Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Dumoine Moose Marsh" (6 x 6 inch oil on birch panel) 7 August 2021 finds me carrying my painting supplies along a twisted well-trampled path through a stand of Firs, to a small marshy lake or large pond. A recently built viewing platform stands back a few feet from the waterline, well shaded by the forest edge. There's plenty of room for three standing easels, but I decide to paint a lower view of the left end of the lake, and sit on the floor to look between the railings with my legs dangling out the front. Catherine Orfald and Ruth Tait are painting with me on this fifth day of the week-long DRAW artists retreat - Dumoine River Artists for Conservation, hosted by CPAWS-OV, the Ottawa Valley chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. A few Pickerel Weed are blooming here, and one candy-pink spike of Spirea tomentosa (Steeplebush). Small floating Water Lily leaves pattern the surface through an opening in the rushes and bushes, and dapple the open water. A p...

"Making it Across, Spednic Snapping Turtle" (oil on canvas 10 x 10 in.) It's a hard life, being a turtle! I painted this portrait of a Snapping Turtle, from a photo taken by Don McAlpine of the New Brunswick Museum, in June last year at the BiotaNB survey of Spednic Protected Natural Area, near McAdam, NB. It was crossing the road at the bridge over Diggity Stream. I've shown a thin strip of riverbank beneath the truck, and a reflection of part of the bridge in the chrome bumper, but most of the painting is devoted to the task at hand - Making it Across. The truck, in the original photo, was parked on the far side of the road, but in planning the painting, I took a reference photo of a truck wheel from a more ominous perspective - that of a crossing turtle. I wanted it to look as if the driver has rolled up close to watch it cross and to hurry it along. Or maybe the truck is threatening the plodding reptile - defending the road as Truck Territory. Snappers r...

19 July 2014   found me standing in the back of a pickup truck on the causeway through the Grand Lake Meadows near Gagetown, New Brunswick, snapping pictures of my favourite scene at my favourite time of day. I'd been craning my neck at this spot, every time we've driven the causeway - several times during last year's Bio-blitz, and even more this year, as this is the second and last year of the all-taxon survey of the Gagetown area.

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 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

1 June 2014 found me exploring a wetland on a tributary to Sand Lake, 9.5 km south of Tolsmaville, on Cockburn Island, off the western tip Manitoulin. It was a cool sunny day and we stopped at a marsh where a team of visiting biologists had seen Painted Turtles and mating Snapping Turtles the day before, still hoping to find a Blandings Turtle. Beavers had piled mud and sticks against a grating that had been propped against the mouth of a culvert to baffle their attempts to stop the flow. Water was still flowing through the culvert in spite of the Beavers' efforts. Fred and the others noted three Painted

29 September finds me painting a scene of rapid, man-made transition north of Kemptville, Ontario. This is a shallowly ditched sand flat, bulldozed from the previous habitat within the past calendar year, near a remnant patch of Red Maple/White Birch woods. Underfoot is flat sand, missing its layer of topsoil and forest. Beyond a shallow ditch looms a pile of tree roots from last year's clearing, and beyond that, the straight edge of natural vegetation and the tall trunks of old, flood-killed trees that marks a large wetland complex that is being transitioned to a major housing development. There's a whispy stand of the Native Reed, Phragmites australis ( americanus subspecies), its lower stem nodes red & smooth, on a ridge of clayey sand at intersection of grid of bulldozed roadways. The sand is whiskered with little early-disturbance annuals, and a pronounced grey-horizon podzol soil profile is exposed at the edge of the bulldozed area. A Great Blue Heron

5 July finds me in a grove of old White Cedar, discovering what must be Mabel Fitzrandolph's favorite pond, in land she had donated to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. We had driven in on Gooseberry Road, east of Musquash, New Brunswick, in search of this pond earlier in the day, but first we found a soggy spot with Sundews and tadpoles, screened from the road by a tangle of young Fir and Birches.  Real ponds are rare in places with rugged topography and few Beavers. Then we went farther along the road to hike down to the Hepburn Basin at low tide. On our return along Gooseberry Road late in the afternoon, carefully straddling the van's wheels over rocks and avoiding ruts, creeping down slopes and scrambling up them, we stopped at the Cedars which I'd noticed on our way in. There is not much White Cedar hereabouts, and this grove of mature wet-loving trees may indicate the  pond we'd hoped to find. We weren't out of the van and into the woods for very long befo...

      6 July finds me, after our Open House in the Musquash Recreation Centre, holding up my skirt to wade into the marsh of the Musquash Estuary. Crossing the dry thatch of the Broadleaf Cattails with Owen after me, I feel for firmer footing through the wetter bed of grass, sedges and rushes, and head for the bank of the red  clay channel for a view toward the landmark Norway Spruces in the forest that stretches

2 July finds me painting a high view over the Musquash Estuary at low tide. My half tent is set among low conifer branches at a spot on the Five Fathom Hole trail where the Firs seem to step aside to reveal a breathtaking vista high above the estuary. Ten meters below, the clear brown water chatters it's way among seaweed-bearded rocks to join in a grand curve in a bowl of pale rusty clay. The green, pelt-like sod of the marsh curls softly over the edges of the steep clay banks. An

30 June finds me sitting at the edge of the marsh to paint a channel of the Musquash Estuary, on the Five Fathom Hole trail, 6.8 km east of Musquash, New Brunswick. The tide has turned, according to the pen that Fred has stuck in the marsh mud. We have trampled a swath of marsh grass in our gradual retreat from the tea brown water as it wets our toes. Every few minutes of determined painting found me retreating again, moving the daddy which is my seat,

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.

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

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

12 September finds me painting at our "Long Lake campsite" south of Cochrane, Ontario. This is the old highway between the spots where I painted the lake and the new forest.  Fred and Jim Rising happened to camp here in 1972 while looking for birds and frogs. Fred and I visited the site coming back from out west in 1977, and began to camp here on a regular basis, looking for Wood Frogs, in 1983. In 1992 Fred's father died of a heart attack where this road meets the highway - right at the spot where the road disappears against distant trees in this painting. He had so looked forward to returning since he'd camped here with Fred and our first daughter Elsa in the spring of 1983, and he collapsed within minutes of arrival.  Looking back up the road toward the highway, my eyes rest on the spot to the left of the road where his little truck stood until it was towed away for scrap. The gentle sunset has closed so many days since then, at the end of this loop of the...

August 23 finds me in a 50 metre long, tear-drop-shaped bog on the plateau between McKinley Creek and Oliver Gulch in the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area. It's a warm, sunny day so I'm in the shade of the forest on the south side, looking out to three snaggly tall spruces in the centre. These trees may be 200 years old or more, though they're only a foot in diameter. They are attended by young Spruces, one of which is being gestured to by the long arm of a tall gaunt one. Most of the Bio-blitz participants have come here today,  because when Aaron was out with the mammal collectors a few days ago he glimpsed an ant of a species not previously known from the PNA, and everyone is out to help look for it. They all disappeared to the west as I was setting up to paint, and left me alone in the bog. I am standing at my easel. A Red Squirrel churrs in the forest behind me, and a blue Dragonfly courses past in the sunshine, darting around the low, Moose-browsed Spruce...

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

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.