Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

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 ...

7 May finds me watching Fowlers Toads hollering from a shallow pool on the flat limestone shore of the west end of Lake Erie, Ontario. Fred and I have walked from the sandy beach west of Point Abino, where the soft sand of the upper beach is tracked with the hopping prints of an endangered species, the Fowlers Toad. We have been tracking them for several evenings, on the Point Abino beach and also on Bay Beach, east of here - but this is the first time we've followed their voices to one of the spots where they breed. The call of a Fowlers Toad is similar to the call of the larger American Toad, but lower pitched and of shorter duration. The American Toad makes a long, high trill that goes on and on for over ten seconds, but the Fowlers Toad's call, though also a trill, is rather like a bray. Some say it sounds like the cry of a baby. All of the tracks head east toward the sound of the breeding chorus, and several Fowlers Toads hop along the wet sand within reach of the c...

November 23, 2012 found me on a windswept Fort Erie beach between Lake Erie and shoreline cottages.  It was 9C and sunny with a gale force wind.  We watched a flock of Tundra  Swans alternately swimming and flying against the wind and I took some amazing photos. The sun shone through the tops of the waves as the wind blew their whitecaps off, and a stormy haze shadowed the industrial waterfront

26 November finds me painting the view across a snow-patched meadow that used to be the north half of Silver Lake in Port Dover, Ontario. The Misner Dam was lowered for safety reasons two years ago and since then the river has returned to its old channel along the east side of this exuberant meadow of Goldenrod, Asters, Purple Loosestrife, Nettles, and Vervain, with thickets of Willows and Honey Locust.  I can only see the river channel as a dark shadow between the tall herbs on its banks from where I stand on a picnic table to start my painting.  A Cattail marsh with patches of invasive Phragmites is beyond this scene to my left, and in the foreground you can see dishevelled, autumn-redded bunches of Nodding Smartweed (Persicaria lapathifolia).  When I turn to my right and look downstream across the paths and park benches behind me I can see the open water of the existing millpond and the bridge at its southeast end with the Misner dam below it. This river used ...

24 November finds me sheltering from the wind between a low sand dune and a cement retaining wall at Crystal Beach, Lake Erie, Ontario. The wind is blowing half a gale out along the beach. This Rose bush was glorious with yellow leaves only the day before yesterday but the wind that began last night has blown them almost all away. The rose hips are still here though, glowing like rubies in the autumn sun. The little sand coloured Toads who share this beach with the citizens of Crystal Beach are all burrowed down for the winter. No one knows exactly where they have gone, but I imagine that a number of Fowlers Toads may be sleeping in the damp sand directly below me as I sit leaning against this wall to paint the Rose bush. A wooden stairway leads up from the beach beside a vacant snack bar to a lawn, public washrooms, and a fenced parking lot. Beyond the stairway lie the sand-filled concrete ruins of the foundations of another beachside building, and that may be an even...

21 November finds me sitting on a boulder to paint the view westward, my back to Point Abino, Lake Erie, Ontario. It is a delightfully calm, sunny, sweater-temperature day and we've been brought down to the beach by one of the cottage owners of one of a resident association of Point Abino (pronounced "Ab-in-o"). The famously beautiful lighthouse is hidden around the point. Our interest is not in it but in the Fowlers Toad, a "species at risk" on the northern shore of Lake Erie. All of the toads must be burrowed down for the winter now, high on the sandy beaches. How vulnerable to digging and trampling they are, we don't know. Their eggs have been seen in the spring, in water-filled pools and dimples in places like the fossil-filled, algae-streaked limestone at my feet. In the summer, night-time visitors to the sandy beaches find the toads hopping on the wet sand at the fringes of the waves where they feed on small invertebrates. The last time we were ...