Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

21 August 2014  finds us at dusk looking across a marsh on Long Creek just above its confluence with the Canaan River, 13 km northeast of Cambridge Narrows, New Brunswick.  I have found my scene for a Fragile Crossings painting, just before the road enters the covered, wooden "Starkey's Bridge". We are looking out over soft green flats of what is apparently Wild Rice.

12 August 2014 found me touching up one of my oil paintings in the Bio-blitz headquarters in the Courthouse Museum in Gagetown, New Brunswick, when Don McAlpine showed me the Chinese Mystery Snails that were collected in Grand Lake off French Island. I decided to paint them in watercolour. The the snail on the left has its aperture closed neatly by a horny "operculum" attached to the back of its tail, and the one on the right shows the eroded spire that

On 11 August 2014 , Fred went out with Don McAlpine and Mary Sollows to Grand Point of  New Brunswick's Grand Lake, to search for specimens of Lampsilis cariosa that might have been thrown up by Hurricane Arthur.  This was (before our surveys during this Bio-blitz) the one known Grand Lake location of the Yellow Lamp-mussel,  which prefers sandy bottoms, mostly in rivers. It was at this spit of sand and fine gravel that the species had been taken from the lake in 2001. I've always found beach drift exciting as a subject for painting, and decided to do

12 August finds me on Thatch Island in the Grand Lake Protected Natural Area along the north shore of the Saint John River near Gagetown, New Brunswick. The meadows and marshes are glowing in the sun against the shady rows of trees that line the channels, and Kim Stubbs, the other Bio-blitz artist and I are setting up to paint riverine scenes. The sun is hot on Goldenrod, Evening Primrose, Angelica, and mints among the grasses around the cove where our boat is moored. The shade cast by the Silver Maples along the north shore's narrow channel is inviting as I try to find an exciting angle on the peaceful scene. Kim has her first painting half finished before I find the excitement I want - combining a distant scene with a botanical study. Bumblebees and Honeybees visit the bright flowers of the small compact panicles of Swamp Loosestrife bloom, at head height for me as I sit beneath my sunshade. An Osprey

9 August 2014  finds me with other Bio-blitz participants on French Island, between French Lake and Indian Lake in the Saint John River, Grand Lake Protected Natural Area, New Brunswick. We came by boat across a narrow channel from Sand Point, and upon landing on the pebbly beach the ant collectors went east to a hillside of birches and cedars stepping up among slabs of sandstone, and the botanists went in the other direction. The Myxomycologist (slime mold specialist), the Mycologist

7 August  finds me painting from the back deck of a house overlooking the lovely Tobique River on "Reeds Island" near Plaster Rock, New Brunswick. I glance down to see our friend Lee's little red SUV push its way down through the long meadow grass below the house on a riverbank expedition with Fred to look for clams. They are following the presently invisible road to where his grandfather used to ford the river in the days when they used to cut hay on

4 August 2014  finds me looking out at the Rigaud River, from between two big old Willows at least 70 cm in diameter, with heavily ridged corky bark and moss-streaked bases. They are rooted in a jumble of granite rocks strewn with sticks and bark drifted there in spring floods. The left one has a felt of tiny rootlets over rock that it uses for feeding when the water is high.The right one elbows out near its base, leaning against a young Elm. These are not the native Black Willow, as their leaves

10 May 2014  found me admiring spreading willows and a magnificent old Burr Oak on the bank of the Trent River at a Conservation Area near Glen Miller, Ontario. We'd come for spring drifted mollusc shells, and we only noticed the "Line 9" pipeline river-crossing signs just as we were leaving. Our colleagues Amanda Bennett and Matt Keevil evidently hadn't noticed the pipeline crossing either, during years of launching their boat here as they studied the turtles in this stretch of the river.  Our formal description of this “limestone savannah rare habitat” is “ lawnpark bank of rapid canal-river, in residential area.” After a day of collecting spring-drifted shells from creeks and rivers in Toronto we zoomed alog the 401 to the parking lot here and slept in the seats of the van until dawn. While I made breakfast, Fred sprinted for our traditional drift sample up near the Trent/Severn lock.  He found handsfulls of chaffy drift from the eddy above the bridge. Much ...