Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

Yesterday evening our Bishops Mills neighbour Lou Jerolli stopped his truck out front. Marigold, who was down in the lab, barked so insistently that I got up from supper and rushed down to see what was the matter. There was Lou, outside the front door. When I unlocked and opened, he invited me out to see the "present" he'd brought. There was a fresh road-killed Coyote in the back of his truck, and I thought, "Oh, no - I have no time to do anything with it!" Lou was sure I'd do a nice painting of it, as he was the proud owner of a print of my watercolour Fisher portrait. I explained that we were rushing to prepare for a meeting in Roebuck about Limerick Forest Advisory Committee, so he asked where he could leave it. I gave in, and said the back porch. I went back up to finish eating supper while Fred was down attending to the printing-out of documents to take. I didn't think about the Coyote again until we left for the meeting. There was the Coy...

I took photos of all this, so I really should post the followup. On 4 January we had more snow, drifted again from the back of the main roof to the garage roof, obscuring my studio light again.... but even if we pushed a hole in the drift from the window again, the weather forecast worried us. The weather was warming, and by 5 January, we were sure the morrow would bring rain, and temperatures over 10C - that's ten degrees above freezing! I imagined all that snow on the garage roof filling with rain like a gigantic, soppy, heavy, sponge. Even if the garage roof did not cave under that weight, I didn't like the thought of all that waterlogged snow freezing into a giant block of ice, and stay that way until it one day slips off onto the hood of the car. I was really feeling gloomy about this when Judy came to work on the 5th. When I explained my foreboding to her, she offered to go out the window and shovel off the roof, with the enthusiasm of a rock climber with cabin feve...

On 18 December 2007 I found my "north light" almost entirely blocked by a wall of snow. All night long it had snowed, drifting off the main roof onto the garage roof just below the north-facing Gallery windows. The Gallery was in gloom, as if curtains were drawn. Before I resumed my Sparrow watercolours, which I'd set up on the glass counter just under the best north light window in the building, I had to remove some snow. After poking at it with a sponge mop until about half the window's view was cleared, I noticed that the remaining snow bank reflected more light into my "studio" than I was getting from the heavily overcast sky, so I left it like that and resumed painting. Purple Finch compared with House Finch, for the online bird identification quiz on The Green Bird Network Note the study skins on the left of the tray - borrowed from the research collection of the Canadian Museum of Nature. I prefer to paint from a fresh bird, but such cannot be fo...

This morning Fred "did the streets" - his routine before turning in at night and upon leaving the house in the morning. Sometimes it is Cepaea snails, alive or crushed by tires (one notable snail became roadkill after crossing the road to feed on a squashed frog). Most of the time there is a frog or two (Leopard Frogs, mostly) and every so often a Toad. I think if our village did not have street lights, the road mortality (except for snails - and worms on rainy nights) would be much less than it is. Most of the insects are attracted to the lights and the brightly lit street, and the frogs (when they're not simply crossing the road on seasonal migrations) may come out to catch insects, appreciating the clear view for hunting at frogs-eye level. There are always changes - seasonal, weather-related, and differences from year to year in both abundance and behaviour. Fred recently found our first autumn Red-belly Snake of the year , and this Giant Water Bug ( Lethocerus am...

Returning from a funeral in Ottawa on the 18th of July, I stopped to visit my favorite spot on the Jock River. The riffle, at summer low-water, was a pattern of dry stepping stones emerging from a cobbled bottom tapestried with fluffy yellow-green filamentous algae. Several Honey Bees were roving about, sipping at the soft wet algal fringes of my stepping stones. A female Mallard was quietly minding her own business, leading her three nearly full-grown ducklings to dabble in the shallows. One, which seemed darker plumaged than the others, napped on a stone. I searched about for clams and crayfish among the stones, not willing to get my feet wet today, but all I found were a few clam shells and the shed skin of a Crayfish. No Zebra Mussels. If they're here, they are not obvious yet. The smaller shells were Strophitus undulatus , the clam that fascinated Fred at this place when he began to study fresh water unionids a decade ago. Then I pulled a heavy dark, slightly gaping, em...

Recent wildlife sightings : On the evening of 13 June we interviewed (measusred and photographed) a large female Blandings Turtle on Bolton Road north, and less than an hour later, a large female Painted Turtle which was lying upside down on Highway 29 south of Almonte - there must be a name for balancing on your back like that, unable to do anything about it.... She was doubtless relieved to resume control of her locomotion in the safety of the grassy ditch after we'd measured her. There were just a few chips abraded from the edge of her shell by the vehicle that had flipped her. Then on the 14th, during his visit to the South Nation River at Crysler, Fred watched a Great Blue Heron swallow a Sucker which was as long as the Heron's neck! He wrote: "...at the parking area below the bridge at Crysler I watched Great Blue Heron barely capture, stagger to shore under the weight of, and then gracefully swallow, a Sucker (Moxostoma?) that appeared to to be at least 45cm l...

On the evening of 6 June I counted two Snowshoe Hares on the Bolton Road Hare transect, but I couldn't count this Hare - it was south of the transect - almost where the gravel road named "Kyle Road" meets the equally narrow but paved "Branch Road". This Hare saw me and hesitated, then dashed right in front as if he were on a suicide mission. I didn't brake too hard for fear of spinning out on the gravel, so I was surprised to feel no bump. A split second later, out of the corner of my eye I saw him spin around beside the van, and when I glanced in the rear view mirror there he was sitting in the middle of the road behind me, looking as saucy as a jaybird. It seemed to me that he was challenging me to a chase, or perhaps watching to see the van lose control and slide into the ditch - like others had before? Hares are intelligent, and this is a good year for green growing things, and for creatures that eat green growing things. Hare populations are on a...