Here many of the  Willow stems were standing dead, and swathed by such vines as Hops,  Bindweed, Prickly Cucumber, and Twining Buckwheat.

Then a few metres of walkable Pussy Willows floored by  Gill-over-the-ground, before I plunged into more head-high Goldenrods  and then up a steep slope of small trees, where Beavers had been  cutting Ash trees, and presumably dragging them along vertical  trackways down to the river, and a final steep slope of Euiesetum  hyemale Horsetail and Sensitive Fern (densest at the lip) to a terrace  of the planted Red Pines of Larose Forest.
I then rejoined Aleta on the abutment until she finished painting at 18h45 or so - as we sat we saw big splashes in the river upstream but  no wakes that might indicate a Beaver. Ringing three-notes calls up  the river resolved into Yellowlegs-like Birds wading and walking on  two mud islands upstream, and going a long way from the visible shore, suggesting very shallow water around the islands - and then they were off. Similar ringing calls of single notes matched a Picoides villosus  (Hairy Woodpecker) flying across the river to the trees around where  we were perched. Earlier a Warbler had come across and given a few notes as it poked through the branches overhead. There was a bird  across the river that sang a variety of tentative songs, which we  thought might be a young Catbird, also a few loud Robin notes, and  sporadic singing of Melospiza melodia (Song Sparrow) songs; Parus atricapillus (Blackcap Chickadee) called briefly nearby, but all these  ceased as dusk fell, and it was Branta canadensis (Canada Goose) overhead, flying west in small flocks, that provided bird-sound.
Listening to the new bridge had verified Bierce's analysis that noise was the "chief product, and authenticating sign, of civilization" as  vehicles producing various, all loud, motor sounds zoomed past, with  the bridge seeming to amplify their passing. One sounded like a small plane taking off from the roadway, and there was a variety of roars  and rumbles, and only a few that provided a simple whoosh. One would  think that, out of respect for Lemieux, the South Nation, and the  Champlain Sea, most drivers would slow down as they passed this place with its flexible bridge and swept-away predecessor, but few showed  any sign of such consideration. About 19h00, as we were retiring into  our trailer, a pickup, evidently of unusually civilized demeanor, roared into the gravel road that goes south along the river, sprayed  gravel as it fish-tailed the full width of the road a couple of times,  and then accelerated loudly around the corner of the road."

Lower Hoasic Creek (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-10-10T13:44:00.004-04:00

6 October finds me sharing a bridge abutment with grapevines, to paint the view down Hoasic Creek to the St Lawrence River, charmed by the parallel stripes of New York State on the horizon, the blue seaway, a strip of parking lot, a mowed lawn, and the shrubby river bank. Fred explored downstream this time, discovering that just beyond the curve out of my sight, the St Lawrence has backed up Hoasic Creek and established Zebra Mussels there. Until people introduce them farther up the creek, the three species of native mussels we confirmed here in 2006 will continue to thrive.

As I painted, a Raccoon entered the scene, walking among the cobbles on the east bank. Once we were noticed, it hurried along the riverbank stones I have included it in the lower right corner of my painting. Fred has written a charming account of the afternoon, so I will include it here:
"...Then, as the shadows lengthened, down to Hwy 2, near the St Lawrence, a site which we've been monitoring since 1980. This time, instead of heading upstream from the bridge, I went downstream along the cobbly creek towards an industrially modified landscape, with the scent of baking cookies in the air. Aleta set up to paint this downstream stretch, with the sky, New York, the St Lawrence, a parking lot and an industrially influenced lawn making contrasting bands of colour above the creek.

By the time I was just past the bottom of the stretch of creek visible in her painting, the water was flowing upstream, from the river, and river-borne Zebra Mussels and their shells were sparsely on the rocks and bottom, indicating that there'd be no point in seeking Unionid mussels closer to the River.

I returned back to the bridge, with Aleta perched on the top of the concrete abutment, photographing me. This wide bridge was built when Hwy 2 was to eastern Ontario what highway 401 has become, and the roadbed was made wide enough for twinning. The concept of the 401 intervened to relieve transportation planners of the necessity of widening this highway through all the towns along the river; now it's just "County Road 2" in the minds of the government. The bridge is showing its age in picturesque cracks and rust and a drapery of fruit-laden yellow-leaved Grape Vines cascading the 6m or so down the abutment to the water from where Aleta was painting.

I continued up under the bridge, where fine mud and beds of algae with pointy pricks sticking up from their surface were spread over coarse sand, and then up over the ankle-twisting artificial bed of the creek north of the highway to the first natural riffle.

This is where we'd found Elliptio, Pyganodon, and Lampsilis mussels in 2006, but now the Sun was going down and the bed of the creek was hard to see, and there were lots of dead Ash leaves on the bottom, and I didn't see any Unionids at all. A pale Crayfish jumped out from under cover, however, and while it had the size and dark abdominal band of Orconected propinquus (formerly noted as abundant there), it also had the constricted rostrum of the invasive O. rusticus, so further investigation of the Crayfish here is warranted.

I think, on the other hand, that Hoasic Creek is entirely too cobbly and gravelly for Ligumia nasuta, so we'll cross it off our list of sites where that species might be expected to persist. This stretch of land along the St Lawrence must be mostly gravelly till to produce such a stream, which, except for the brown water, looks like it had flowed right out of the Oak Ridges Moraine. The contrast was enhanced because yesterday, and on previous visits in the South Nation basin, Champlain Sea clay had been so ubiquitous that a creek that's cobbly for such a long stretch had gotten to be something we didn't imagine.

By this time Aleta had the painting roughed out, and was putting in those details that made it recognizable to someone else in the "much improved light" of the sunset. We sat together for a while conversing when the thundering whooshes of traffic allowed it. At one point, we looked down as a well-rounded medium-sized Raccoon looked up towards us. My first comment alerted it, but when Aleta revealed herself as human by pointing a camera at it and clicking away, it turned tail and hurried along west bank of the creek (a row of stones (laid to form the edge of the constructed channel) until it was out of sight.

The stream sign on the road here says "Nash Creek," which is evidently also on some topo maps, but that on Hwy 401 uses the generally accepted "Hoasic Creek" for this stream. Tomorrow we'll be snooping about, and painting, the Larose Forest and the vicinity of the Lemieux landslide."

Here is Fred - a little farther and he'll find Zebra Mussels!

This is how my painting looked when I lost the sunlight on my scene

and had to pack up:

Watershed Tour (ink on paper)

2011-10-07T23:04:00.002-04:00

5 October finds us on a bus tour of the north east section of the South Nation River, sketching in my journal when as we stop at various places. For eight years now, the South Nation Conservation [Authority] has replaced the old Fisheries Committee tour of fisheries projects with a generalized tour of their activities in some quarter of the South Nation drainage. This year it was the northeastern portion of the watershed, which we have seen the least of, and featured projects such as water source protection, manure treatment, bog flora in the Alfred Bog, forest management in LaRose Forest, and seining up Silversides at Jessups Falls Conservation Area.

Our first stop is an organic farm, where a fence was being built to keep cattle out of the creek. We are attended by a flock of companionable turkeys, which I sketch as the project is explained to our group.

When the bus arrives at the LaRose Forest pavillion so that we can hear presentations on forest management and native herbal lore, I decide to sit in the sun at the foot of a Red Pine to stay out of the chill wind, and Fred brings me a Lactarius chrysorhea mushroom. There are so many things to notice about it!

If you can read the notes on this page of my journal, you will see that the seining demonstration came up with a Brook Silversides - the first one found SNC staff in the main channel of the South Nation River! This huge fallen Willow tree reminds everyone of a dragon, and is a favorite vantage point for fisher people and for basking turtles. You can see the bridge in the distance on the right, just downstream of Jessups Falls, which isn't really a falls anymore, because it was blown up to let logs past in the 1800's.

This little Tamarack reminds me of the one I painted in Alfred Bog after our first daughter Elsa died in 1985. The raffling of that painting contributed to the funds that the Ottawa Field Naturalist Club needed to purchase and conserve the first portion of the bog. Now the whole central area is protected, and planning is going forward to preserve its water level from peripheral drainage.

Soft white tufts of Bog Cotton sedge wave above the little tree, and a wonderful diversity of bog plants rejoice all around it. I sit on the boardwalk to sketch as the tour walks past me, pointing out Pitcher plants and red-berried holly bushes, and our old friends Labrador Tea and Leatherleaf, and many others. The sun is warm on my back, and being low among the bog vegetation protects me from today's cool wind.

Bear Brook Haven of Diversity (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-10-03T11:17:00.002-04:00

28 September finds me painting another view of Bear Brook - this time near its confluence with the South Nation. Here it has steep, wooded banks and a broader stream. The water is only slightly milky with clay down the centre, and dark green algae in streaks and patches on the firm clay bottom show in lovely viridian streaks from where I sit on one of the rocks that were tumbled down the bank when they built the bridge.

Fred has gone upstream, and and our friend Andrew is out of sight downstream. They begin to find the same diversity of mussels that Fred found at this place in 2007, as well as Flat-sided Horn Snails in huge abundance, embedded in the coarse algal fur of the rocks (at first we'd thought they were Zebra Mussels!) and grooving the bottom with a dense network of snail trails. I hear a sudden large splash behind me and turn to see Fred rising up from the water after slipping on the bank. Wading, where the water is shallow enough, is safer than walking along the slippery clay banks!
Fred and Andrew both return with bags full of clam shells, including two Butternuts still in their green husks, and one old shell, found in the stream, which suggest that a healthy tree of this endangered species is somewhere nearby.

Records from today in Fred's database shows that Bear Brook is still a haven for Unionid mussels from the Zebra Mussels that have taken over the main channel of the South Nation River, including the main channel species Leptodea fragilis and Potamilus alatus (this is the first time Potamilus has been found in a tributary). The hope for Bear Brook persisting as a refuge is that it doesn't have any empoundments on it, so there is no place for the Zebras to build up a population.

2011/261/ee, Elliptio complanata (Eastern Elliptio). abundant adult, shell, specimen. many seen alive near bridge, many mostly old shells.

2011/261/ef, Lampsilis ovata (). abundant adult, shell, captured, specimen. many seen alive near bridge, many mostly female shells.

2011/261/eg, Ligumia recta (Black Sand-Shell). 6/several adult, shell, captured, specimen. several seen alive near brdge, mostly ca 100 mm shells. Shells include a small valve (39.5 mm), 2 pairs and 3 valves, largest 115.3 mm.

2011/261/eh, Lasmigona costata (Fluted Shell). 3/few adult, shell, captured, specimen. few seen alive, 2 pairs, 1 valve, elongate shells, largest 101 mm.

2011/261/ei, Alasmidonta undulata (Heavy-toothed Wedge Mussel). 2 shell, specimen. 2 valves, old ca 68.5, fairly fresh 69 mm.

2011/261/eja, Leptodea fragilis (Fragile Paper-Shell). 1 shell, specimen. fairly fresh 90.5 mm pair.

2011/261/ejb, Potamilus alatus (Pink Heelsplitter). 1 shell, specimen. fairly fresh, barely alate 96.2 mm pair.

2011/261/ek, Strophitus undulatus (Squaw-Foot). 1 shell, specimen. heavy, fairly fresh 85 mm pair.

Bear Brook With Geese (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-10-01T18:39:00.006-04:00

27 September finds us on this warm day, exploring the upstream end of Bear Brook just down from Carlesbad Springs, Ontario, to see how far the unionid mussel diversity of the lower reaches may extend upstream. When we stopped at the bridge on Carleton Line I was first intrigued by a deeply gullied pasture scene with grazing cattle, strongly backlit by the lowering sun on the west side. Walking back to the van to get my paints I turned around to look eastward and there, in totally different light, was an enchanting scene under a delicate sky - an intensely green field with the sinuous band of natural vegetation that marks Bear Brook, winding through it.

As I settle down to paint this scene my attention is drawn to constant excited honking of Canada Geese. The goose music is coming from a flock resting in the field just past the bend of the creek. Zooming in on them with my camera I can see that they are all sitting down! Only a couple have their black necks draped over their backs, napping, and very few are grazing. Most have their heads high, honking in animated discussion about migration.

Fred finds five pairs of fresh Pyganodon grandis (Common floater) shells neatly laid, perhaps by a Muskrat after its dinner of clam meat. He wades past Floating Pondweed and clumpy algae, and notices a haze of spent Wild Rice stems all along the creek, even in the Cattle pasture. Between the deepish water, clay bottom, and overhanging grass, any Unionids are certainly secure from detection. There are no snails evident in the water or in the small piles of old drift around the bridge. Great Blue Heron tracks crisply pattern the clay under the north side of the bridge. One adult Green Frog sits on the bank under the bridge and a few others jump in before they are seen.

For the whole afternoon a pair of Mourning Doves have been flying around and perching on wires.

A Wood Duck lands downstream of the bridge and a Kestrel soars overhead. As I pack up my paints, Crows are calling from the ground in the pasture.

Fern Bank on the North Castor (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-09-30T23:46:00.004-04:00

26 September finds us at the North Castor River looking downstream from the bridge of the Ottawa Carleton 9th Line Rd. As I set up to paint the first loop of the river downstream from the bridge, arranging small flat stones to keep the feet of my stool from sinking into the clay on the only flat spot along this side, our dog Marigold perches uncomfortably between soft sinking clay and steep grassy bank. A Robin sings its fall song for a while, and I begin to paint the exposed roots of Manitoba Maple and the rusty fringe of frost-killed Ostrich Ferns draping the shoulder of the far bank.
The the river parallels the road in a deep clean clay channel and then loops away. In this dead-flat agricultural landscape, where Corn & Soy Beans are being harvested today, the only wooded area is a wide swath along the meandering river - woods which it doubtless defends each year by spring flooding. Manitoba Maple are turning yellow on some trees and curling up brown-edged on others. The water is low and clear with streaming Pondweed Potomogeton natans. On the clay bank across from me the leaves of a sparse patch of Pickerel-weed have been left high by the low water.

Procyon lotor (Raccoon) tracks continuous all over the mud under the bridge span, as there has been at all three bridges. The air is full of the lovely sharp scent of Champlain Sea clay, as Fred pushes his way through dead twigs, grass and Wood Nettles down the steep trackless bank and into the stream. The clay stream bed supports his weight, perhaps aided by numerous embedded rotten sticks. Clay takes the place of bedrock here, even eroding out into smooth firm pebble in mid-channel. He picks up a few Elliptio complanata (Eastern Elliptio) shells and observed 5 living clams notched into the hard clay bottom. Each movement sets up clouds of clay, which billow downstream. A single small pale Orconectes Crayfish escaped capture in clouds of clay.

Clam-Watching (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-09-27T11:44:00.006-04:00

22 September finds me at the dam on the South Nation River in Chesterville Ontario, looking downstream. This is the season when brownish young Great Blue Herons are learning their trade at riffles and ponds throughout eastern Ontario, and one is fishing & catching below the bar at foot of the pool below the dam as we arrive. It flies downstream and lands in a couple of places with squawks, and then an hour later returns with squawks and lands in a dead Elm tree on the south shore, as if impatient for us to be gone. I settle down to paint and the Heron launches, a lean silhouette with trailing legs, to find a more solitary fishing spot around the bend downstream. Fred is wading along the far shore, and I capture him in my painting as well.

As we arrived, a fisherman was spin-casting down from the top of the dam into the outflow. He asked us if we were bird-watching, and when we said we were clam-watching, he advised us that we should go downstream, as he apparently knew of the shells Fred subsequently found there. There were also a couple of boys fishing along downstream on the north shore, the younger complaining of their failure to catch anything.

As Fred waded down the north bank and back up the south bank, finding spectacularly large fresh shells of a diversity of species, satisfied that this stretch of the South Nation is still free from Zebra Mussels, he made up this little poem:

The fisherperson hurls his lure -
Faint hope of finny prey -
The musselhead walks down the shore,
Delighted all the way. (Fred)

Some of Fred's notes are as follows:

The water is fairly low and murky green-brown. The path down to the river past the fence along the parking area on the north shore leads down to a cobble bar that's white with dried mud, and while there's no sheets or large mats of algae, as in the similar but Zebra-dominated situation in Crysler, there are charming rifflly skirts of a coarse green alga between the stones. The river flows out of the pool below the dam in a narrow riffle only about 25cm deep

The Flowering-rush islands above this bar are battered and tousled by the high water early this season, though those downstream are dense and upright. The Acer negundo (Manitoba Maple) along the shores are turning yellow and have a heavy crop of whithered-looking brown seeds.

At 17h25 he wades across the river, in a maximum depth of 35 cm, without seeing any living Unionids, but the water and bottom were so muddy that they'd be hard to see - and maybe they live in the Flowering-rush beds rather than the open bottom.

When I got across, the gravelly/muddy south shore is lined with huge shells. Later I regret that I did not grope the Butomus beds for Unionids, and gone a few 100 m further downstream to look for other genera, but in stead I headed back so as to not lose touch with the rest of our party.

The shells are spectacular (upper row, left to right): Lampsilis ovata (Pocketbook) female shells (shown) to 121 mm, and males to 93 mm, though bigger shells were left behind, since this was the most abundant species; Lasmigona costata (Fluted Shell) to 117 mm, heavy and elongate, with big teeth and weak external ribbing; Strophitus undulatus (Squaw-Foot), to 100 mm, also heavy elongate shells; Elliptio complanata (Eastern Elliptio) to 117 mm, deep compressed heavy shells, the fresh ones vividly lavender; (lower) Pyganodon grandis (Common floater) to 132 mm, with deep & inflated shell shape, looped or ripply beak sculpture; and long white Ligumia recta (Black Sand-Shell) to 173 mm. The only snails noticed were a couple of old shells of the native Campeloma decisum (Brown Mystery Snail).

Boundary Wetland (oil on canvas 10 x 12 in.) Sold

2011-09-25T23:16:00.004-04:00

19 September finds me on the boundary of the South Nation and Kemptville Creek watersheds, painting the view across wetland from a roadside Beaver pond at the corner of Limerick and Forsythe roads. I perch my low folding stool on the narrow gravel shoulder and poke the pole of my umbrella easily through to the rocks, or logs, beneath. Across the pond I can see exposed ends of logs that were once part of the road - a "corduroy" road that crossed the wetland. It must have been incredibly bumpy and in constant need of repair.

When we arrived a Great Blue Heron was standing right where I have painted it. Before I could get my camera out it was gone, but the image of the straight neck and shadow-striped back stay with me, so I paint it in. As I work, a large Beaver rafts across the pond, wet-furred and blunt-headed, carrying green plants in its mouth and keeping a beady eye on me. This pond is like a living room for the resident Beaver family. They don't build anything here, but someone is almost always at home.
Forsythe is the road south to Robuck, the "main line" of the management road for Limerick Forest, but not maintained or plowed during the winter when we first moved here. Before 1989 there used to be a great flow north through the culvert under Limerick Road, placing the part of the wetland I have painted in the Rideau drainage. From 1992 to 2008 our notes record an alternation of flowing and plugged culverts, Beaver dams in different sites on the ditches, and various activities of backhoes, grates, and baffles engaged by the townships against the Beavers. Since 2008 the culverts have been plugged by Beaver mud, and the stream across the road from it (into the Kemptville Creek drainage) has been stagnant.

Golden Creek September (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-09-21T22:51:00.005-04:00

18 September finds me sitting on a stone at the water's edge in the tiny gorge of Golden Creek, just west of the village of Lyn, Ontario. The creek is only about three metres wide here, and shallow as it chatters over stones a little downstream from the bridge. It has carved its way down through deeply bedded gray limestone, which shelves and benches to the water, gracefully striped by branch shadows and graced with purple flowered New England Asters.

Fred is being filmed and interviewed by our friend John Barclay of Triune Arts for a documentary as he searches for clams in the gravel stream bed just downstream from where I sit.

Past them, my side of the bank becomes a point, jungly with nettles, Joe Pye Weed and Dogwood, as Golden Creek meets Lyn Creek in what Fred calls "the Lyn Creek Naith."

Today Fred has discovered the farthest upstream extent of the rare clam Ligumia nasuta in Golden Creek. We found the first shell of this elegant little mussel in Lyn Creek in 2005 and the first live individual in 2006. This is one of only three spots in Ontario where the "Eastern Pond Mussel" persists. Before the Zebra Mussel invasion it was one of the four most abundant native fresh water mussels in the Great Lakes.

South Nation River Flats at Crysler (oil on canvas 5 x 7)

2011-09-20T21:23:00.007-04:00

14 September finds me standing on the limestone flats of the South Nation River in Crysler, Ontario, looking down river to the north. Banks of Burr Reed are combed by the wind and the evening sun's bold golden glow on the trees of the far bank reflect in bright ribbons of shallow water that lace across the wet clay and finely mossed bedrock at my feet. We have visited this place at least once a year over the past decade.

Fall has arrived. We expect frost tonight, but the rivers and creeks are still at summertime low levels and we are still checking them for fresh water mussels.
Fred wades around & across river where the water is 30 cm deep and downstream into the current where it is deeper and the bottom the bottom becomes crunchy underfoot with little Zebra Mussels under the coating of algae. The flat rocks in the stream are covered by the algal coat on their tops, but their sides, especially the upstream side are densely packed with 15-20 mm Zebra Mussels, though there are fewer on the undersides, perhaps because there's not space for them between flat rocks and a coating of sediment in the flat bedrock. In places of moderate current in midsteam the density goes up to a 1 cm separation, or 10000/sq m. Three small Orconectes virilis (Northern Crayfish) skins are caught in algal fluff.

Wading back across the river Fred finds that the areas where not much current flows on both sides is dense with Tadpole Snails, like raisins in raisin bread. This is a different texture from both the fluffy instream algae and the flat bright green surface of the enclosed pools. There's a whole 'nother universe of algae where the cold water of a drain of some sort comes down along the access track - including tar-like wrinkled dark mats of Cyanobacteria - all of this making one wish one had phycological training - but the dominance of the algae all across the river may be a post-Zebra phenomenon.

For a few years after the Zebra Mussels showed up, we'd find fairly fresh native mussel shells of several species, drifted down to the cobbly patch across from where I stand to paint, but today we found only a few very old, eroded shells there. We will continue to keep this as one of our monitoring sites. Maybe someday we'll get somebody to work on the drift samples we have from back before the invasion of Zebra Mussels, and we'll be watching to see whether native mussels can possibly make a comeback. The river bottom ecology must be really changed for Mudpuppies, and there's another project for a low-water summer - to go back to all the spots along the South Nation River where we've found them in past years.

Indian Creek Culvert (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-09-19T16:04:00.005-04:00

13 September finds us on Indian Creek at Forsythe Road north of Roebuck, Ontario - where I painted an upstream view from the road on my birthday, on 26 December 2005. Today we're on the downstream side. Fred has waded out of sight while I crouch on a rock, admiring the far creek bank's bright keyhole reflection through one of the five large culverts. Wind moves in nearby treetops with an all encompassing roar, and then in the tree tops farther up the creek with a sound like distant surf, and then behind me in a slowly rising and falling "hushshsh" while soft dark cumulus clouds scud quickly past the higher white ones in the chalky cobalt sky. A large Monarch Butterfly passes silently a few feet above my head. It feels like the last day of summer on Indian Creek.

A Rana clamitans (Green Frog), green headed with a slim brown body hops from the creekside grasses into the shelter of the brown leaved indigo berried Dogwood bushes. The water is low and still, its surface broken by shoals of mossy stones and patterned brightly with fallen Ash, Elm, and Maple leaves. Beside me a Swamp Milkweed's curly-silked seeds are being coaxed by the wind from their split brown pods, and at the tip of a neighbouring branch a cluster of still green pods is raised like five candles among long green leaves. The tall banks of Spotted Joe Pye Weed are still green leaved but their once purple heads are now brown with seeds.

Blue Jays ring their rain calls and hidden Redwinged Blackbirds "chuck". No more territorial calls that used to enliven the marshes. It's soon time to head south. A faint honking of a flock of Canada Goose confirms the sentiment. The sky in the north is now dark with pregnant cloud and the treetops are swaying ahead of the storm that will bring our promised cold front.

We're here looking for signs that new species of Unionids had been carried into the creek by the fish ladder the South Nation Conservation had installed at a small dam downstream several years ago. Water is low with no visible flow, but with the midstream bottom not exposed. A moderate crop of fruit on Common Buckthorn which is the dominant roadside shrub. The main emergent is tall Bur-reed, especially along the N side of the pool below the culverts, Lemna minor is the only Duckweed; Moss and Elodea are the bottom vegetation above the culverts.

Fred returns at 19:20, reporting having found three Orconectes virilis crayfish and the shells of Pyganodon grandis mussels but no living mussels or snails. Cardinal Flower is still in bloom and he found 4 Monarch Butterfly caterpillars.

Painting the Painter (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in)

2011-09-15T23:39:00.008-04:00

10 September in the afternoon finds me painting a painter - Phil Chadwick is painting from the dock, facing south. Behind him are the docks of the cruise boats. Small waves lap against the shining algae-streaming rocks at the base of the dock, washed by bigger waves with each boat wake that arrives. Behind me is the western flank of Fish Rock, with a depression atop it that's filled with water from the largest waves, warmed by the sun like a outdoor bathtub. This, I'm told, is where parents watch little children splash while older children fish from the dock and teens jump from the high shoulder of the great granite boulder.

Other artists, on the lawn behind us, paint a tug boat that is moored at one of the little docks that jut out from the shore, and more are standing at their easels here and there through the town, and out painting on some of the "Thousand Islands" that makes the place where the granite bedrock of the Frontenac Arch crosses the St Lawrence River so popular with residents, cottagers, and visitors.

Sunday, 11 September:

It was a grand weekend for plein air painters in Rockport, with lots of camaraderie, shared experience and inspiration, good food, and evening presentations by our Weatherman painter Phil Chadwick. After everyone left on Sunday afternoon I investigated the protected water of the quay between the dock and the shore near Fish Rock, finding no live fresh water mussels, but only a few very old white shell fragments visible from the dock along shore, and the only living Zebra Mussels I found were attached to the undersides of rocks in rows and clusters, none larger than 1cm. They lie against each other like flakes of translucent chert, with amphipods jostling each other to squeeze between them away from the light and air. There were Caddis Fly larval tubes, a 3cm long wooden one and a smaller one of coarse sand - and an irregular sort of network of ivory coloured spongy colony of some kind, perhaps a fresh water sponge, growing on the surface in a diameter of 1cm and a thickness of 3 - 4 mm. Out of the water it showed short bristles all over its surface that were noticeable because they glistened in the sun. They didn't retract when I touched them.

The initial boom of Zebra Mussels around 1990 seems to have wiped out the native mussels here on the shore of the St Lawrence - and now the population of Zebras has subsided, as often happens to invaders after a few years as local predators (in this case muskrats, diving ducks, and fish) learn to eat them.

No crayfish under rocks I turned at the base of the dock in water to the height of my boots, and no crayfish on the other side of the isthmus of lawn that leads to the dock and to Fish Rock. It was sandy with rocks there too, and clumps of tangled olive green branching, fibrous weed as the water gets deeper toward the moored tug boat that several people painted. I collected two conical aquatic operculate snails which were clinging to the side of a rock in the shallows. No drift of note - just a furze of tree roots that looked as if it might be drift. It catches a few old Zebra Mussel valves.

Fish Rock (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-09-15T23:09:00.006-04:00

10 September in the morning finds me sitting atop "Fish Rock" in Rockport, Ontario, on the St Lawrence River, looking down on the low, eastward extension of the rock as waves slosh and comb its fringe of bright green algae. I am participating in the annual "paintout" of the International Plein Air Painters. There are about twenty of us, painting boats, buildings, islands, docks... and in my case, rocks.

The narrow street through the eastern part of town is backed upon its river side first by marinas and then by white frame houses that present blank rear walls, back doors and garages to the street... but most of these unprepossessing dwellings on the river side of the street have elegant fronts on their gardens and yards overlooking a sparkling expanse of blue water, graced by islands, busy with boats, and framed by the distant sunlit southern shore.

Fish Rock is a traditional swimming spot. I am told that everyone who grew up in Rockport swam there. Fish Rock itself is a great round granite boulder encrusted with lichen, a high diving spot for the bold. You can see eastward edge of it at the bottom of my painting. The rock that I am looking down on is lower, smoothed by sandy storm waves, preferred by folks who want to launch into the waves from a lower level.

A White Oak tree and a White Pine shade the ground cover that borders the lawn where I walk back along the path behind the boat house. A ground cover of bindweed that sprawls over a few Sumacs and crowds out the Virginia Creeper. A bank of Jewelweed is half blossomed and half fruited. The Bumblebees are still nosing into the pendulous orange flowers, and I gently pinch the fattest of the dangling torpedo shaped fruits to set off a satisfying explosion as pale seeds go flying and a long translucent green strap snaps itself into a baby fist faster than I can see how it's done.

Announcing Plein-air Painters For Conservation

2011-09-12T17:38:00.004-04:00

I like to paint with other artists - and I have often wished that we had a way of mobilizing to help raise awareness of the beauty and value of special places that are in urgent need of conservation - to paint together, or singly, in such a way that people would see and understand. Then I got the idea of linking to conservation organizations and citizen groups who are keen to organize events and spread the word about their worthy causes - to host artists to paint on site, and exhibit their work afterward.

I've started a new blog for plein air (outdoor) artists at www.paintersforconservation.blogspot.com, to be the display case for dedicated outdoor painters from anywhere in the world - anywhere they can find threatened natural areas and like-minded sponsors to facilitate and promote their work.

As I wrote in the new blog's first post, artists have tremendous power to evoke an emotional response from people. Bypassing politics and opinion, our love shines through our work, directly to the heart of the viewer. Each special place speaks its own value through the time we spend living and breathing with it in intimate contemplation, striving to capture its essence in our work.

Spread the word, and share the link.

Chinese Mystery Snails (watercolour 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-08-29T20:16:00.002-04:00

29 August finds me staring intently at the finely speckled tentacles and short, elephant-like snouts of three large Chinese Mystery Snails in a jar of water on my desk. Fred is busy measuring the last couple of lapfuls of 1260 snails collected from two sites in Winchester, and I have decided that I must paint these three in watercolour, along with one of the young ones that have hitch-hiked on the shells of the adults.

Being air breathers, these giant snails don't wander into deep water. Each snail must periodically climb up to break the surface with the edge of its mantle curled into a tube, to freshen the air in the large space inside its shell. On these snails I see two mantle flaps, one on each side of the head - but only the one on the right side forms a breathing tube, translucent and delicate like a little mushroom. The other is a simple flap of skin that may function as a gill.

Chinese Mystery Snail Habitat (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-08-21T23:29:00.002-04:00

19 August finds me sitting on a culvert, painting the narrow watercourse that drains farmers fields in Winchester, Ontario, while Fred and staff of South Nation Conservation dredge Mystery snails the size of walnuts out of the water in nets and by hand.

The water is opaque with suspended clay washed in by yesterday's rain. That makes it quite complex to paint - the shadows and reflections don't do the usual thing. I like the whiskers of tall grasses over the blooming goldenrod and the way the afternoon sun picks out the ripe red fruit on the Apple tree. The spikes of Purple Loosestrife that overhang the water in the foreground are past flowering, but farther down the bank some is still in bloom.

My umbrella shades me on this hot, sultry day, and we're here all afternoon. The painting is loose and bold, with very little fine work, as I'm doing it entirely on site, from the yellow ochre underpainting to the signature. Pure plein air painting, with no finishing in the studio is rather like 'pot luck' - you get what you see on the spot, in the time that you have on the spot!

The Chinese Mystery Snails, Cipangopaludina (or Bellamya) chinensis are remarkable because of their huge size (to 60 mm high, though the ones we are finding are not that large), and uniform dark greenish coloration. Introduced to the Pacific Coast for food by oriental immigrants in the 19th Century, and to many places throughout eastern North America throughout the 20th century as an aquarium snail, these are now common in the Lake Erie and Lake Ontario drainages, around Montreal, and fairly widespread in southwestern Ontario. They have long been known from the Rideau River in Ottawa, and colonies exist in the Ottawa River upstream to Pembroke and the lower Mattawa River. This spring we found them at Blind River, but they hadn't previously been known from the South Nation drainage in eastern Ontario.

Last July, a South Nation Conservation team was collecting stream morphology data in a drain in downtown Winchester, and found that the dominant organism in the drain was the Chinese Mystery Snail. This summer, after some discussion, invasive species intern Janet Greenhorn decided to organize a control event, and yesterday and today we sallied forth to the bits of the drain which are accessible. With 3 km at least infested, this is so far just a token effort, but at least we are getting a sense of the abundance of the snails, and the difficulty of scooping them up.

The first thing to note is the black sucking Champlain Sea mire, when it comes to scooping up snails. Yesterday we visited two sites, both of which left Fred groping in the mud to recover his shoes after they'd been wrenched from his feet (the others tended to stand on the shore and prod the watercourse with dipnets, but as a total immersion kind of guy, Fred just waded in and got stuck). Before the torrential rain hit Winchester, there was very little water in the drain where it ran through town, and that was covered by duckweed so the snails could just be felt for by hand, or sorted out of netfulls of mud. The interesting thing to discover was that where the water is low, the Chinese Mystery Snail burrows into the mud. Native snail species found in the mud were only empty shells. Fred's fingers found 62 snails per square metre in the mud.

At today's site, thanks to yesterday's storm, what our team has to work in is half a metre of totally clay-opaque water, and it was decided that in future, visits should be made to different spots on the drain, in different seasons, to try to find it running clear, with snails visible on the bottom, as it was when SNC staff first discovered the Mystery Snails in July 2010.

Fred will measure the 200 or so snails that were collected, and after keeping them in clear water for a week, we'll try out some of the recipes he's found on the web.

Juvenile Song Sparrow (watercolour 5 x 6 in.) Sold

2011-08-18T10:30:00.001-04:00

8 August finds me picking up another bird and stopping everything to paint its eye and beak. The feathers can wait until tomorrow.

This one is a juvenile Song Sparrow. Most of the birds hit by cars are young ones, not yet adept at flying, and also perhaps not smart about the danger of vehicles. The young of this year that will survive in proximity to roads will by next year have learned more about the need to watch for cars and perhaps even the wisdom of flying high across strips of pavement. The ones that get hit obviously are partly influenced by a genetic pre-disposition that puts them in the path of danger.
We notice a marked decrease in the incidence of juvenile Barn Swallows dead on the road. Whether that is evolution of car wariness or decreased population we don't know. All the "noticing" and forming of hypotheses Fred and I can do will not bring us the data that would be needed for testing the hypothesis, by us or anyone else.

For me, these days, stopping to pick up a freshly road killed bird or snake is an exception rather than the norm, even though I'm newly equipped to make precise digital records with my Blackberry phone - time stamped, GPS locations with a few words of notation, e-mailed in a moment to Fred for inclusion in the database. But there's still something missing.... the willingness to slow down and pull off the road! I still don't seem to be able to take the time when everything else seems so urgent and my life has a momentum that increasingly alarms and saddens me. I know that the more records we gather, the more useful each record is to science. The urgency for knowledge and understanding is growing as wildlife populations are under increasing threat from automobiles as well as from loss of habitat and growing instability of their environment.

Aside from the urgent need for knowledge, there are personal issues. The quality, usefulness, and enjoyment of my life increases dramatically when I can take the time to investigate and record my discoveries. I know that! I feel more human when I slow down to take notes and do a sketch. When I can't slow down I feel sad and even guilty, because I have the tools and the knowledge to do better. It is as if I'm turning into a machine driven by clock and calendar. So many of the things I've started get left behind unfinished, buried under the clutter of new projects. Flowers bloom and go to seed unpainted, amazing cloudscapes drift away, turtles and snakes cross the road unrecorded, and I've driven past feathery-looking objects countless times without stopping to see what they are and if they're fresh enough to paint. My eyes blur past them because I'm afraid that I won't have time to paint or sketch, photograph or even take a note!

I'm grateful to this juvenile Song Sparrow for stopping me, holding me still for a while to admire its softness and study its details - and especially for reminding me that I must stick to my goal of simplifying, downsizing, and slowing down. Of course, "slowing down" is just a euphemism for doing things that are more important in the larger picture and for the longer term.

Commanda's Teepee (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-08-12T23:00:00.002-04:00

5 August finds me at William Commanda's place at Kitigan Zibi on Anishinabi land near Maniwaki, Quebec, contemplating his old teepee on the shore of the Gatineau River. I am sitting against the back of his house, with a sunny expanse of lawn between me and the tent.

Retired Chief William Commanda, whom many unrelated people call Grandfather William, died on Wednesday. He would have turned 98 years old this fall. I had hoped to meet him here this weekend, at the "Circle of All Nations" gathering that he has hosted annually at his place. All nations are welcome, and I feel welcome too.

Commanda's vision was one of peace and reconciliation, respect for our history and for the natural world. It is a far-reaching vision, and will be carried on beyond him by those who consider him their spiritual leader, and those who respected him as a peacemaker and visionary. Many world leaders came to pay him their respects during his lifetime - including Nelson Mandela and the Dali Lama.

The thing that inspired my desire to meet him was his speaking about the importance of Eels in the ecology of North American rivers, and the importance of Ottawa Valley female Eels in the population of the whole northern hemisphere. He also expressed appreciation of Fred's poem about Eels

I came to attend William Commanda's funeral because I still want to meet the man. Returning from the cemetery, I notice a very large traditional canvas teepee that looks well used to being pitched beneath the trees by the river here. A pattern of branch shadows gracefully laces its canvas surface to the landscape. People are sitting in quiet conversation by its front door, the bright colours of their clothes in contrast with the blue of the river.

Perhaps this teepee was one of Grandfather William's favourite places, so I decide to paint it. This is a "place" that could be anywhere he wanted to pitch it - a place of tradition, yet adaptable to its environment. A place of shelter and privacy, yet hospitable and accommodating for friends and guests. A place of comfort in any weather - providing shade and cool breezes on hot days or the bright warmth of a fire on a cold night. It does not have a floor to collect the earth's dampness. The walls, doors, and hole at the top are all adjustable to control its internal climate.

I spent a night in one of the canvas teepees during a Bio-blitz last summer, and found the structure fascinating. That evening a migration of young Green Frogs came through the tent. They hopped in under the walls on one side, made their way around the fire which was glowing in the centre as several of us lay around on our sleeping mats, talking, and slipped out under the walls on the opposite side. Some of us felt ourselves being hopped upon! The next morning, we watched a Five-lined Skink moving about perfectly at home in and out of the chimney-like cone of the top of the tent.

The skin teepee (or "ti-pi"), the basis for this modern canvas model, originated with the plains tribes. Traditional Algonquin summer dwellings are "pikogan" made of posts covered with bark, with an opening at the top for air circulation, as in the skin or canvas teepee.

The large field at the entrance of Grandfather William's place is a patchwork of tents of all colours, shapes and sizes, but you can't have fires inside any of them - neither can they be comfortably shared with wild creatures! As I paint Commanda's teepee, and ponder the ancient designs for living on the earth comfortably and with a light footprint, I feel hopeful that our native peoples may help to guide "All Nations" to a sustainable future.

NOTE: Wikkipedia tells me that Kitigan Zibi (also known as River Desert, and designated as Maniwaki 18 until 1994) is a First Nations Reserve of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, an Algonquin band. It is situated at the confluence of the Désert and Gatineau Rivers, and borders south-west on the Town of Maniwaki in the Outaouais region of Quebec, Canada. Having an area of 175 square kilometres (68 sq mi), it is the largest Algonquin Nation in Canada, in both area and population."

Baltimore Oriole (watercolour 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-08-06T12:01:00.001-04:00

31 July finds me picking up the bright black and orange bird that my van just hit on County Road 20, north of East Oxford, Grenville County, Ontario. It is very sad to have caused the death of one in my own community - a neighbour, even though I had not known the bird personally until holding its hot body in my hand and admiring its vivid breast, noticing the orange inside the head plumage - only the tips of the feathers at the back of the head and neck are black. These feathers are all orange at their bases as if the bird were bursting with orange! The eye is large and dark brown, and the bill is pale blue, as are the sturdy legs and feet. The foot and toe pads are pale creamy yellow.

The first 'going-back-decades-later' project that one of us was associated with, was Fred helping to unpacking the returned loan of Oriole skins for Jim Rising's thesis at the Cornell bird collection when he was an undergraduate there. These were the specimens that Sibley and Short collected in the 1950's when they first documented hybridization between the Baltimore and Bullocks Orioles in the Great Plains, and Jim was comparing them with those he had collected himself. Jim came to Cornell as a post-doc and continued to work with contemporary evolutionary change among hybridizing birds, and Fred followed him to the University of Toronto to be his first graduate student.

It seems that there has been an evolution of car-caution among song birds. We used to see many more dead on the roads and as I paint this bird, I realize that it is in a way, an illustration of an individual whose road-crossing habit has been selected against. (see Fred's 2008 essay, Ten Other Questions about Road Ecology. Question 7 asks "how much evolution of car-caution has there been?"

Below Hanlan Bridge (oil on canvas 12 x 16 in.)

2011-08-04T13:34:00.003-04:00

22 July found me sitting on a cedar root above Kemptville Creek, below the Hanlan Bridge in Oxford Mills, Ontario. It was 26C and overcast, with a light breeze that didn't reach me through the woods. Cedar trees leaned from the lower edge of the slope down from the road. The moss and leaf litter were parched, and Cicada's buzzy whine rang high in the ashes, elms, and spruce. The stoney, gravelly streambank was about a meter below my dangling feet and the flood-exposed roots of the cedars, the water golden and slow, streaked by floating skeins of Cladocera algae. Its surface dimpled with skating water striders, making rings that look liked rain was falling from the hot, hazy sky. Along the far bank the bottom glowed through the water at a place where the floating algae hung up on it in a long "U" shape, indicating to me the gravel bar inside of which we have found young Mudpuppies, still striped. Fred and company were wading downstream, looking for mother Mudpuppies under the largest, flattest rocks, to show Elaine who is studying Mudpuppy denning preferences.

Something splashed near the opposite bank, and again, and then I notice a big lazy fin... Carp! A Grackle strutted, long-tailed and formal in black, poking under the edges of water-side stones. Amid the twittering of little voices a Towhee sang "drink your tea" - so I did, cold from my thermos.

Grapevines reflected in the water like ropes hanging from the trees, but they weren't hanging, they were climbing. They must have grown there when there was a continuous twiggy vegetation that has now receded into the canopy, leaving them swaying in the open. I wonder how old they are...

Baie de Pentecote (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-08-02T13:27:00.001-04:00

26 July finds me sitting on a root in the low bank of Baie de Pentecote, near the entrance of Plaisance National Park, Quebec. I am in the lee of a bush, but a brisk breeze turns the leaves of a Silver Maple, whose lowest branch gestures toward the bay. Across the bay is the base of the long peninsula of the park, stretching eastward into the Ottawa River. Just beyond where my feet are resting on the mud at water's edge, the Pickerelweed is sending up spikes of purple-flowers.

Our mussel survey team is elsewhere, counting clams in quarter-metre quadrats, grubbing with their hands in the sandy bottom of metre-deep water on the Ottawa River shore of the park. I will join them at another site tomorrow, but now I am quickly painting the changing sky as cloud shadows and sunlight chasing each other across the scene before me, highlighting now the marsh and now the trees. A thunderstorm is banking up dark masses over my shoulder, rolling and booming its approach, and I pack up my paints and head for the van as the first drops fall.

After lunch with our crew at the park headquarters, I return to my spot. I am lucky that the sun's progress from noon to early afternoon does not change the aspect much, and I paint the tree, reaching long, leaf-feathered branches in slight upward curves - very un-tree-like, I think. Bank Swallows dip and swoop over the water, and Cedar Waxwings fly-catch with them. The Waxwings have longer tails tipped with pale feathers, compared with the swallows' blunt and dark, and sometimes I can see the dark band across the swallows' white breasts. Dragonflies are flycatching too, darting and hovering, some of them in tandem mated pairs.

There are no mussels to be seen along the shore right here, but on our return to the house in Montebello, Jean-Francois shows us the Potomilus alatus that he picked up as an empty shell. It is angular and tall-crested, with a rich pink pearly nacre. This species is listed as rare and endangered in Quebec. The mussel crew has been finding many of them alive today , and it's a "Pentecost-like experience", Fred says, to find so many of these spectacular clams that since their discovery in the Ottawa River in 1863, have been thought to be very rare!

NOTE: This painting is not submitted for the one-week auction, because our gracious host of the survey requested to purchase it as soon as it was finished.

Andrewsville After the Invasion (oil on canvas 5 x 8 in.)

2011-07-23T23:17:00.003-04:00

19 July finds me sitting among rocks and drifts of zebra mussel shells near an old stone bridge footing in the Rideau River at Andrewsville, 4 km n of Merrickville, Ontario. An alien Honeysuckle bush, bright-berried, overhangs the waters edge where part of the river finds its way around a little island and I am shaded by one of the large invasive alien Cathartic Buckthorns that have filled all the spaces of the river edge forest so that the only place to walk along shore is in the water. We have waded here from the footpath that comes down to the river from the mowed bank of the canal. Three plants of the native Joe Pye Weed, not blooming yet, keep me company.

The river has been sorting shells here, large native mussels that were killed by the Zebra Mussels a few years ago, and lots of remnants of Zebra Mussels too - the gravel between rocks is more than half Zebra Mussel shells. It is sad, now that there are relatively few live Zebras to be found, that the native unionid mussels, some of them perhaps 100 years old or more, are still all dead. They were smothered by the Zebra Mussel boom here in 2005, when every rock was crusted with them and the mussels couldn't close their shells for the very multitude of little invasives with their strong holdfast byssus threads, and the Zebras, filtering the water, starved the unionids.

In the foreground of my painting, there is one of the big old ones, the brown skin of its shell slowly eroding away to expose pearly white. Between the stones you can see the litter of Zebra Mussel shells. They crunch underfoot.

Today we haven't seen a single living or even fresh dead native mussel, and this place was once teeming with them. We used to bring visitors here to show off the diversity and abundance of the mussel fauna. There were ancient torpedo-shaped Ligumia recta, which may likely have been young when the canal was built by Colonel By in the 1830's. Lampsilis radiata was the most abundant, with Lasmigona costata the other common species, although Elliptio complanata was more abundant than the Ligumias. Sometimes we also found a few Pyganodon grandis. A couple of years ago, when the invading Zebra Mussels were at their most abundant, competing the extirpation of the native mussels, Fred suggested that the name Andrewsville should be changed to "Aliensville".

The little invasive mussels have declined in number as many initial invasions do. Predators like Muskrats and fish have learned to eat them. Our hope is that the host fish of the native mussels may bring them from some Zebra-free tributary, dropping their little hitchikers here to start new colonies of natives that may be hardy enough to tolerate moderate populations of Zebra Mussels. Only time will tell.

Simplifying the Plein Air Studio

2011-07-22T20:36:00.003-04:00

Welcome to my plein air studio. On 19 July it is in the Rideau River at Andrewsville. My setup is very simple - just a sturdy plastic caddy whose main space holds my tubes of paint, a pair of wooden boxes for palette and wet canvas, and the mug that holds my water. Under the outer flap of its lid are all my brushes. In my backpack are camera, mosquito coil, lunch, etc. I often carry a beach umbrella too, but the overhanging bushes shade this little plein air studio so I won't need the umbrella today.

Here is the caddy. Sometimes I take everything I need out of it and use it for a seat, but usually I sit on the ground, or on a rock or log. Occasionally I would like to stand to paint, and I used to carry an easel, but did not use it often enough to make carrying it everywhere worth while.

Here are the two wooden boxes. I bought them at Dollarama for $1.25 each. One I use for the 5 x 7 or 5 x 8 stretched canvas. You can see my blank canvas in the box. A scrap of sponge keeps it from rattling, and the upright nature of the caddy ensures that the wet painting doesn't get turned upside down. The other wooden box I turned upside down, and lined the lid with stiff, matte-textured plastic from a report cover, to use as a palette. It is stuck to the unfinished wood with double-sided scrapbooking tape, and I pry the plastic free with a palette knife when it needs to be soaked and scrubbed, replacing the tape to re-line the lid. I made two of these palette boxes, so I can switch directly to a clean palette.

First I choose a colour for the underpainting, scrubbing it into the texture of the gessoed canvas with a stiff brush. I give it a wipe with paper towel to remove extra paint from the surface and then scratch my composition in with the end of a brush.

Sometimes my painting session is cut short and I must fiish at home from my photos. I'm afraid that's going to happen today because the rest of our field party are nearly finished with their mussel collecting and we'll have to leave soon. So I begin with the foreground because I'm making some adjustments in the positions of the mussel shell and the rocks. According to the reference photo, the mussel shell would have been in the centre of the foreground, but I want it over on the left, offset to balance with the sunlit limestone of the old stone bridge footing. Getting this part established first makes sure that my painting does not depart from the essence of the subject - the elements in reality are here to speak to me while I make the alterations for the sake of my composition.

This is how the wet painting fits in its traveling box...

... and here I am putting the wet brushes away, having wrapped them in an old plastic bag. I usually coat them with brush cleaning soap in case I don't have a chance to wash them as soon as I get back.

We shall see in the next post, how the painting worked out - it always makes me nervous to leave a plein air studio with a substantial part of a painting unfinished. Wish me good luck!

Zigzag Moth (watercolour 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-07-14T15:26:00.000-04:00

July 7 finds me painting "in the lab". I have worked on this watercolour on and off throughout the two-week Bio-blitz on Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area. It is a noctuid moth, Panthea acronyctoides collected by Anthony Thomas in an ultraviolet light trap at the eastern edge of the PNA on the night of 24 June. Its caterpillar, which feeds on conifers, is black with a white zigzag pattern along each side and its pupa overwinters in soil or debris.

I selected a licheny maple log from the stack of firewood in the building in which all of us are working (40 specialists and students altogether, but not all at once). I stuck the pin into the lichen, and the moth nearly disappeared into the zig-zaggy pattern! The moth in my painting is almost twice life-size, as I peer through a magnifier to get its zigzags right.
Fred, Sophie and I are the last ones remaining after everyone else has packed up their temporary labs and departed to other parts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and even a few back across the US border. Our delay is the completion of this painting, and I'm slow because I'm tired. I've been very active as the 'slug expert', as well as producing 5 oil paintings and three watercolours over the course of this two week all-taxon survey. I've been picking up all kinds of knowledge from the micologists, the entomologists, the botanists, and mammalogists - and everybody brought slugs back to me from their excursions!

Water Shrew Habitat (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-07-12T17:25:00.001-04:00

6 July finds me alone for most of the day to paint a little waterfall on a tributary to Canada Brook in the Caledonia Gorge PNA, New Brunswick. On a rainy day last week Don took a photo of this creek with torrents of water rushing over the mossy rocks, but now the water is quietly trickling under most of the rocks, and only falling noisily in a few places like this. I have chosen the larger of two falls side by side. The splash and wet moss from the smaller can be seen at bottom right. This is near the location of the Bio-blitz's only Water Shrew. They are not vulnerable to the kinds of traps that mammalogists set, so no one knows how rare or common they may be. Fred and I have caught them occasionally all across the country in minnow traps set for salamanders.

A Tiger Swallowtail butterfly courses across my scene and lands on a Hobblebush just above my head. There must be birds about too, but I can't hear their songs over the rushing of water. Choosing a spot has been difficult, partly because I'm not sure where the sun and shadows will be
- so first I had to plan my composition structurally rather than tonally, and then did a pencil sketch in my journal to block in the tones when the sun dapples were just right. Then I drew lightly in pencil on my canvas. Finally confident of what my painting should look like nearly an hour later, I begin putting paint to canvas.

12:00 I have just finished photographing an orange Arion slug, about 4.5 cm long, crawling about through the moss in the splash zone. In my painting it is visible a little to the left of the waterfall. It crawled from moss-tip to moss-tip, but I couldn't see any evidence of grazing. Some of its time is spent down among the bases of the moss, where they attach to the rock, but I can't see what it's doing down there.

12:30 checked the slug again and it was 3 cm from the waterfall. It was crawling over a delicate new shoot from the growing tip of a moss stem, and in order to see if it had eaten it, I pushed the slug aside and ... whoops! It tumbled into the torrent. Another dispersal event, though nothing new for this population.

16:00 packing up to head upstream toward the forest track, away from water noise into quieter woods where I'll be able to hear if anyone is calling me....

Bog Candle (watercolour 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-07-05T11:30:00.006-04:00

4 July finds me sitting on a mossy stone with the hem of my jacket dipping into the clear fast-running water of a braided brook, in a steep-sided valley of Rhody Brook, at the south edge of the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area, New Brunswick. One tall narrow flowering stalk of the Bog Candle Orchid, Platanthera dilatata, is just at eye level and my large umbrella shelters us both - and most importantly, my watercolour paper - from the steady drizzle. There are a few other Bog Candles blooming among the sharp-edged whispy blades of Carex and lush herbs that tussock the valley bottom, separating the many shallow channels of the braided brook, but this one is near the woods, with a dark, sprucy background. The scent of the tiny white flowers is sweet and spicy, like cinnamon and cloves.

An Arion slug is munching delicately on a blossom of Blue Flag right at my elbow, and I pause my painting to extract the camera from my pack - capturing an image of gracefully curved tail and orange body rearing up from green leaf to purple petal edge. There were not many slugs evident on the forest floor as we came down into the valley, but we found lots on rain-wet vegetation in the valley bottom, including many very small ones.

A female Blackburnian Warbler calls and flits about among the Spruce boughs beyond my orchid. As the drizzle stops and insects emerge, several gather on the underside of my umbrella, including a male Scorpionfly, with a long, narrow face and an orange, scorpion-like end to its tail. Fred adds a Spring Peeper and a baby trout to our survey of Rhody Brook. He and Sophie and Janet find several native Philomycus slugs crawling on logs, but no salamanders under cover. Perhaps they are all out hunting through the moss on this rainy day.

Young Fir in the Old Cellar (oil on canvas 4 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-07-04T21:47:00.005-04:00

3 July finds me sitting on the edge of an old cellar hole at what used to be a homesite on the Caledonia Mountain Road, north of Riverside-Albert, New Brunswick. This is a second-growth portion of the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area, and as we first walked in from the road we waded through a shallow carpet carpet of Bunchberry in bloom, each plant with a single white dogwood flower. Soon the Bunchberry was mixed, and then replaced, by a lush ground cover of small, heart-shaped violet leaves. Fred noticed a long-stemmed Rhubarb plant and I said "look for where the house used to be!" Then we saw the cellar hole in a sea of violet leaves. Three walls of carefully stacked stones, with the fourth buried where the forest floor slopes in. Trees are growing against the cellar wall, spruce, fir, and Paper Birch, and a young Fir has established itself near the centre, where it poses for my painting.

I begin with a black underpainting, to represent the darkness of the cellar when it was still part of the house. I imagine the time when the light began to penetrate - perhaps when part of the floor caved in, allowing indirect light from a broken window to penetrate the darkness. Some time later, sky light would have reached the cellar floor through a gap in the roof. Now the only sign of the ruins of the house is the cellar hole, lined with mossy stones that hopeful human hands placed there over a hundred years ago - and in the centre of what used to be darkness, a young Fir tree waves its bright spring needles in the sunshine that dapples through the branches of older trees that stand inside the walls.

The raucous voices of young Ravens rip the silence of the woods, screaming to each other about how bold and black they are, and we answer, imitating their falsetto screams. They fly low over the tree tops above us, answering us with more screams as if they think we are another Raven family - until an adult cruises over and comments "Graaawwwwk", turning away with a couple of youngsters following. That must be a Raven term in the local dialect for "humans".

As I work, Fred circumnavigates the violet patch so in the future it will be possible to see if and how fast it's spreading. We will take a sample to the Bio-blitz botanists to see if they can be identified - though Fred couldn't find any with seed capsules, which violets bury in the ground for ants to disperse. These plants are hairier and paler than the European Viola odorata that's spreading behind our home in eastern Ontario. We wonder if the legacy of the cellar hole may be an invasive violet....

Mossy Snag on Lewis Mountain (oil on canvas 4 x 7 in) Sold

2011-07-03T21:39:00.008-04:00

1 July finds us on Lewis Mountain, the second of two candidate Protected Natural Areas north of Caledonia Gorge and included in our two-week Bio-blitz. The others have continued down the increasingly steep slope down toward Turtle Creek, collecting insects.

Only a few hundred metres down the slope I find my painting subject, standing tall in the steep valley of a tributary to Turtle Creek - a tall mossy snag, elegantly festooned with mosses and several bell-shaped Tinder Polypores, Fomes fomentarius, sometimes called "Hoof Polypore." As I paint, splashes of sunlight appear and disappear on the leaves of a Yellow Birch that frame my view of the mossy snag, and a light breeze wafts the smoke of my insect coil back and forth, discouraging most of the mosquitoes that would be harassing me otherwise. A day-flying moth with black wings, white-banded toward the tips, flutters by, not stopping. I call to Don that it has gone in his direction, but he shouts back that we are looking for butterflies - Tony has already trapped several good samples of moths.
Fred is searching for salamanders within my hearing, above and below, carefully turning and replacing "100 pieces of cover" to get an idea of species abundance. He is collecting slugs too, of course, and finds five Philomycus of all sizes as well as (as yet uncounted) dozens of the large invasive Arion slugs. It is not yet known how they may be affecting the native forest communities, but the lichenologists and micologists participating in this all-taxon survey suspect that they may be capable of devastating the lichens and fungi that are most palatable to them.

Upham Brook Old Growth (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-07-02T20:59:00.001-04:00

30 June finds me sitting at the end of Dobson Trail, beside the headwaters of Upham Brook, painting an ancient Yellow Birch, leaning and fountaining with Dryopteris Sheild Ferns. In the foreground is a Cedar also leaning, frilly with lichens, the lacy Parmelia and the frilly, bubbly Lungwort Lobaria pulmonaria. The roots of the Yellow Birch embrace a spongy stub of rotting wood that may be the core of what was its nurse tree - so insignificant now, but a long time ago, its dying provided nutrients for the birch seedling, nursing it through its decades as a sapling and young tree.

This patch of old growth forest, less than a kilometre square, lies up among the mountains where new roads have been put in for giant hydroelectric windmills that we passed on our drive in, rowing their narrow tapered blades across the sky. This is one of the two candidate "Protected Natural Areas" to the north east of the Caledonia Gorge PNA.

To the right of where I sit, Upham Brook runs over stones and under logs, trickling music to my painting. A red-eyed Vireo sings variations on the theme "vireo, vireo, vireo", and Robins, who at home are worm-eating yard birds, here are deep forest eastern thrushes, darting through the viny lower storeys of Mountain and Moose maples, and creeping to forage beneath the large heart-shaped leaves of the vibirnum bushes.

As I paint, Fred searches in and under mossy logs, finding Red-backed Salamanders, one native Philomycus slug, and lots of the large faintly striped Arion slugs, varying from bright orange to brown, as we have found everywhere in field and forest during the Bio-blitz. There are only a few of the smaller Arion species among them, grey with sharp black stripes and a speckled back. Local naturalist David Christie told us yesterday that the large Arion slugs appeared in the mid-1970's, where before the only Arions were small grey ones. As if to corroborate my theory that one means of rapid dispersal for the recent invaders could be in brooks and creeks flooding after rain storms and in spring freshet, Fred finds them living a semi-aquatic life here in Upton Brook, crawling in partially submerged aquatic moss and on little rocks in a seepage tributary to the brook.

Old Moose Yard (watercolour 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-06-30T23:07:00.004-04:00

28 June finds me sitting in front of a Moose skull above the pond at the "Old Homestead" of Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area, New Brunswick. The woods here show signs of heavy use by Moose, both browse and droppings, and today we have been given a tour of the spring, the old house site which is now a grassy clearing, and the pond.

One strange feature of the place appears to be an old dying ground for Moose, perhaps in years when it was used as a winter yarding area. In a 20 metre radius on the gentle slope above the pond among Fir, Spruce, and Maple trees, we found several deposits of Moose bones - single ribs, groups of vertebrae, jaw bones, and here, a skull with vertebrae.
As I sit on the fir needled ground to draw the skull, which lies between the curved trunk of a young Yellow Birch and the base of a Balsam Fir, Green Frogs call intermittently from the pond sixty metres away, their banjo-string comments escalating to vigorous discussion. Don McAlpine found a pair in amplexus and collected freshly laid eggs. Fred discovered a Yellow Spotted Salamander on the other side of the pond, while Don found hatched-out egg masses of that species in the water.

There is less algae and moss on the Moose skull than would be expected of bones of this age, and as I start the painting, Fred keeps coming by with slugs that he's taken off of various Moose bones, from which they probably have been scraping algae and getting calcium. He is all excited about inventing a new way of monitoring slugs by collecting them from piles of damp moose droppings which provide them with food, moisture, and cover.

Caledonia Gorge (oil on canvas 11 x 14 in.) Sold

2011-06-30T09:04:00.006-04:00

27 June finds us looking out over the Caledonia Gorge Natural Protected Area from the viewpoint just north of the village of Riverside-Albert, New Brunswick. The falls on Crooked Creek can be seen where the sun glints on it. The high wall of the gorge is visible there too. The sun coming through clouds makes a golden necklace just before Caledonia Mountain, and stays there just long enough for me to paint it in.
The New New Brunswick Museum's web page says that "The Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area (CG PNA), at 2,832 ha is the smallest of New Brunswick's 10 largest PNAs and representative of the Central Uplands Ecoregion. Situated in the southeast corner of New Brunswick, this PNA captures the steeply-sloping Crooked Creek Gorge and tributaries where they cut into the Fundy Plateau, before flowing into the Bay of Fundy".
The Museum's Facebook page shows photos of Bio-blitz activities so far. There will be an open house here at the lab on Tuesday next week from 4-8 pm.

Crooked Creek No Bridge (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-06-29T09:27:00.006-04:00

25 June finds us in New Brunswick - in the Protected Natural Area called Caledonia Gorge PNA, for a two-week Bio-blitz organized by the New Brunswick Museum. We have driven in on an old logging road along Crooked Creek, to the washed-out bridge, and I'm sitting on a stone beside the old wooden bridge footings, looking across the creek to a graceful spruce which leans from its high perch, its red-barked roots entwined with its neighbour.

This is our first foray into the PNA. Fred has found three Red-backed Salamanders, one of them in a drift of twiggy debris from spring floods up at bridge-level. As I paint, four of the many orange and brown slugs that are so plentiful here crawl on the rocks near my feet, and I reach down to collect them. In addition to my role as visiting artist at the Bio-blitz, I am the "slug expert."

Sophie and Mary have forded the creek and walked farther up the road to check for other places of easy access to the creek for algae and fish sampling. A pair of four-wheelers churn across and scramble up the far bank, the first nearly tipping backward, and the second using a winch cable. What a contrast between our expense and effort in pursuit of knowledge and theirs in pursuit of thrills!

Georgian Bay Alvar in Bloom (oil on canvas 5 x 7)

2011-06-27T22:48:00.003-04:00

15 June finds me sitting on a rock beside the track through the alvar on the Georgian Bay shore of the Bruce Penninsula that we used to call "Dyers Bay Campsite". Flooded in the spring, baked dry in late summer, this natural open area of shallow soil over limestone is now resplendent with Blue-eyed Grass, yellow Senecio, and fiery Indian Paintbrush. We have never seen Blue-eyed Grass so abundant in any other year, and at first we thought that it was invasive flax!

It is no more a campsite, as vehicle access isn't easy and the owners patrol it often. That is good, because some people who camped here before left litter strewn around and did not replace the rocks they turned in search of snakes. I have a photo of myself at 19 years of age, on elbows and knees, watching a snail crawl on one of the flat limestone rocks that seem to litter the ground but which are shelter for many creatures, including Massassauga Rattlesnakes. Fred was pleased to encounter one basking near where I am sitting this morning - the first one that we've seen here since 1985, a period which included a summer-long herpetological survey of the outer Bruce Penninsula in 1990.

Here I am, in the translucent shade of my umbrella, wearing a long-sleeved linen shirt to protect me from biting flies, even though it's a hot, nearly breezeless day.

I don't have photos of the very start of this painting, but I will try to describe how I got to this stage:
After sketching the composition out on the canvas, I underpainted all areas except the sky, that purplish blue of hazy distance. I painted the purplish blue all over the escarpment, the near forest including the lone tall trees, and the foreground. I figured that cool purple-blue would not only give good support for the distance, but also contrast nicely with the hot bright colours of the alvar. Then I painted the sky over the white gessoed surface that remained in the upper left corner, dabbing it in between the branches of the lone tall trees. Next I painted the escarpment and the forest over the still wet underpainting - first the darks, and then the lights, between and over the darks. Lastly, the golden-olive Cedars at the edge of the alvar. The yellow flowers were daubed on with heavy, fresh paint. As the still wet underpainting tends to pick up and mix in, I wiped my brush clean and re-applied new colour every few daubs. Next the red, the Indian Paintbrush. Then I laid the edge of the vehicle track across the foreground.

Filling in the lights and darks of the alvar, between the yellow and red wildflowers took some care and delicacy, deciding where my stronger darks should go, emphasizing the horizontal contrasts in tone, stroking the long, shiny, curved-bladed Carex in overtop with a the knive-edge of a dagger brush.

I then crisped the edge of the alvar in the foreground, scumbled in the golden mosses that stabilize the shallow soil there, and defined the stones, taking care to describe the shape of each one.

Since the muddy bottom of the puddle is rusty coloured, so must be the reflections of the tufts of Carex. Crisp white sparkles emphasized the water's contact with the mud right in front of me, giving an immediate surface that one could "step out on" - if one doesn't mind muddy feet!

I signed in the water. It's always an anxious moment, deciding where to sign. I could also have signed in dark red on the left hand bottom.

After about four hours of work, here's the painting, finished onsite!

Tobermory Ladyslipper (watercolour 5 x 7 in) Sold

2011-06-15T22:02:00.006-04:00

14 June finds me sitting on dry Cedar twigs and leaves, crouching to paint a Yellow Ladyslipper which stands by a shady path sloping down toward Little Tub Harbour in Tobermory, Ontario. There are several here. growing in ones, twos and threes in little nooks among the Cedars. This one tilts its blossom demurely and I like the way it holds its corkscrewed 'wings'. I spend a long time sculpting the flower parts in yellow and green with brassy shadows, admiring the red dots and strokes that run in rows like fancy top-stitching.
As I paint, a Robin moves along the fencerow, "chuck"ing assertively, and boat motors idle down by the docks. People talk beside their cars in front of the hotel, and the baleful horn of the Chicheemaun ferry sounds just across the harbour. Eventually Fred brings my supper to me, but I'm just finished the portrait of the "yellow lady" and am ready to unkink my legs and straighten my back, and carry my plate back to eat with our friends.

We're not sure which species name to use for these little yellow Ladyslippers, and over dinner it turns out that nobody is particularly sure. After supper we struggled, not quite successfully, to make the digital scan show the gradations of yellow and shadow that are in the painting. You'll have to see the original...

Whippoorwill Country (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in) Sold

2011-06-14T17:05:00.004-04:00

12 June finds me on Highway 553 north of Massey, Ontario, painting a marsh in evening light through the open window of the van, with mosquito repellant smeared on my face and hands and an insect coil burning beside me. The sun is to my right, not quite set, glowing on the tops of the maples on the near hillside. A dead spruce or tamarack stretches its long bare fingers across the sky, and others in the marsh are also dead, spaced about like the standing skeletons of gnomes.

We've driven up this well-maintained gravel road north of Massey, probing the northern range limit of the Tetraploid Gray Treefrog which has been one of our projects since the 1970's.

A small chorus of s Spring Peepers strikes up with gusto every 15 minutes or so. Fred brings me a salad of the tender parts of cattail stems, chopped up with hummus for dressing, but although my stomach is ready for supper I can't stop to eat until I lose the daylight for painting - which happens at 21:53. Yellowthroat and Yellow Warbler make their last songs of the day and we hear a few rolls of drumming from a Ruffed Grouse in the forest that borders the marsh.

As we pack up to leave a Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor) calls from a distance, and we hear two Whippoorwills marking their territories with song. There are lots of Whippoorwills up here, a bird that is becoming more and more scarce to the south. As we drive back down the hilly, winding road toward Massey, stopping to listen for Hyla versicolor at each wetland, we hear more Whippoorwills, and once had to stop for a Nighthawk which was resting on the road in the headlights.

watercolour portrait (5 x 7 in.) not for sale

2011-06-14T16:12:00.001-04:00

24 May finds me commemorating the recent first birthday of a dear little friend - with a portrait in watercolour. This painting is not for sale because it was done as a birthday present.

This portrait is my second try. Both reference photos were taken by me, but the first one was 3/4 view of the face. I worked first in pencil but never got to painting it. The finished pencil portrait is a good likeness of the photo, but not instantly recognizable as the person! This is often a problem in portraiture - the angle chosen does not adequately present the character.

So I began again from my front view photo, which had not been chosen initially because of its very solemn expression. I was finished in only a couple of hours and am pleased to recognize my little friend at a glance!

I used Canson watercolour paper that is mounted on paper board, like illustration board, and the surface was pleasantly forgiving. The watercolour lifted off nicely where I wanted to lighten it, and it accepted very fine detail as well. There is a slight rippling of the surface, which holds wet washes nicely - altogether a lovely paper.

Festival of the Invasives, Japanese Knotweed (oil on canvas, 5 x 7 in.)

2011-05-08T16:09:00.010-04:00

6 May finds me sitting by the north west wall of my little red "Pipers House" in Bishops Mills, where the candy-pink banded spring shoots of Japanese Knotweed are exploding through the moss-covered knobs that are the junctions of taproots and rhizomes.

The Rhubarb got away from me this spring without being painted as emerging shoots. Now I'm waiting impatiently for Asparagus, which is still sleeping underground - but the Knotweed is showing itself instead, poking up pinkly in festive-looking, thumb-thick shoots about the dry, thin-walled tubes of last year's stems.

The Japanese Knotweed has been here long before we moved into Bishops Mills in 1978. When we had Goats it was their favorite food, diverting them from raiding the garden, but in recent years the patches have expanded. Since he put up our Knotweed page, Fred has had lots of inquiries about control, so this year we're going to try to suppress this vigorous invasive alien at our place once and for all!

Yesterday we began to pull the Knotweed roots. Fred began beside "Weirs House", snapping the succulent shoots off into a bucket to take to our neighbours' goats for a special spring treat, and I started in on the patch that makes a tall shady thicket outside the kitchen window of Pipers House - but soon I fell to admiring the vivid contrast between the fleshy pink shoots and the gleaming green moss. Then I began to look for compositions in spite of despairing the lack of time for a painting.

But today Fred suggested that I should paint the knotweed shoots anyway, so here I am in the late afternoon, sitting on my paint caddy and looking down at one of the mossier clumps right next to the house wall, my brushes stuck into the soft damp soil and my palette on my lap, the fingers of my left hand tucked behind the wooden stretcher of a small canvas. Clouds are moving in on our sunny afternoon and the Robins are beginning to sing.

Mudpuppy Mussel (watercolour, approx. 3 x 4 in.) SOLD

2011-05-07T20:45:00.001-04:00

The last of my watercolours of fresh water mussels for this contract with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the one closest to our hearts, because its host is the Mudpuppy. Kemptville Creek, where we do Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills would be a paradise indeed if this species occurred here. It The range gets into Ontario at the extreme south west of the province.

The recovery plan for this species advises increasing the population of Mudpuppies as hosts for the larval glochidia, and an astute aquarist at Waterloo University is designing artificial dens for trial deployment as Mudpuppy nest sites in the Sydenham River where this species occurs, but Mudpuppies are less abundant than they are in Oxford Mills.

These are some of the notes I made in the process of painting the Mudpuppy Mussel: I have lightened and re-drawn the edges of the shapes that I see in and through the inner valve, and then softened them with my kneaded eraser. The shell is quite thin, and presents an additional problem from those where there is only reflected light to show. As I apply the peachy glow of light that is transmitted through the upper part of the shell, I worry about how bright it is, and how much it overwhelms the actual colour and surface detail of the nacre. In the Epioblasmas and a little in the earlier species I showed as much translucency as I saw, and realized that it can be used as an indicator of shell thinness.

This is the thinnest shell of them all, but I am afraid that the transmitted light is too bright! I lay my pencil against the top edge of the shell to cut out the back lighting. Now the shell's inner surface is shaded at the top, and it is all a silky greyish purple, with very little peachy colour visible in the colour of the nacre, mostly on the right hand side. Then I move the pencil a little over a centimetre away and anchor it with the kneaded eraser. That cuts out the light that shines from the window onto the upcurved backside of the shell, and the only light that is transmitted through the shell now is reflected light from the cardboard substrate. I decide to go with that. I can see both the warmth of light through the shell and the colour and surface detail of the nacre.

Eden Mills Roots (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2011-05-01T22:46:00.002-04:00

15 April found us in Eden Mills, Ontario, walking the new shoreline of the Eramosa River upstream of the old dam, which no longer holds back its full height of water. Since I painted "Cedar By the Spillway" on 9 April last year, much of the water has gone underground through a series of cracks in the limestone bedrock, that are locally called "sinkholes".

Only the tips of these ancient drowned Cedar stumps were showing above the surface of the water last year. They were probably cut when the land was cleared long ago. I like the sinuous shapes, and how the blue sky reflects on the shaded surfaces of the ghostly wood.

Walking here where the water used to be, I step carefully over what initially look like old water-swept rags, but which are beginning to send up tight yellow Coltsfoot blooms from the raggy corners that appear to be stuck in cracks among the flat rocks, the clotted, darkened scraps and remnants of last years broad leaves swept in a downstream direction by spring freshets. I took several photos of these, enjoying the contrasting yellow flower buds, water-smoothed stones, and crusty rags of last years leaf, but decided to paint the old stumps instead, looking upstream away from the now dry spillway and the village of Eden Mills.

Snuffbox Mussels, Male and Female (watercolour approx 3 x 4 in.) SOLD

2011-04-29T22:18:00.001-04:00

I have finally finished this series of clam paintings, working too steadily to find time for posting here, but now that I'm finished, I can show you what I've done, and what I've learned! The Snuffbox, Epioblasma triqueta, is a smallish clam listed as a Species At Risk, its Canadian range reduced to a few hundred individuals in the Sydenyam River in southwestern Ontario. You would never know, from looking at the male, why this species is named "Snuffbox". But neither would you think, upon finding the female, that she was in any way related - and her special shape is why they are named "Snuffbox".

Smaller than the male, she is not flat at all, but deep and box-like, with a distinctly beak-like front-end. This is the business end! Her way of propagating her tiny gloccidia is to grab a curious log-perch by the nose and pump her babies out in its face, so as many of them as possible may latch on and be nourished, carried, and dispersed by the fish.

We found this video of a female Snuffbox in the very act of catching a host for her young. Just at the end, you can see the little particles puffing out from her shell. These would be 'inhaled' by the fish, and establish themselves on its gills, to be carried about for a few months, and then drop off to be free living for the rest of their lives. Other fresh water mussels have various strategies for luring their host fish, but none of them make such a forceful introduction as the Snuffbox!

Northern Riffleshell, female, close up (watercolour) SOLD

2011-04-09T22:19:00.002-04:00

9 April finds me finishing my female Epioblasma torulosa, delighting in its ripply, knobby shell. The flared and eroded front edge is the end that the foot is thrust out of, for adjusting the animal's position in the gravelly river bottom. The narrowed curve of the rear or posterior end of the shell is where its inflowing and outflowing siphons are visible when the shells are gaped slightly into the water current for breathing, feeding, and reproduction. The illustrator Gina Mikel has done a nice anatomical drawing of a fresh water mussel.

Epioblasma males and females are dimorphic in shell shape, the female being more bulging at the posterior end and with a narrower curve. This allows room for her mantle to swell with little larval clams or gloccidia, ready to be released to attach to fish. Its host fish are recently thought to be Darters.

Now I have three more clam drawings to finish in watercolour.

Northern Riffleshell male, finished (watercolour) SOLD

2011-04-07T22:39:00.003-04:00

7 April finds me painting until the last shreds of daylight on the inner shell of the female of Epioblasma torulosa, after having finished and photographed the outer shell of the male this afternoon. I thought I'd post a finished one this time, so here is the male.

The official Species At Risk website of Fisheries and Oceans Canada tells us that this species requires well oxygenated, clean water with a gravelly bottom, and is now extirpated from 95% of its former range in North America over the last century, and it is now known from only the Sydenham and Ausable rivers in southwestern Ontario. The site also says:

The Northern Riffleshell is sensitive to pollution from municipal, industrial and agricultural sources. Siltation, habitat perturbation and impoundment of rivers has also likely destroyed much of the habitat for this species over the last century. More recently, the Zebra Mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) has devastated Great Lakes populations. Access to suitable host species may also threaten this species.

Next Clam (watercolour)

2011-04-02T19:50:00.004-04:00

2 April finds my mind briefly recoiling, saying "I don't want to have to do this part", faced with the picayune details necessary to render a likeness of the shell in front of me. But each detail I notice is like a command - "paint this now" - and absolute obedience is required, no getting out of it. Sometimes it requires a few separate steps, or a correction of what I had already laid down, but I'm always forced to the utmost of my skill, with no shirking allowed.

I can walk away and make tea, or apply the chain saw to part of our pile of logs, or lie down with my eyes closed - and when I return I can paint a simpler part of the shell - but there's no getting out of tackling the difficult bits.

I'm learning to persevere, because procrastination only prolongs the anxiety and boredom of not making much progress. In obedience to the imperative of the reality of the shell before me, I pick up my brush, apply it to the palette, and recreate the colours commanded by my subject, in the exact proportion and detail which is the only way to make the puzzle pieces fit.

Taking a deep breath and hunching to stretch tight shoulders, I can then reward myself with broad, confident strokes where these are possible, enjoying that moment of recognition as the image leaps ahead, becoming that much more the twin of its subject. Then I bend again to attend to the next challenging bit so that in the end, the painting will be justified by the clam. This one, on its way to completion before I lose the daylight, is another endangered species, Pleurobema coccinneum.

Fred and I both find a mysterious appeal in each of these watercolours before the illustration is completed - herein is art, like a poem that leaves something to your imagination, which would have been made explicit in prose. So I present my uncompleted paintings for your enjoyment as art, then submit the completed illustrations to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to represent the species in their publications.

Painting Clams! (watercolour) SOLD

2011-04-02T00:03:00.003-04:00

30 March finds me painting rare fresh water mussels for Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 30 years ago I painted 36 species of fresh water mussels for publication in the book by Arthur Clark, "Fresh Water Molluscs of Canada". Painting them now makes me feel as if I've gone back in time!

I only have 8 illustrations to do this time, and over the years I have learned how to focus and drive myself to finish stages of an illustration within a given time. But even so, having someone read to me is a tremendous help. The gradual work of applying washes to build the iridescence of the pearly nacre and fine details of hinge teeth and growth lines requires only part of my brain, so if I have something interesting to listen to it keeps the rest of my mind still and patient, sort of anaesthetized, so that it doesn't interfere with the work.

Since this contract is brief but intense, Fred is doing all he can to keep me at the painting. He's reading aloud to me, making delicious soups, and keeping the kitchen fire burning under steaming pots of Maple sap on their way to becoming syrup. The book I've selected is Bernd Heinrich's "The Snoring Bird"- a biologist's family history through both world wars and beyond, from Poland to the USA - in many ways more exciting for us than the classic "Doctor Zhivago".

The watercolour I'm working on above is the Kidneyshell, Ptychobranchus fasciolaris, and the one to the left, photographed in progress, is Obovaria subrotunda, the Round Hickorynut.

Flooded Field Sunset (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD

2011-03-22T17:46:00.003-04:00

14 March finds me stopping to admire the sunset across the flooded fields that we call "north of deButte's on County Road 18, 1.5 km NNE of Bishops Mills." The Ash trees along the fencerow draw a spidery black filigree against the luminous sky, and the last drifts of snow reflect the evening blue in a vibrant contrast.

I love to see these fields flooded by the creek each spring. We've been monitoring Leopard Frog migration here since 1987. Every year the frogs move a kilometre from their hibernation sites in Middle Creek to the South Branch, where they breed. Their routes vary depending on conditions - in high-water years the movement is centred on the overflow from Middle Creek to the South Branch, but on dry springs when there is little or no flow through the culvert, it's a kilometre north of there, where the creeks are closer together.

At coming-home-from-work time on 18 March, Fred went out to check the site I'd photographed, and found about 10 cm of water above the tops of the double culverts, being sucked into them in twin vortices. He walked 100 m on both sides of the road, seeing neither fish nor Leopard Frogs; it was probably too windy for any frogs to be at the waterline, and too cold for Perch to be moving yet. Lots of fine landsnail-rich drift was accumulating on the waterline; an advantage of submerged culverts with vortices is that they don't sweep the floating drift downstream, and since 1993 this has been one of our most reliable drift sampling sites.

When he came back from Mudpuppy Night that evening, after the water in the flooding creek in Oxford Mills had measured 1°C, he found that the water here was 4°C, since with huge flooded fields as solar collectors, the water was probably as warm here as anywheres, but probably not warm enough to motivate migration in either the fish (primarily Perch) or the frogs.

Waiting for Spring (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-03-05T22:01:00.004-05:00

3 March finds me in Bishops Mills, walking between our Natural History Centre to the house, casting my eye across the old snow drift in our neighbour's driveway and thinking that he'll soon be coming to putter about his country place again. Then I noticed the old red truck parked between the Cedar and Spruce that mingle their branches over the path to the door. It must have been there for some time, unnoticed by us. Now it looks to me like an old red dragon sleeping, waiting for spring to arrive and the man to return with work to do.

The only sounds are the rushing tires of commuters coming home for supper, growing and fading, carrying far across the leafless landscape. This morning's clamour of Crows chasing nest-hunting Ravens from Bruce Starling's woods is long forgotten in the stillness of early evening. The Chickadees that hunted hidden insects in the high sunny branches of our Maples, singing their late winter "Fee-bee" songs, have all gone to find shelter for the night.

The slowly melting snow in our neighbour's lane glows in the final moments of sunshine, and I'll be checking the forecast, hoping for that special combination of warm sunny days and frosty nights - "sugaring" weather that raises the pressure of sap in the Maples.

Wild Cucumber Winter (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-02-28T18:02:00.002-05:00

26 February finds me captivated by the soft snow "toques" on the Wild Cucumber pods. This one is hanging down low from the vine draping over the barnyard fence. Its translucent membrane almost seems to glow from within like a little lampshade.

Last night's fresh snow is tracked by Hares and Cottontails where I walked with the dog "out back" in the morning. Grouse tracks lace across the path from a low-branched Cedar, and my boots slipped sideways over the hard irregularities of the old crust below the soft fluffy stuff. Suddenly a Ruffed Grouse flushes, exploding from a curtain of Cedar boughs close beside us, and Marigold dashes off in the direction of the whirring wings. Sometimes fleeing Grouse hit the sides of light-coloured buildings, perhaps taking them for openings in the trees.

The soft snow was deep for much of the winter here, and Grouse had plenty of opportunity to dive into it to shelter for the night. But then most of it melted, and what remained froze hard as ice. Now the Grouse must roost in the trees until the soft snow gets deeper.

Mudpuppy sculpture (acrylic painted polymer clay 6 in.) SOLD!

2011-02-20T23:44:00.006-05:00

20 February finds me at the kitchen table with a live Mudpuppy in a shallow basin for reference as I press and smooth with my fingers a handful of flesh-coloured modelling compound. Pictured here is my first finished sculpture, painted yesterday and posed on black velvet for a photo shoot.

The live Mudpuppy becomes restless and starts to splash with its tail, so I return it to the ice-lined bucket with its fellows. Zero degrees is "room temperature" for winter Mudpuppies, and it is at this season that they are most active, feeding and wandering about on the bottom at night. In Oxford Mills they are easily seen by headlamp and searchlight. We have been studying this population every Friday night for 12 years and have not found another site where they are so visible and conducive to long term monitoring and public education. See Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills

The four in this bucket will be returned to the icy-banked creek next Friday. They were collected last night by the young naturalists of the Macoun Field Club from Ottawa as they assisted in our weekly count of the giant salamanders that gather in winter below the dam on Kemptville Creek. The Macouns were lucky that the creek hadn't risen too much for Mudpuppy viewing, after our two days of temperatures well above freezing, as when rain falls or snow melts the creek becomes fast, deep, and cloudy with suspended organic material. Many of the Mudpuppies are swept downstream then, and we may not see them again until they make their way back as the water level drops with the return of cold temperatures. Every week brings different conditions and our weekly counts of Mudpuppies vary from none to 180.

The sculpting material Super Sculpey is a polymer modelling "clay" that feels like warmed beeswax to work with. It hardens in 15 minutes when baked at 275F. This flesh-tinted ceramic-like sculpting compound named "Super Sculpey" is a variation on the original white "Polyform" that I used as a teenager. It is still available, under the name of "Sculpey" and is a little softer to work with than "Super Sculpey". I have painted this model with "Tri-Art" acrylic paints, mixing gold and copper colours with brown, black, and pearl, and I'm especially pleased with the red, as it is slightly translucent over the external gills, so that they glow just as those of the live Mudpuppies do when the oxygen is reduced in their water.

Mudpuppies are very adaptable to varying oxygen levels, having lungs into which they gulp air from the surface, and gills which expand and fluff out at need, from finger-like flaps of flesh behind either side of their heads. They also are famous for having more DNA than any other living creature, and the reason for this has been recently explained as allowing the production of enzymes that allow them to be active at a wide range of temperatures, from 30C in summer to 0C in winter, which is their time of greatest activity, having little competition from other scavengers and predators for minnows, crayfish and other small food items on the creek bottom, and also freedom from being predated themselves, as herons have gone south and the larger fish have drifted downstream to where the creek has more oxygen.

Wild Turkey Dusk (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2011-01-29T22:39:00.004-05:00

26 January 2011 finds me stopping again to admire Wild Turkeys in a snowy field. Today is not as cold, so their shapes are not as round. The corn stubble no longer shows above the snow, and they must dig deeper to find stray kernels and old fallen cobs.

Wild Turkeys are native to Canada, but disappeared in the early 1900's due to over-hunting and deforestation.

In the 1980's Wild Turkeys from the northern US were introduced into southern Ontario. It is hard to find accounts of this that agree with regards to numbers, but I remember hearing that survival was not good until they used canon nets to catch whole flocks, so that the Turkeys were relocated with their social structure intact.

We heard an account of an introduction to eastern Ontario in the 1990's that was rather more natural, though I can't find a written account of it. Apparently they played Turkey calls across the ice of the St. Lawrence River, and the flocks walked across from New York to Ontario.

The jury is still out on whether the reintroduction will be good for biodiversity, as Wild Turkeys are known to eat salamanders, frogs, and snakes, and disturb forest ground cover by scratching to feed. This will be a task for long term monitoring....

On 27 December I did my first painting of Wild Turkeys, also on a 5 x 7 inch canvas, called "Wild Turkey Sunset" but this painting somehow disappeared from the blog, so I'll post it again here.

Canada Geese are large birds, but they usually blend into a field. Sometimes I only notice them just as I whisk past on the highway - black necks with white cheeks raised up from a corn stubble field - but Wild Turkeys are much larger and darker. Like grazing cattle or deer, these giant birds become a prominent part of their scene, and I find myself marvelling at them - modern dinosaurs, come to wander in foraging herds in our ordinary landscape.

Gray Tree Frog Retreat

2011-01-12T16:06:00.000-05:00

I have just finished this commissioned painting of the Gray Tree Frog, Hyla versicolor, resting in a Manitoba Maple stump behind our house in Bishops Mills.

Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches, this one has been very complex to paint - as Fred said this evening, "like a spilled jig-saw puzzle". I wanted the frog to blend with the lichened bark as well as showing distinctly against the rich rusty coloured soft rotted wood of the stump, so the conflict is there, accented by the stems of vines and a spiral tendril that actively gestures to the motionless frog.

Waves Before the Hurricane - remastered!

2011-01-11T12:41:00.000-05:00

Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches,

Commissioned re-mastering of the 5 x 7 inch miniature, "Waves Before the Hurricane"

My client requested two figures in the surf, rather than the single figure in the miniature, painted when Hurricane Earl was headed toward Nova Scotia.

The two figures in the larger painting are a couple who were engaged to be married while watching the same waves I painted, on the evening before the hurricane.
A very romantic subject and a very energetic one - I enjoyed painting this one, tremendously!

Hogsback Falls (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-12-27T19:43:00.000-05:00

26 December finds me on my 59th birthday, at Ottawa's Hogsback Falls, to do my "birthday painting." I sit on my paint box behind a wrought iron fence and below me the water, leaping and churning like blended toffee and whipped cream, rushes through a channel between vertical limestone cliff and a massive rock that crouches like a "hogs back" in the middle of the river. The wider view upstream is a fantasy of raging falls, leaping spray and river sculpted ice, but I have only half an hour before sunset and I choose a simpler composition, closer at hand.

My camera battery is dead, so I can't begin by taking a reference photo to aid in finishing the painting indoors, so I just "wing it", even though the icy-fingered bush on the rock face before me must be indicated only perfunctorily in hopes that I can return some day soon to do it justice.

So this is what I have, on a windy day at -12C just before dusk.

Working on Commissions

2010-12-18T18:03:00.002-05:00

18 December finds me at the easel indoors, getting caught up on my commissions - "remastering" some of my Biodiversity Painting miniatures for people who want them larger.

It's sunny outside today with the temperature rising, almost persuading me to paint outdoors, which I haven't done for weeks (having been busy with trying to sell our building) - but plein air painting's no way to fulfil my commissions!

There is news of inclement weather all over the world - cold and heavy snow in Europe and the United Kingdom and various kinds of inclement weather elsewhere, disrupting transportation.

In my painting I am revisiting the evening before Hurricane Earl hit Nova Scotia when we were there at the beginning of September. It is exciting to use large brushes and bold strokes. The proportion of this 20 x 24 canvas is a bit wider than my miniature 5 x 7, so the composition shifts a little, reducing the height of the sky and bringing the figures (there will be two of them) up a bit higher than in the first painting

If I don't do a plein air miniature before the 26th of December, I'll certainly do one then, as for several years that has been my personal gift to myself on my birthday - my expression of ME. Wach for it!

Ash by the Wetland (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-11-26T19:10:00.002-05:00

25 November brings us news of the death of my teacher Doris McCarthy at the ripe old age of 100. Her passing was announced on CBC Radio's national news, a fitting tribute to her place and influence in Canadian Art. Miss McCartthy, my painting teacher at Toronto's Central Technical School, taught me how to see colour in the world around me, and how to paint light, shadow, and reflected light. This painting is done with her voice in my head - her advice on colour and composition....

Yesterday we stopped at a bridge on County Road 20 northeast of Bishops Mills Ontario at an Ash tree, lichened and twisted, deformed by the ice storm of 1997. Beyond it is a view of the wetland to the south, where the South Branch of the Rideau River joins Kemptville Creek. Sunset was fast approaching, so I took a photo as the last ruddy beams of the setting sun painted the distant swamp maples and highlighted patches of yellow lichen on the Ash's dark trunk.

A phalanx of Pigeons distracted me into turning and taking notes instead of beginning a painting on the spot. They flew in a compact flock for several minutes above the creek downstream of the bridge - a sunset skydance, in formation like fighter jets practicing. Now closing up so there's only one Pigeon space between them, and now turning so that each becomes a narrow line, flikering at each end, and now spreading into a band of broad winged birds - then wheeling all at once, rejoicing in that mysterious reflex that flocks of birds share with schools of fish.

The tree that I chose to paint today from my photos of yesterday, is the largest of a row of Ashes along the bridge embankment, the only one that has not been seriously compromised by Beavers. The others could be considered sculptures, if Beavers ever intend to create art! They have been chewed down into tufts of stems, leaving one successful shoot of 6 cm diameter in each of the clumps to grow up as a tree. The resulting shapes are gnarled and bristly - more installation art than subject for painting!

Winterberry Holly (ink & watercolour 4 x 6 in.)

2010-11-21T21:52:00.005-05:00

19 November finds me at the Red Maple swamp on North Augusta Road, north of the Brockville Fairgrounds, admiring the fallen-leaf splendor of the Winterberry Holly, Ilex verticillata. Nobody ever sees the male plants of this wetland shrub, but every fall, spectacularly in some years, more modestly in others, such as this year, the female bushes bear this brilliant crop of berries. It's a challenge to paint in its linearity, but the berries are prominent enough in their intensity of colour to hold their own in the busy linearity of stems and reflections.

This is the time when we pick the berry-laden twigs to bring them indoors for winter decoration. I don't put them in water, so the berries dry, wrinkled and spongy, and stay on the twigs, as bright as they were when fresh.

We've observed so much here since we moved to this area in 1978. We've heard Wood Frogs, Peepers, Woodcock, Barred Owls, Snipe, Leopard Frogs, Grey Treefrogs, and, in 2003 & 2005, Chorus Frogs here.

We've seen Snapping & Painted Turtles dead on the road, along with a Blackbill Cuckoo, Red Squirrel, Ruffed Grouse, Woodchuck, Porcupine, Striped Skunk, Snowshoe Hare, Grey (black) Squirrel, and Raccoons. There's been a Snapping Turtle nesting on 21 June 1997, and Blue-spotted Salamanders, Coyote and Deer alive on the road.

On 1 April 1981 the late Mike Rankin picked the first pair of amplexed Wood Frogs ever noticed by science off the pavement here as he and Fred were heading out on a museum expedition to southwestern Ontario; on 27 September 1982 Fred picked up what was to turn out to be the last Pickerel Frog found in eastern Ontario near here, on 2 March 1987 the Red Maples were bent or broken down all along the road by an icestorm; on 29 July 1993 Rose van der Ham recorded Tansy as a very common roadside weed here; on 20 February 1998 the snowpack in a nearby Cedar bush held 69 L of water/sq m, with 5 cm of snow above the 11 cm ice lens from the January ice storm, which was supported above the frozen ground by 2 cm of coarse ice crystals; 17 May 2004 2 pairs of Canada Geese had 2 clutches of 4 goslings on the roadside of the Swamp; on 19 August 2007 the Buttonbush across the road from this Holly gleamed with rich lush foliage and green fruit, and on 2 June 2009 we first recorded the invasive Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, here.

Transition time!

2010-11-14T20:53:00.003-05:00

13 November finds us sorting, clearing, shifting, carrying, dumping, and storing in preparation for listing for sale the old General Store building that has been the home of Bishops Mills Natural History Centre since 2002 (this is a photo taken a few years ago when the sign was still up).

In stead of all this moving I would rather paint the Winterberry Holly that I saw yesterday glowing crimson against the dark water of the Red Maple swamp north of Brockville, but I must postpone that painting - indeed, all painting - until next week and I hope the berries won't drop or be eaten by birds before I have time to paint them.

Next week's job will be to continue the move of the Natural History Centre into the barn behind our house and make the "Lab" and "Range" areas of the 30 Main Street building spacious and inviting for the plans and projects of potential buyers. If you know of or are a potential buyer, please contact me! Bev Wigney prepared a slide show about the building several years ago and her photos and floor plans give a good sense of this spacious education and research facility. Feel free to share the link with anyone who may be interested.

Through the week I hope to have time to post a few of my older plein air miniatures for your delectation - and in the spirit of natural "history" - stay tuned!

Bittersweet Closeup (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-11-11T19:26:00.002-05:00

9 November finds us hunting for Bittersweet fruit in various spots where we've previously seen the vines around Bishops Mills, Ontario. In 2008 we found one that we'd thought was the invasive Celastrus orbiculatus at the edge of a Jack Pine plantation along South Bolton Road, but today it looks as if those vines may have been included in the roadside clearing that was done by chipping machine this spring.

In swampy Soft Maple woods between wetlands on the loop road behind the Limerick Forest headquarters we revisit several vines of the native species Celastrus scandens, close along the road. The stems of the vines are all more than a metre tall, and clusters of red fruits with orange bracts glow in the evening light.

The first Bittersweet painting I did was several years ago, sitting beside these very vines and looking up to paint the thin curving stems with spaced out berry clusters against a clear blue sky. This time I decide to paint the berries larger, so you can see how beautifully sculpted their bracts are, and how succulent the red berries, beginning to wrinkle a bit this late in the season... and what better background than this Limerick wetland scene as the sun sets!

Prickly Cucumber Music (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-11-09T21:03:00.002-05:00

8 November finds me peering into the bell mouth of the seed capsule of Prickly Cucumber the size of a small chicken egg, one of thousands on their stringy vines with twirly tendrils, matting the long grass into an Echinocystis blanket over a fence along the west side of Mill Street in Bishops Mills, Ontario.

A few of the Prickly Cucumber fruits are still green and fleshy, having recently exploded their bottom ends in the act of ejecting their two large flat oval seeds. The dry capsules are pale golden bells with spines, each bell lined with the lacy double skeletons of the empty seed chambers.

At one end of the fence some of the vines decorate an Eastern White Cedar, and standing close beside it I hear the wind hissing through dry vines, its thin continuum accompanied by mysterious small clicking, ticking - a wonderful tiny percussion of Prickly Cucumber spines tickling against the scaly Cedar leaves!

Milkweed in the Rain (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-11-07T19:33:00.011-05:00

5 November finds me painting under an umbrella in the Milkweed patch behind our house in Bishops Mills, Ontario. It is a light rain with not much wind, and my blue and white beach umbrella is enough to keep my canvas and palette dry. A blanket over my lap and a touque on my head keep me warm.

I photographed the Milkweed yesterday - but when I tried to paint from the photos I missed the richness of colour, and the subject got mixed with the background. So there is nothing for it but to get out there and paint, with rain clotting the silky fluff and dripping from the tip of one of the pods. Wetness also brings out the strong black silhouettes of the Milkweed stems. It looks like they're wearing black stockings. The upper surfaces of the pods are also blackish where they've gotten wet so often this autumn. I think it may be a mildew type fungus like the blackish stain that grows on old grey barn boards. It makes a striking contrast with the glowing tawny gold inside the pods.

To the right of the Milkweed in my painting the fuzzy white heads of Geum are dripping their fluff with the weight of the rain.

Blue Jays are giving their "rain" call, and a woodpecker makes a coarser "eck". The ever present Chickadees peep as they forage in the wild Apple trees and Dogwood bushes. Marigold the dog pricks her ears at a sudden distant Coyote-like yammering and would like to join the hunt. We heard gun shots earlier. I guess it's deer hunting season.

Chad Clifford has posted a youtube video of rope-making from Milkweed stems.

Here is a photo that Fred took of me painting Milkweed in the rain.

DISPLACING HONESTY (watercolour 5 x 7 in.)

2010-11-04T17:18:00.004-04:00

3 November finds me still fascinated by the flat satiny pockets of Honesty's seed pods. Lunaria annua, or the "Money Plant" of my childhood. This one has only one of its pods unopened, with the seed shadows showing through the translucent membrane. The others have opened and dispersed their seeds, leaving the thin tissues of one side of each pod still attached, to vibrate in the light autumn breeze, sending sun reflections flickering through the Canada Plum thicket behind our house in Bishops Mills.

Beside it I have painted a seed head of Allium tricoccum, called Ramps in the Appalachians and Wild Leek in Ontario. We've transplanted them here from various places through the years as we bring home our woodsy harvests, and we pick a few garlicky flavoured leaves each spring for our salads, leaving the bulbs to continue to grow. This spring for the first time, we had clumps that were large enough to disperse through the grove, encouraging this edible native to replace the invasive Honesty as an understory herb.

Autumn Honesty (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-11-03T15:30:00.002-04:00

2 November finds me sitting in the "forever wild" thicket behind our house in Bishops Mills, painting the translucent parchment disks of Honesty (or Money Plant) Lunaria annua. The basal leaves of the first year plants of this biennial make bright notes of green among the dry fallen leaves. The sun is warm and I'm sheltered from the light wind, only a few degrees above freezing.

Manitoba Maples have long shaded this spot, making it cool and mossy in the summer. For more than 30 years we've watched the wild plums and buckthorn growing up and the Honesty spreading underneath them. At first this European introduction was just a curiosity to us because it had such nice seed pods, bright magenta blooms, and it was edible in the spring. About the time it was discovered that Garlic Mustard, also introduced from Europe, breaks down fungal symbiosis in Ontario forests, we began to suspect that Honesty, which is also a shady woods mustard, may have the same effect of actively suppressing the ability of the soil to support native plants.

We had set this spot aside as the 10% of the house lot that was to be forever wild, without any human intervention, but invasive species were becoming so common that we've decided to take action against them in 2008, cutting out Buckthorn, Honeysuckle, and Black Locust. We also started to pull the Honesty plants as soon as they flowered, and carefully take out the dead second-year stems with their unopened seed pods. There are only a few of them left now in the densest part of the thicket, where previous falls they were a galaxy of glimmering silvery coins.

Today we tried the basal leaves as an autumn harvest of cooked greens and found them in texture like cooked nettles, with a mild kale flavour.

Inspired By Emily Carr (oil on canvas 10 x 12 in.) collection of R & J Tanner

2010-10-31T22:36:00.002-04:00

28 October finds me in Ottawa viewing "Winds of Heaven", a film by Michael Ostroff about the life and art of Emily Carr and the diminishing of the forests and the native peoples of the west coast of British Columbia.

The film resonated with the Emily Carr I'm familiar with, and the reader of her journals and letters expressed all of her strength of character, humour, and frustration with those who wouldn't understand. The wealth of archival photos and old motion picture clips brought to life the time and place, especially the felling of the giants of the forest and native villages bristling with totem poles.

The voice that played Emily Carr read my very favorite passage from her journals - the process of sitting and waiting quietly and patiently in the forest for all the details to come together into shapes and movements - for the forest to speak to the painter.

Here is an image from my archives... On a sunny day in late September 2007 I sat on the forest floor in "Mediola Woods" to paint this old growth forest of Red Maple and Hemlock which is one of Ottawa's best kept secrets - overlooked by all but those who live nearby. Being an urban forest, it is unique in species composition - both for the plants that it has, and those which are noticeably absent. In the spring we visited the vernal pools and I had wanted to paint Mediola in bloom, but missed the moment. So I returned in the autumn, finding this tall spire of a stump forming a dark fulcrum, for the other movements of colour and texture.

Still Life With Chickadee (watercolour 5 x 7 in.) Sold

2010-10-29T20:29:00.002-04:00

26 October finds a road-killed Chickadee, discovered by me as I stopped the van at dusk to catch a migrating Leopard Frog on County Road 18 northeast of Bishops Mills. Fred was already out with the net, so I leapt out, following the frog into the roadside grass and catching her by hand, a big female destined for a breeding experiment at Carleton University.

As I turn back to the van, something glimmeres white in the fast-falling dark and I reach down to pick up a small lump of softness - a Chickadee, only a little bedraggled by tumbling to the wet road after being recently hit by a passing car.

In this porcelain bowl with two Crabapples it begs to be painted - two "mistakes" - the Chickadee's mistake was to fly into the path of an automobile, and the Crabapples... misidentified as Wild Pears for a while.

Among the Tamaracks (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-10-26T14:03:00.003-04:00

25 October finds me among the Tamaracks at the tracks on Bedell Road south of Kemptville Ontario.

Standing among the Tamaracks their yellow is like a lamplit room after the gloomy grey roadside. Chickadees call "dee - dee- dee" in little raspy voices and flit about among the branches hiding food for winter. Their memories have been cleared of last winter's larder catalogue as happens each year and they're starting afresh, using their powerful tiny brains to keep track of thousands of hiding places. A Robin flies across the road calling "churp, churp, chuck". A small swarm of Chironomid midges seem to me to be holding a Ceilidh dance, weaving and bobbing above my head, their whiny music too tiny for me to hear.

The Poplars are leafless except for large round leaves at the very tops against the grey sky. Roadside wildflowers, except for a few stout littel plants of purple asters, have gone to seed - all brown and golden, variously prickly and lumpy with burrs and capsules.

This is "Station 12 of our 42-station auditory monitoring transect. In 1992 and 1993 there were a few open-habitat Chorus Frogs calling from here, but none have been heard since then. Woodsy species, Peepers, Grey Treefrogs, Wood Frogs, and Leopard Frogs do most of the spring calling now as the forest grows up from the fields of 30 years ago and folks are squeezing houses in all along this gravel backroad.

Scarborough Bluff Dawn (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-10-26T00:18:00.000-04:00

22 October finds us looking up at the Scarborough Bluff freshly illuminated by the sunrise, from the east end of the parking lot of Bluffer's Park in Scarborough, east of Toronto. My back is to the lake and the breeze is brisk and cold. The cloudy sky protected us from frost last night but now the cloud is clearing and the rising sun picks out the pale clay bluffs and burnishes the autumn red trees and bushes.

At the base of the bluff is a veritable sea of Phragmites, in shadow now except for the fluffy plumed seed heads. An invasive reed introduced from Europe, Phragmites, is also climbing the bluffs in places and Fred is keeping track of its progress, and measures three of the tall stems to be 392 cm, 452 cm, and 451 cm - the tallest is four and a half metres! The Phragmites rhizomes as well as the roots of the constantly spreading Coltsfoot, also an European introduction, will stabilize the clay which is constantly eroding so that woods, yards and gardens at the crest of the bluffs are being undercut.

A little to the west of the view I have chosen, a strange wasp-nest-like structure with a gaping hole in it poises, exposed, at the top edge of the pale clay wall, high above the rows of autumn-empty Bank Swallow holes. Binoculars reveal it to be a brick lined well. Through the big hole in its side we can see the wooden planks of its cover. A hump of long-grassed sod covers the well.

Last night we saw a Fox at the foot of the bluffs, and heard wild howling and yapping of nearby Coyotes.

Burlington Beach Cormorant (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-10-21T16:35:00.001-04:00

19 October finds us visiting the Lake Ontario shore in Burlington Ontario, after Fred's first day of meetings on the conservation and recovery of rare fresh water mussels.

It is sunny, but windy and cool. Autumn mating chironomid midges hover in dancing clouds and single individuals brush against my hair as I walk down to the water's edge to watch a big Great Lakes ship pass imperceptibly, lit by the late afternoon sun across the pale blue lake. I am composing a painting of the grapevines draped over willow bushes and a low dune bracketed by drifts of fallen leaves, with the pearly blue lake behind with pinkly glowing skyscrapers of Hamilton along a high horizon.

The beach edge thickets are alive with little birds, hopping and peeping softly among the grape vines and scuffling the fallen leaves for insects - sparrows and warblers of many kinds. Ducking inside the nearest thicket, I brush aside a few vines and notice something black lying like a small cast off jacket. Stepping closer it changes fantasy-like into a dwarfed waif draped in a dark blanket, sleeping - or dead. And so it is, a Cormorant who crept in here to die, blanketed by its dark wing iridescent in purple and green.

Protected by legislation from near extinction, Cormorants are hated by some fishermen, who regard them as competitors. This will be my subject for today's painting. On its other side I see an open wound, attesting to a violent death. It reminds me of the Gannet I painted at Cap Lumiere, New Brunswick.

Bolete Under Pines (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-10-14T21:30:00.003-04:00

11 October finds us looking for Wood Frogs in Limerick Forest, east of Bishops Mills Ontario. We have walked back into the Red Pine plantation behind the "Chalet" building - pines that were planted in the 1940s to stabilize blowing sand after farming failed in the area. At this time of year the Wood Frogs are leaving the sunny open spots in the woods where they have been hunting for insects all summer, and heading for low, moist spots where they will hide in the leaf litter, raising their blood sugars in order to survive freezing solid for the winter.

A Spring Peeper practices for spring, emitting a volley of lusty peeps from somewhere unseen while Fred and Philip sneak around among the dry ferns and leafless Viburnum and invasive Shining Buckthorn, looking for movements of brown, gold and copper Wood Frogs among the brown, gold and copper fallen leaves, I am finding mushrooms, creeping about on my hands and knees to photograph them.

First I notice a tall Amanita mushroom with a gleaming egg-shaped cap flakey with the white scraps of its old veil, and then begin finding more and more brown Boletus with their soft suede caps and spongy porous undersides. This one still wears the fallen pine needles that it pushed up as it emerged from the fine network of mycelium that fills the forest floor, breaking down buried rotting wood and feeding the trees.

We will take some of them home for Fred to identify, and then to add to supper. Neither the bolete (which Fred recognizes as a Leccinium) nor the Amanita compare well to the species described in the field guide, so we decide to leave the Amanita because many of them are poisonous, and keep the Leccinium because none of them are poisonous.

Most "boletes" are edible, but we always check their identities anyway. The flesh is very soft when cooked, with a texture like raw liver. This is surprising to those who are used to the rubbery consistency of gilled mushrooms, but I find them quite tolerable in casseroles and thick stews, and of very good flavour.

Knothole Triplets (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-10-11T21:34:00.003-04:00

9 October finds me home again in Bishops Mills, viewing three perfect Elm Knothole Mushrooms growing at head height from a knothole in a tree behind our barn.

These are Hypsizygus ulmarius, the Oyster Mushroom that Fred and I call "Manitoba Maple Knothole Mushroom," though the formal name is "Elm Oyster." Each October we're constantly scanning distant Manitoba Maples for the telltale white spots, often quite high on trunks and branches.

Right now the dehydrator is whirring away in the back porch, drying this year's crop. We slice them and dry them until crisp, then store them in jars in the pantry. Cooked when freshly picked these mushrooms, though very flavourful, are tough and rubbery, but the dried ones cook up nice and tender, and they're a nice snack when eaten dry.

This species lives for most of the year as hidden thread-like mycelia in the quickly rotting wood of most of the Manitoba Maples in eastern Ontario. About Thanksgiving time fruiting bodies slowly blossom from scattered knotholes: whitish caps with pale tan gills, held up on stout curved white stalks. Their flesh is firm and dry, not easily damaged by autumn frosts. This delicious and safely-edible wild mushroom is easy to identify, as no other gilled, stalked, white fungus grows on Manitoba Maples at this season in our area.

Hypsizygus ulmarius is widely cultivated for food under the Japanese name ‘Shirotamagitake.’ The name 'ulmarius,’ suggests growth on Elms, but the only one we’ve seen on an Elm was on a tree drowned by Beaver-flooding, so they don’t seem to use Elms afflicted by Dutch Elm disease, which is how most of our Elms die.

View from Beausejour (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-10-01T17:17:00.009-04:00

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed

30 September finds us at the historic site of Fort Beausejour south east of Sackville, New Brunswick, looking out from the rolling grass knolls of the fort, over the Tantamar Marshes to the misty reach of the Cumberland Basin.

Saltmarsh ponds glint in the sun along the shoreline and beyond its sharp edge the seawater is pink with red mud - I think it becomes even pinker with the receding tide.

A red-rutted track runs between the sloped grassy lawn of the fort and a field of lush long grass, crouched in by large round bales of hay, and beyond that field the land drops away again to flat scrubby variegated fields that may have been farmed at one time, dyked and drained, now threaded through by dark lines and dashes of brushy ditches and gullies. In the distance a small herd of scattered cattle are mere dark dots, but the breeze brings me a faint bovine bellow. It is very quiet up here at the top of the world, until a train clatters along the tracks that were barely visible beyond the edge of the field.

Fred has returned from his walk along the rail line to scan the marshes for the puffy domes of Phragmites stands. He didn't see any. This is the one place in the Maritimes where the invasive European Phragmites australis subspecies australis has been reported, so we are interested in seeing how conditions here compare to what we'd observed elsewhere in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Watching the traffic on TransCanada Hwy 2 beetling along to the north we figure that the place that would be most informative would be the roadsides, since traffic and earth-moving machinery are the vectors of the spread of the invasive kind.

Fred reported later: "When the painting was done, we drove the busy road across the marshes both ways, waypointing stands and taking representative specimens (and giving the artist plenty of time to reflect on the prospects that might be opened up by widowhood as she watched me crossing between long strings of very fast traffic).

"The first thing we noticed was that the stands were very distinctly divided into native-like and invasive-like kinds: we counted 11 alien and 7 native stands, and only 1 that we called ambiguous, though the natives graded out into little whisps, and we doubtless missed some of these which an observer on foot could have waypointed. The most striking feature of this difference was the persistent green foliage of the aliens, in contrast to the shriveled get-ready-for-winter brown of the natives (one often sees that alien plants from NW Europe retain green leaves far longer than native plants do).

"Those on NatureNS will remember that throughout Nova Scotia we were perplexed by the intermediacy and confusing morphology of the majority of the Phragmites stands we sampled there: at Tantramar there was no ambiguity, and the natives didn't look much different from the ones we see in Ontario".

Sea Horses (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-10-01T16:47:00.001-04:00

29 September finds us driving the winding, hilly Nova Scotia highway #215 east along the north coast as evening falls. Each tiny community has its own old white frame community hall and every road to the right winds up into forested hills. The trees are compact in shape, not fluffy and rangy as they are farther inland, and the crowns of big trees are smoothly rounded.

We drive slowly. I am looking for a high seaside view for today's painting. The crest of each hill shows us the gleaming sea beyond sloping fields of small farms. Some hayfields all frosted with blueish asters and others uniform green.

Then I see them and we stop. Two stout, creamy-coloured horses, one following the other up to the barn from their seaside pasture. The leader has a black stripe up the centre of its stiff upright mane. Perhaps this is the Fjord Horse, an ancient breed from Norway.

Ellershouse Brook (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-09-29T21:16:00.002-04:00

For sale at Burlington Art Centre, $425 framed

27 September finds me on the bank of a brook near Ellershouse, Nova Scotia, gazing across a dark pool formed as the brook turns at a massive wrinkled and water carved bedrock wall. The rock is a greenish grey metamorphic, stained rusty-pink in places, with four little "caves" along a bedding fault, which reflect ripples on their ceilings. From the water to its forested crest, the nearly vertical wall is 15-20 metres high. I look straight up to Pines of half a century or more waving long arms of sunlit needles against the cobalt sky. The forest has crept half way down the rock face. Spruces, Maples and Pines perch on ledges and find roothold in crevices. To my right a large Maple with lichen-whitened bark leans over the pool to reflect its 'fluorescent' leaves from lime at the bottom to crimson at the top. It is matched by a Red Maple whose leaves haven't started to turn yet.

A row of Hemlocks shade the low bank directly across from me, their black roots exposed at the waters edge, and the brook upstream chatters to itself as it gradually drops about one metre, slipping over a series of worn ledges, rafting bright leaves and sparkling in the sun.

Fred notices a single plant of the invasive Pink Jewelweed. Panicking, he pulls it as a specimen, thinking to have eradicated the first plant of a potential invasion. As he dips its roots in the water to wash the soil out, he says he hopes that none of its seed pods will explode - but when we see a couple of tightly coiled bright green pod strips floating downstream, we realize that at least one "impatient" pod has snapped open in a violent act of seed dispersal. Crouching on a flat rock, with sinuses aching and nose dripping, I searched for tiny flat green seeds, finding some among muddy pebbles, then more in the edge of the grassy lawn. I even sweep up all the Hemlock needles from the flat rock because I notice a few seeds among them.... but Fred, returning from his foray downstream announces that the beautiful invader Pink Jewelweed is already established here - he has found several other plants in bloom. We will certainly return another year, and I'll look to see if any of the seeds I missed have sprouted on the bank of the pool.

Hairy Willowherb (watercolor 4 x 6 in.) SOLD!

2010-09-28T13:57:00.005-04:00

26 September finds us parked along Highway 102 so that I can paint the blooming willowherb that Fred picked about 15 minutes ago where we'd stopped at the Highway 101 interchange to check a patch of tall Spartina grass which might have been Phragmites.

We are now parked on the shoulder of Highway 102, just southeast of the Sackville River, at a real Phragmites stand that looks to be of the invasive kind. I decide that I must paint the willowherb right away, rather than waiting until we arrive at our next camp, because it may wilt. The flowers are larger and showier than those of Fireweed, to which it is closely related, and i remember that i'd had a difficult time painting Fireweed in 1984 because it wilted so easily.

Choosing the tip that gives me flowers in all stages, and popping it directly into the hole in an electronics bubble pack with a dribble of water, I'm very pleased to see the flowers which had begun to droop perking up noticeably, and so I begin to paint, without having been able to find my pencil and eraser. I'll just have to be very careful where I place the paint, triangulating among the other shapes that I see - a hefty challenge for an artist who is suffering from the onset of what she knows will be a dreadful cold/flu because of what it did to her husband!

I can't paint in the van as it rocks with the passing of each truck, so I sit on a folding stool beside the open door with my subject on the seat and my water bottle in the armrest. While he waits for me to finish with the flowers, Fred gets the Peterson wildflower guide to look up the name of this plant. It turns out to be Hairy Willowherb, with no mention its occurrence in the Maritime Provinces, so he plugs in our internet stick and does a web search on "Epilobium hirsutum" and "Nova Scotia". The top hit is a Facebook page calling for pictures of rare Nova Scotia plants for an electronic field guide. He writes to them and the Nature Nova Scotia list, from which Christopher Majka replies that our record is 15.4 km from the northeasternmost of four known Nova Scotia records of this plant.

We wonder, if we found it by stopping to look for something else, how frequent it may be along superhighway roadsides. We all whizz past these so frequently, but stop so rarely, making them one of the most-seen but less-studied habitats, and they're exposed to a constant influx of wind- and vehicle-borne seeds, so many plants may be established that nobody ever sees (and this may be equally tre of introduced snails and slugs).

NOTE: I finished the seed capsules the next day, and even two days later, still with its cut stem in the bubble pack, the buds of my Hairy Willowherb are continuing to open and the first ones haven't wilted.

Ceres in the Gardens (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-09-25T20:26:00.004-04:00

25 September finds me in the Halifax Public Gardens with three participants of my plein air painting workshop. Shaded by a Robur Oak tree planted by King George and Queen Elizabeth in 1939, a statue of Ceres, goddess of grain stands poised with hand out as if she were once holding a sheaf of grain, and attracts my attention as her slight form is an understatement in all the diversity of shapes and colours in the garden. Diana and Flora complete the set of three statues which were bequeathed by Chief Justice Sir William young in 1887.

It is a mild misty grey day with a few drops of rain that had us packing our paintings away temporarily in an attempt to shelter in the large Victorian bandstand, but its gate was locked. The afternoon is lightening somewhat and the sun comes out for a while, pleasing the wedding parties that have come here to have photos taken. Every time I notice a group of people it is a different wedding party, with brides maids in a different colour than the group before them.
The citizens of Halifax seem to enjoy promenading in their Public Gardens just as much as they did when it was opened to celebrate Confederation in 1876. There is a pond and a brook and a fountain and ducks which no-one is allowed to feed, so that they are more cute than nuisance - and a special plot of labelled Dahlias and a collection of Rhododendrons, and a tropical collection and a Horticultural Hall. I didn't see a vegetable garden, however, which the earlier citizens had been very proud of, storing their produce in the Hall for the winter.

I would like to store some of this balmy seaside air for the winter - fresh, moist and gentle. I raise my brush to take a deep breath of it and savour an afternoon of painting in the Halifax Public Gardens.

From Dartmouth to Halifax (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-09-24T13:48:00.003-04:00

23 September finds us having new tires installed on both van and trailer at Miller Tirecraft in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. While we wait I sit on a pile of cement curbing at the back of the lot to paint the bridge to Halifax past a pile of big old tractor tires at the brink of a steep slope above more industrial park and the harbour.

I can see vehicles crossing the bridge with their windsheilds twinkling in the sun. My eyes are shaded by a hat and everything is brightly backlit. The surface of the harbour glares brightly to the right of my view.

Painting the worn surfaces of the huge tires reminds me of some boulders that have been a prominent part of some of my paintings - boulders moved by glaciers and left there as part of the landscape for a long time. But here the moving force is vehicular, and it leaves piles of things as massive as boulders. When I mentioned this comparison to Fred, he said that from what he could see from the face of the slope, this place was established on a moraine of buried tires, interlaid with crushed rock and gravel. The current pile, however, is probably waiting to be picked up for approved environmentally safe disposal.

It is a breezy day, and the wind at my back feels cold when the occasional cloud covers the sun. Queen Anne's lace and Goldenrod are finished blooming, and so is the Black Knapweed whose heads are dark and bristly in the foreground to the left, but it and the White Sweet-clover have a few residual blooms. A Tansy flower is still knobby and bright yellow in the lower right of my painting. The rest of Fred's plant account is as follows:

"Tussalago farfara (Coltsfoot), covers 70% of the ground here. The taller herbs are Carrot, patches among the other herbs, all in seed, no current blooms; Horseweed, scattered individual plants, still blooming; Solidago cf canadensis, patches of stout plants, in fluff and bloom; Sonchus sp, scattered individual plants in seed & bloom, Dandelion, many plants lush green down among the Tusselago; Lotus cuniculatus (Birdsfoot Trefoil), some plants in bloom ar edge of the open gravel of the lot; A pale blue-blooming Aster is the third major tall herb, with Black Knapweed and Goldenrod, though mostly inland of the exact painting site".

Just as my light is fading and I'm packing up palette and brushes Fred works the gravel slope and flat below the brink. He "Found Gastropods and a few big flat Sowbugs only under piled Spruce branches and logs in a little pile down on the flat - there were none under a pile of old milk cartons. There were about 10 Deroceras reticulatum slugs, mostly creamy-pale in colour, a little blackish Arion slug with a stripe, and cf Discus snails clustered under one piece of wood, shells under another".

Hemlock Looking Up (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-09-22T11:27:00.001-04:00

21 September finds us looking up into the crown of a 400 year old Hemlock tree in Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia. Lying on my back with my head propped against the railing of the boardwalk, this is the first time I've painted up into a tree. The top of the trunk fades into a blur of grey branches in the halo of soft sunlit needles against a blue sky. I am guessing that the tree may be 40-50m tall. Its branches are stout, curved and twisted more like an Oak than a Hemlock,

Higher twigs are whispy with Usnea lichen, moving with the breeze like downy feathers. Lower on the trunk the bark is 'painted' in patches and splashes with softly weathered grey-green crustose lichen. There is none of the frilly Lobaria lichen that festoons the trunks of some of the other trees. Most of the lower branches are broken, and a section of broken branch as thick as my leg hangs in crotch of another branch and sways in the breeze. A Blue Jay flies soundlessly overhead to one of the upper branches, and then away again.
Not shown in my painting, a large side branch juts out horizontally and then rises vertically in the shape of a conventional Conifer on one side of the crown.

Other old Hemlocks stand spaced about 15 - 20 metres from each other, but the smaller Maples and Birches grow closer, crowded by Spruce and Pine which actually push at their trunks with needled branches. Moose Maple seedlings spread their flat leaves above the forest floor. Pillows of dry fluffy moss cover old dead wood and Wintergreen raises its hard shiny leaves in clusters.

As I paint Fred discovers three Redbacked Salamanders and a few very small slugs, Arion and the native Pallifera in the process of turning flakes of Hemlock, rotten branches, and curls of Birch bark. He replaces all cover turned and does not disturb the rotten logs. He reports that everything looks very well processed here - slug droppings, and tracks gnawed into the cap of a Russula mushroom - but we would have to come during or after a rain to meet the larger slugs and snails.

Blomidon View (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-09-21T11:07:00.005-04:00

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed

19 September finds us enjoying the panoramic view from the viewpoint on Nova Scotia Highway 358 that is locally named the "Blomidon Look-off". The road climbs fairly steeply and without switchbacks, along the south east side of the backward-hooked Blomidon Penninsula jutting into the Minas Channel, and now we look over a flat patchwork of woods, fields, roads and buildings as evening darkens the landscape and the moon rises, nearly full.

The nearest fields and farms are almost directly below us, then the patchwork of woods, fields, roads and buildings stretches out, all in miniature to the arm of the Bay, and in the distance the main Bay. On the near shore to the north, a Fundy-red low-tide meanders down to the Bay through a patch of marsh at the mouth of Pereaux Creek, which I can see by leaning over to see past the Alders growing up beside the guard rail.
I paint quickly, sitting on my caddy against the guardrail, heavy sweater and jacket against the cold breeze to my back. underpainting red ochre for the landscape, a complex greenish purple for water, and bands of dull purple cloud and pale evening sky colours above that. Stroking in the dark patches of forest and skewed rectangular fields, I realize that I will again have to finish my painting from photographs, as lights begin to twinkle in the distance and I'm having difficulty in distinguishing the colours on my palette. Strangely enough, after I've packed up and return to the van, the colours in my painting, as I hold it up, still match the scene, which has darkened even further.

Hawthorns at High Tide (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-09-16T23:29:00.004-04:00

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed

15 September finds me admiring a lush meadow of autumn wildflowers and a Hawthorn bush that overhangs the east side of the brook downstream from Bev's place near Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. This is a Bailey bridge of steel girder-style railings, and the thin asphalt paving is cracking over the diagonal boards of the roadbed.

The brook is wide here, slow flowing as the high tide in the Annapolis River pushes back against it. It's as still as a mirror - only under the bridge can we see the water move. The forest on the west bank is mostly deciduous, the Ash, Maple, Cherries, and Birch crowding down the bank as if to view their reflections.

Two bushes of English Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna stand on the east bank of the creek above the bridge, and Fred makes his way down from the road over licheny boulders to collect a twig for the plant press. He wades through the thick Goldenrod, low bushy wild Roses, and pale green patches of Red Raspberry, a scattering of mauve New England Aster, and a tall, small-flowered white aster lodged down in thick tangles.

The textures are rich, begging to be painted, and the colours glow in the evening light which breaks through after our afternoon rain storm. Out in the middle, near the Hawthorns is a reddish patch of Black Knapweed, dark, narrow-leavered and rusty-headed. Blue Jays call across the creek and a young Song Sparrow practices a partial song. A single Spring Peeper pipes out a series of clear calls.

Now it really has gotten too dark to paint. Just as we cross back over the bridge, a Beaver drags two spreading threads of silver wake across the black reflection of dark trees on the downstream side.

Annapolis River (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in)

2010-09-14T22:03:00.001-04:00

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed

10 September finds us in the quaint town of Annapolis Royal, in a parking lot overlooking the Annapolis River beside the historical Fort Anne.

The tide is going down, revealing red mud flats and turning the river pink under dramatic evening clouds. Buildings are visible across the river in the town of Granville Ferry which serves a military base, under the long silhouette of the richly forested hills.

I am having fun with this painting, as the river is making long smooth strokes of dull purplish pink with hints of pale greenish-blue. I must work quickly though, as every time I look up from my painting its appearance is changed. When we arrived the river was strikingly striped by mud-pink, foam, and strips of slick upwelling, its appearance changing every few minutes and I have had to paint fast, but as the Sun sets and overcast moves in, the water becomes more unicolor. My photos will help me to finish it.
Fred comes back from the boardwalk where he had been poking about at the top of the mudflats as I sit painting in the front of the van where I can get the best view. He reports that he "found the top of the tide was a fine drift of grassy bits, then there were piled broken rocks liberally dotted with Littorina littorea, and a slope down past many Mytilis shells to a level where living ones are abundant, blackening the surface, with little Crepidula and more Periwinkles. Then there was a mudflat onto which it didn't seem wise to venture. The whole slope is dotted with Mya shells.

The Molluscs are protected by signs that proclaim them to be too "contaminated" for use as human food. The whole scene is festooned with Ascophyllum of exuberant growth, both on walls and breakwaters and on chance rocks on the slope down to the mudflats - there's also some ruffly Fucus (Rockweed), as well".

Annapolis Royal has an interesting history, having changed hands seven times and been under attack thirteen times, more contested than any other North American place. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Royal,_Nova_Scotia

Old Black Locust (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-09-13T23:05:00.001-04:00

9 September finds us at Round Hill, Nova Scotia, appreciating Bev Wigney's old Locust trees. Bev reports that three or four Pileated Woodpeckers have been coming every day in the late afternoon to search for beetle larvae in the crevices of the deeply grooved bark, bright red heads glowing in the evening sun high among the branches as they propping their stiff tails against the bark. I haven't been very successful at photographing them today, as they are constantly on the move.

Now they are gone again and I'm sitting on a stool between the van and the trailer to paint the eldest of the Black Locusts that surround the yard. Its hard corky bark flares like the edges of fabric, and criss-crosses in places as if braided. In mid-trunk it looks as if the tree has pulled both sides of a shawl around itself. We have two Black Locusts at home in Bishops Mills, but none large as this one. Around the base of its trunk the ground cover is Goutweed, or Bishopweed, which also grows beside our house in Bishops Mills, and which we eat in spring. Chokecherries, Bird Cherries, Black Cherries and Sour Cherries grow with the Locusts in this fencerow. At home Cathartic Buckthorn would have crowded all of these out long ago.

Arriving at Bev's place yesterday was much like driving into her blog - in addition to actually being able to hear the high-piched voices of her collies from the house, and feel the cool soft grass of her lawn, and stand in the shade of the towering Locust trees.

We established the van and trailer on the afternoon-shaded side, and took a tour of the path down to the brook, noticing the berry-filled droppings of a small Ursus americanus (Black Bear) on one of the stones in the creek (now at low-water because it hasn't rained for a while) and a Procyon lotor (Raccoon) skull at the base of a bush coming back up. Bev introduced us to the odd stones that turn up in the brook, and picked up another one for herself - a small ball within a ball of reddish conglomerate, the outer one eroded away on one side to reveal the inner one.

Growing Back (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-09-10T15:38:00.005-04:00

7 September finds me perched atop a white granite boulder, near Crawford Bridge, Nova Scotia, my knees and paint box crowding a Chokeberry bush, to paint a little Spruce tree in the lee of another boulder. It has a mop-like crown of little branches each competing to be the new leader, and at its feet are several younger Spruces doing their best to grow straight and true with lots of light but very little nutrient.

I had at first thought that the clearcut was pretty recent, but the wood is very weathered, suggesting that it's a least a decade old. The exposed soil, barren wood, and trampled ground have not been re-covered by moss. In a rich soil the birch and Maple sprouts would be only a couple of years old, but here, with so much rock and so little soil, the forest was its own nutrient bank, and between the removal of nutrients in wood, and the massive effux of dissolution and erosion that accompanies logging (there is no original organic soil present) those nutrients are gone, and the plants are growing very slowly.

I expect that the butt of the log and the bare granite rock that are here in the foreground will enhance the impression of congestion and also provide a sense of tension and conflict.

This is a challenging painting, as there is so much happening - so much chaos and disorganization and shapes coming and going every which way. I underpainted it in burnt sienna to provide immediacy and contrast, to enhance the appearance of busyness and confusion... and now I have to pull the painting together in spite of it. That's partly what's challenging! I find that I'm often choosing the hardest route to completion of a painting by my choice of colour for underpainting, but if I can pull it off, I'm glad I did it that way. It would be boring for both me and you if I just did easy paintings.

There's so much grey and green here that if I just made the underpainting one of my purplish or blueish greys, with the other dominant colour being that undernourished-spruce green, I'd have to try to find all the bits of burnt sienna in the scene to give it some life. I've chosen instead to start with the burnt sienna. All the way through the process of painting this scene, the hot, lively colour of the underpainting is still here to provide excitement, and it's my job to cover it up with spruce and bark and wood and rock colours until the painting works.

When the sun comes out full, it's very hot out here on my rock. As the afternoon progresses most of the cloud that I first painted behind the main Spruce, lightens, and the day becomes "partly cloudy". This place is only about 3 kilometres from the woods at Brandy Spring, but it feels to me like a different world. The word for world WAS forest....

Fred notes: "Coming up from our old-bridge campsite is a track up the clay, gravel and rock slope into a clearcut with Black Chokeberry and Low-Bush Blueberry (both of which seem to have had their tops bitten off by Bears earlier in the year), and especially Kalmia angustifolia (Sheep Laurel), springing up around the white granite boulders. There's a scattering of bracken and various weedy herbs, as well. I later collected a tiny Alnus (Alder) just below the boulder from which the painting was done. I had scouted this slope earlier, and been impressed by the pavements of crushed wood among the boulders, the sparseness of the shrub cover, and the upspringing Birches, with evident hybridization between Betula populifolia (Gray Birch) and Betula papyrifera (Paper Birch)".

Woods at Brandy Spring (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.)

2010-09-09T12:18:00.003-04:00

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed

6 September finds me gazing up into a steep forest of mossy boulders, stout Yellow Birch, Red Maple, Spruce, and Hemlock. Some of the larger boulders are the size of a small house, and all of the smaller ones are entirely carpeted with moss. Exposed tree roots are also mossy, as are the huge trunks of fallen trees and the mounds of nurse logs. Dark green, leathery fronds of Polypody feather the sides of mossy boulders, and yellow-green Dryopteris ferns grow knee-high where they can find a bit of well-rotted wood between mossy rocks. This scene continues all the way up the slope.

We pulled into a short loop of old highway that parallels Nova Scotia #357 yesterday at dusk, and when I stepped out of the trailer this morning I walked along the edge of the woods to identify a trickling sound, and found water flowing from a dark space beneath a large rock which is hand lettered in weathered red paint, BRANDY SPRING.
The water falls into a depression too shallow for dipping, but after a brief sparkle over pebbles it collects in a small pool and trickles from that into the grassy ditch, spongy with Sphagnum and laced with Cranberries, where it shortly sinks into the ground. The forested slope continues on the other side of the highway, down to a slow reach of the Musquodoboit (pronounced "Muskadobbit") River.

Water from Brandy Spring is clear and pale golden - the colour of watered-down brandy. It tastes fresh, clean, and cold - not soft on the tongue, but with a sort of mineral edge to it, a rocky sharpness. The colour will be from rain that has soaked through leaves and moss and the spongy web of tree roots over granite. I filled all of our water containers.

We have not disturbed the forest here by turning any cover, so we don't know what slugs or salamanders may be here, but Fred noted "autumn calling" by Green Frogs and Peepers.

Waves Before the Hurricane (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

2010-09-08T12:21:00.003-04:00

3 September finds us on Martinique Beach, at the mouth of Pepetswick Inlet, to see if the waves are beginning to grow larger ahead of Hurricane Earl which is forecast to reach the coast of Nova Scotia before noon tomorrow.

The beach is long and curved, it's barrier dune backed by a large salt marsh, and there are several vehicles parked along the beach access road. Two groups of people are wading in the surf and a flock of Gulls rest on the long rock that juts into the crashing sea. The waves indeed are large, rising near shore from a ruffled gray sea under an inscrutable grey sky. The wind isn't strong yet, and although the sky is brooding, it doesn't appear threatening - there are just these waves rising out of it as if propagated by a force yet unseen.

Waves are coming fast in threes and fours. Some rise high enough for light to shine green through them like glass and some crest together from two different directions, meeting in a heart-shape before curling and breaking into white chaos. The front edge of one wave appears to change direction, streaking with a mad hiss like a car just shooting past at the edge of the surf. Most waves break further out, and follow each other in a procession of watery mountain ranges, snow-capped along the ridge. The curve of the wet beach reflects the faint rose of the hazy evening sky and high above a field of broken mackerel clouds, thinly spread across the pink-touched baby blue.
NOTE: Prudence dictated that we retreat about 20 km inland from the coast while the storm passed, but on the bright sunny day after the hurricane we returned to Martinique Beach to waves that appeared no higher, but sea and surf much more agitated. Waves followed each other thick and fast, their crests brushed forward by the wind. They broke early, crashing into a field of white water from their breaking to the beach. The gale force wind kept so much sea spray in the air that it was blazing white and painful to the eye to glance west along the beach toward the sun. Sand was also in the air, gritting in our teeth. It was as hard to stand against the wind as it must have been to stand against the surf for those adventurous folk who were trying it.

The hurricane felled many Spruce trees. They lay like jackstraws in the patch of woods at the base of the beach, and it was interesting to see their closely-coned, heavily lichened tops at close range where they'd fallen by the road. On the back side of the dune, the tops of every plant except dune grass, Bayberry, and Beach Pea was killed by unaccustomed exposure to salt - I imagine the very rain must have been half sea water right at the coast. On our way north we noticed Alders and Apple trees, Cherries and Maples all browned and blasted as if their leaves had been turned to darkly-dyed leather and twisted away from the sea. Even far inland many Maples still have their leaves turned upwards, undersides to the south.