Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

14 June finds me painting at the foot of a venerable Sugar Maple near Eadie Road, North Russell, Ontario. A Red Squirrel chase explodes, close and urgent, around the base of this tree and up another, launching onto the zig-zag tree-top paths in a territorial dispute. This old Maple and its neighbours are over a metre in diameter, perhaps 200 years old. They look like they may be the first generation after the original woods were cut down, and left as shade trees in a pasture. In 1981 the pasture was

13 June finds us driving very slowly in the dark around the red shale hill of North Russell, Ontario, surveying frog movements after this rainy day. There are adult Leopard Frogs, adult and newly transformed Green Frogs, a few Toads (two yearlings and one adult) - and we were pleased and surprised to find many yearling and small adult Gray Tree Frogs! Adults have been calling from the trees, having left their breeding ponds to begin their summer insect hunting. They forage

5 June  finds me sitting on the roof of our van, painting the scene that I can see over a high chain link fence where a lake glints between the trees at the northeastern gate to the old quarry in North Russell, Ontario. There are only a couple of spots where the surrounding grassy berm behind the boundary fence is low enough for the lake to be visible. What we are doing here is taking a peek into the forbidden hole in the centre of the redshale area - the land

8 June finds me marvelling at the tiny dragon-like larvae of Ambystoma salamanders that we've netted from the vernal pool that I painted on 3 April in Russell, Ontario. They came up with the tadpoles, wriggling in the muck swept up by Fred's dipnet. Like the tadpoles they have broad, veil-like, spotted tail fins - but these baby salamanders have small heads and long slim bodies. Fred tipped the net onto the dry leaves at the pond edge and we picked

31 May finds me at the edge of a cornfield, painting the view down rows of young corn toward an island-shape of trees, one of the corridors of woods that are so essential to healthy biodiversity in a landscape inhabited by people. To me, this island shape represents the well-forested North Russell red shale hill as it rises from the flat, intensively-farmed landscape that surrounds it. There are fields of red soil here indeed, growing corn and

3 June finds me painting through the chain link fence at the weir on the Castor River in Russell, Ontario. The far bank is the Burton Conservation Area, a sloping grassy lawn by the river and a walking trail through a Red Pine forest. The Castor runs clear and golden today, foaming from its two-metre fall over the weir. A wire-bound gabion at the far end of the wier is filled with grey broken rock, and in the shade of slim young Poplars and Elms, the gabion

24 May finds me doing a watercolour painting of a rare Liverwort - the floating Purple-fringed Riccia, Ricciocarpus natans! At one of the culverts on Eadie Road, there are round leathery leaves stranded on the reddish mud like a scattering of bright green coins. Ricciocarpus is a floating liverwort, and indeed, some were also floating in the shade of the mossy natural bank. This 40 metre section of ditch has been recently dammed at both ends and the water is still and clear. I scooped up a layer of the mud to get a closer look at the liverworts, and have decided to paint them.