Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

27 August finds me still amazed by the tide at the mouth of the Walton River at Walton, Nova Scotia.  We decided to spend the night here, to try again to find clams during the morning low tide today, as Adam came back last night without any.  He had walked all the way out to open water without being sure of what to look for in terms of evidence of clams.  It was a darkly cloudy afternoon, lightened a little toward evening, and then got dark so quickly just as the tide turned, that he would not have been able to find the shoes he'd left beneath the cliff if they hadn't been white.  Without shoes, his return would have been painfully slow, and it would have been a race between a search party and the tide, which comes right up on the cliff, leaving no place to walk when it's high. My artist's eye is so excited by the sweeping bands of red and blue in this scene, that I'm grinning all the while I'm painting it. This is the other side of the river mouth from l

26 August finds us in Walton, Nova Scotia, at the mouth of the Walton River, on the Minas Basin, the place of the world's highest recorded tides. The tide is going out now and will soon be at its lowest, and it's threatening rain.  I've set Fred up to skin the Gannets that he found at Cap Lumiere for the New Brunswick Museum, and Adam has gone to explore the tide flats for clams. At low tide the sea goes out for more than a kilometre here, leaving a vast and fascinating landscape of channels in shining clay, and wandering bars of mixed clay, sand, and gravel - all the way out to a thin line of open water at the horizon. I am sitting on a flat rock at the edge of a shale bluff, and directly across the river, at the top of a sloping gravel shore and against the forest, a family is camping with a cluster of bright nylon tents.  This afternoon they were fishing from the tip of the headland and exploring the receding tide line. We are parked on the town side of the rive

25 August finds me on the Richibucto Dune, northwest of Cap Lumiere, sitting at the edge of the dune grass on a knee-high bluff that crests the soft dry sand of the beach, gazing across at 'another world'   All along the beach this afternoon, ever since the krumholtz forest dwindled to a few outlying birches, the dune, crested with waving beach grass has been our horizon. I was trying to decide on which view of the beach I should paint, when Adam came down from the crest of the dune with news of a wide panorama of different habitats visible from up there - beyond our horizon. It was a surprise to the eyes after days of revelling in beach and sea, to suddenly see beyond our horizon.....  salt marsh! The very marsh that I thought was unattainable in the short time we have for hiking before breaking camp this afternoon, is suddenly revealed to us - a vast flat variegated salt marsh vista, blending gradually from bogs in the south and east to the channels of the estuary in the n

24 August finds me sketching one of three Gannets that Fred found dead on the beach north west of where we are camped.  I have photographed it for an oil painting, but the evening light will not last long enough to even get the painting started, so I will replace this sketch with the painting when it is complete (completed on 29 August and replacing the sketch, which remains in my journal). The death of three Gannets, spaced out along 3.5 kilometres of sandy beach is a mystery to us.  Their feathers are a gleaming white, highly reflective as if they were clothed with light.  The stripes on their black feet are pale blue, as are their beaks, and the longer feathers on their heads are golden-yellow. The eyes are positioned so that they can see directly below them - the better to see fish while flying. Gannets dive from 30 metres above the water, reaching speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour, penetrating the ocean to greater depths than other diving birds can reach. They don't

23 August finds us at Cap Lumiere, New Brunswick.  Our trailer is parked at the end of the road, but a grassy track continues along a ridge of old dunes parallel to the beach, at least a kilometre along the sandy spit, toward the mouth of the salt marsh which is three kilometres further on. We camped were here in 1976 and '77, and are pleased to find it much the same as it was then.  I haven't been out to the salt marsh yet, but I've gone into the wind-sculpted "krumholtz" forest that shows darkly on the left of my view this evening, and glimpsed the bog behind it.  All four habitats, beach, salt marsh, forest, and bog, grade into one another in classic simplicity, and I described and drew the beautiful pattern of it in my first book Canadian Nature Notebook (Wild Habitats in the US) published in 1979. The salty air is soft and sweet, smelling like home to me and I hear the rhythmic 'breathing' of the sea along the beach.  Frank Ross painted a stormy w

18 August finds me painting in the lab.  This morning I stayed to finish my watercolour of the red Grasshopper while everyone else went out for the last day of fieldwork for the two-week Bio-blitz. Karen, the student who researches bats, collected a Dwarf Rattlenake Plantain to paint, so I'm starting right in on it.  She brought three - one plant of the full-sized species, with unpatterned rich green leaves and a tall flower stalk, and two plants of the dwarf species - one in dry twiggy litter and this one in my favorite moss of damp places, Mnium.  They were all found in a Cedar forest near Doyle's Meadow. The single plant of the large species has fresh white flowers, but its stem is too tall to fit into the kind of close-up, whole-plant portrait I would like to paint.  Both plants of the dwarf species are "past flowering", but little brown scraps of what were delicate white orchid flowers still cling to the tips of the developing seed capsules.  I chose the plant

17 August  finds us holding "science at work day" Open House for the BioBlitz in the lab set up in the building beside the house where our trailer is parked and tent pitched. My recent paintings are displayed beside those of the other Bio-blitz artist, Kathleen Gallant, near the front door. I have retreated to one of the tables at the back where the floor is more stable and there is less coming-and-going, to demonstrate the painting of a red grasshopper from the bog that we visited yesterday.

16 August finds us in the bog at the headwaters of Eel Brook, very nearly in the centre of the Jacquet River Gorge Protected Natural Area. The bog is rosy with red Sphagnum hummocks and patches.  Bog Cotton bobs little white popmoms in the light wind, and gardens of Pitcher Plants nestling their hollow  leaves in the moss raise tall-stemmed, leathery red "lampshade" flowers. The bog mat, Sphagnum laced together with the roots of low heaths, floats here, depressing several centimetres under each step, and weak enough in some places for a foot - and leg - to punch through.  Biologists wander all over the bog, collecting beetles and rasshoppers, catching Green Frogs and Wood Frogs, baby Maritime Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis pallidula), netting water insects. and not finding fish or snails.  This is a true bog - with no flow in or out except seepage toward Eel Brook, and so there is no way for purely aquatic animals to reach it except by accident. This time we entered

15 August finds me taking an evening drive down Archibald Road to the Jacquet River in the PNA - 13.5 km ssw of the Jacquet River settlement as the Raven flies.  The glass clear river flows in a deep pool with smooth corrugations drawn out on the jade green bedrock bottom, past a narrow gravel bank at the feet of Spruces and Cedars. On this side I stand on a 4 metre high bank of stattered shale, where three days ago, I found and relished the last Saskatoon berry on a bush on the high gravel open area where we parked to view the river.

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed 14 August finds us crouched beside some mushrooms under Firs and Maples at the western tip of Antinouri Lake in the Jacquet River Gorge NPA, New Brunswick. There are three large brown mushrooms, and Adam is doing a watercolour of all three, beside the log that overshadows my closer view.  They are satiny-capped and perfect, except for a pale leaf-print on the cap of the larger, which I find charming.  Also pleasing my artist's eye is the yellow mottling on leaves to the left, and the various spots and holes on the long smooth leaves of Queens Cup Lily and on the parallel veined Bunchberry.  The yellow mottling may be due to a fungus that operates within the tissues of the leaf.  It has been estimated that there are some ten million species of that kind of fungus in the world. Without these imperfections my painting would be a cartoon of coloured shapes and planes, but thinking in terms of biodiversity, the blemishes are eviden

13 August finds Kathleen and I painting at the Jacquet River again, this time farther south in the Jacquet River Gorge Protected Natural Area, all the way down Mitchell Road to the closed bridge.  I sit on the flat ledge in the shade of my big blue and white umbrella, painting all the colours of the Jacquet River.  Here the green bedrock bottom, carved deep by the scouring of its multicoloured cobbles, gives the clear water coursing down the main channel a mysterious glass green colour in the afternoon sunshine. On the far side of this narrow channel the river chatters among stones past the bar and on this side it makes a standing wave and swirls and slips over larger stones, chuckling around the emergent rocks just off the ledge where I sit in the shade of my large blue and white umbrella, painting the many colours of the river. Dr. Reginald Webster, freelance entomologist working with the Canadian Forest Service, bends over one of the golden-mossed rocks, splashing river water o

12 August finds me in the Bio-blitz lab in New Mills, New Brunswick, painting a watercolour of a cluster of mushrooms that we collected on our hike back from Antinouri Falls yesterday.  When we presented it to Amanda, the micology specialist she asked me several questions about the habitat and condition of the mushrooms before picking, that had me embarassed that I'd taken to little time to observe.  I had taken photos though, to help me in painting - but I am not referring to them at all.  Having the mushrooms in front of me on the table and in good light is far better than any photo, and I have been contentedly painting away for hours, noting the translucent blush and the wonderfully sculptured ribs. The Wooly Chanterelle, Gomphus floccosus is a "Trumpet" mushroom, but is in a different genus than the Chanterelle considered "choice" for eating.  The edible Chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius, has a smooth cone-shaped cap, where ours is scaley inside.   Aman

!! 11 August finds us at Antinouri Falls in the Jacquet River Gorge Protected Natural Area, having followed Don and Martin along a track with huge mud puddles, and up and down through thick forest for over an hour of steady going - our destination the waterfall on the brook that flows into Antinouri Lake.  It is beautiful here, but I can't take time to bathe my face in the pool at the bottom, or lie back on the forest floor, listening to the rushing water - Kathleen and I have been given one hour to paint, and then we must begin our return hike in order to get back to the truck before dusk. Every time Fred and I stopped to take photos or write notes on the way in we got left behind and had to halloo for direction.  I had lightened my painting kit by removing the largest tubes of oil paints, but my pack, with water and camera, journal, plastic sheeting in case of rain, first aid kit, etc. is still heavy enough.  Someone else carried my painting umbrella.  My legs felt like rubber

10 August , participating in the 2010 Bio-blitz of the Jacquet River Gorge Protected Natural Area, finds us on the bank of the Jacquet River in northern New Brunswick.  There will be a total of 40 specialists focusing on this 26,000 hectare forested area over the course of two weeks. Don McAlpine, head of Zoology at the New Brunswick Museum, took us down a steep rocky road this afternoon, to a spot on the opposite bank from the Protected Area, where there are large Black Ash trees, a special part of the forest that is left out by the current boundary. Parking near an old wooden bridge, we follow a ferny path along the chattering brook through the woods, emerging on the cobbly river bank where the bar of the brook curves into the Jacquet River.  The  old growth forest rises on the steep far bank of the gorge, White Spruce tall and pointed, and White Pines waving long branches, and ochre-leaved Poplar trees on the river banks looking like western Black Cottonwood.  Hand-sized Lungwor