Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

20 June finds me in a Silver Maple forest flooded by Trout Creek in the Grand Lake Meadows PNA, New Brunswick. I am painting the portrait of a tree that is extending a long horizontal limb, twisted and forked, in my direction. Its bark is shaggy with strap-like plates lifting at either end. This is not the largest tree on the clay floodplain. There is a several-trunked Silver Maple several metres away, standing amidst Sensitive Fern at the waters edge, and not far away in the other direction, a huge Green Ash tree, leans toward a Silver Maple as if in conversation. Its trunk is about a meter in diameter at chest height.  Barb Brown and I have followed this track deep into the Silver Maple forest, the trees getting older and larger with a more complete canopy the further down toward the Jemseg River we went, identifying tracks in the soft mud - Raccoon, Moose, Deer, and Bear. Barb walks farther on as I stay here to decide which trees to paint.

18 June finds me sitting on my paint caddy by the Burpee Millstream in one of the western slices of New Brunswick's Grand Lake Meadows PNA, working to capture the patterns of light and colour of water as it courses past, and the rhythm of Red maple and White Pine branches as they reach into the light above the stream.  Fred has just returned from wading down the creek on the round cobbly rocks, admiring the aquatic moss and collecting spring drift from the floodline one metre up the bank. He found a Two-lined Salamander under a stone at the stream edge, and dipnetted a Stonefly larva. There were no crayfish, clams or snails, and no evidence of Beavers. Then he walked back through Sensitive Fern and waist deep Ostrich Ferns to check my progress on the painting.  Painting moving water is a time-consuming study, and I realize that whenever I'm not guessing, I'm learning. 

19 June  finds me at the Bio-blitz open house, finishing a second painting of the bog near Albright in the Grand Lake Meadows PNA from one of my photos - the bog "Where Elfin Skimmers Live". I had nearly finished it yesterday morning, so it is not difficult filling in the dancing strokes of the forest,  and the blue and white sky above the tops of the Black Spruces - between conversations with people who stop to watch me work and ask about my paintings. All around me swirl conversations - about meadows, forests, beetles, mice, plants, roads and maps, where people have been and what they have seen. Then the chatter was silenced as the president of the New Brunswick Museum introduced this year's Bio-blitz as the first of two to be held in this Protected Natural Area, and she introduced other speakers - Don McAlpine, the organizer of the Bio-blitzes, and someone from the New Brunswick Nature Trust, and a very gracious

15 June 2013 finds me in one of my favorite places - knee deep in the spongy mattress of a sphagnum bog. I am painting Pitcher Plants in bloom near Albright, New Brunswick, at the edge of one of the tracts of the Grand Lake Meadows Protected Natural Area. The waxy red lampshade-shaped Pitcher Plant flowers nod demurely from the curved tops of 30 cm tall stems, each in the centre of a half buried nest of pitcher-shaped leaves. These actually hold water and are lined with tiny curved hairs so that insects that slide in can't climb out. They are drowned and absorbed as nutrients for these extravagant plants. The Sphagnum moss that forms most of the floating bog mat produces an organic acid that prevents decomposition and sequesters nutrients, so most plants that live in bogs are evergreen and have other adaptations for life in a low nutrient setting. The tiny carnivorous Sundews are also here, showing in my painting as bright red dots at

14 June finds me standing by the broad St John River west of Jemseg, painting a Silver Maple with its evening reflection as the flood levels of a rainy week begin to recede. Fred is searching the skim of filtered drift over packed grass for the places where there are the most snail shells. Robert Forsyth is searching the ground above the flood line for living snails, and Owen is botanizing, taking special note of Winterberry Holly, invasive Angelica sylvestris , and a

1 June finds me on "The Dome" at Elbow Lake Education Centre, a high outcrop of gray granite, looking down on Elbow Lake in the Frontenac Axis of eastern Ontario. Piles of lichen patterned granite are jumbled here and there on the solid bedrock, surrounded by grasses and bushes wherever they can get a roothold, and here and there the delicate, thread like Pale Corydalis nods its pink and yellow snapdragon-shaped flowers. One that I'm painting is weighed down by the attentions of a heavy Bumblebee, briskly spreading the petals and probing each flower in turn. Suddenly the air all around us is alive with a loose cloud of about 30 hunting Dragonflies, darting and swooping and hovering, their four wings a blur and their abdomens tipped up slightly. You can see three Dragonflies in my painting - one large dark one near the top, a more distant one against the lake on the left hand side, and over near the right hand edge, the glistening horizontal wings of one perched on th...

7 May found me observing ... A little Fowler's Toad is making a big sound, braying his hoarse three-second trill into the night on the Lake Erie shore at Point Abino Ontario. Oblivious of my headlamp he's eager and confident, changing his orientation a little every few calls to broadcast his love song in every direction, advertising his perfect spot to the females that we passed on the wave-wet sand, and who even now are hopping toward these rocky pools to lay their eggs. He's just shifted position again. I can see his sides expand as he fills his lungs. Then they press in and suddenly his throat pouch appears, round and shiny like a balloon as the vibrating shout begins. How the air can make sound both while filling the pouch and without a pause, also while exiting the pouch is amazing! The pouch, becoming smaller, forces all of its air past his vocal cords, so he actually makes his sound both on the exhale and on the inhale - rather like Inuit throat singing - and ...