Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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 curv...

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.

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 lo...

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...