Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

Another slug painting, this one I expected to be difficult, as it is deliberately indistinct in pattern - obviously trying to look like a bird dropping, decomposing fungus, or some other bit of organic muck. Philomycus is a forest slug, and there are other species, but in the east we have only togatus . I found this one resting in the shadow of a well-rotted, mossy branch of White Birch on the forested southeast facing slope just above a newly gravelled laneway leading into a recently surveyed potential cottage lot. Fred is checking a block of four surveyed lots for the presence of Black Rat Snakes on the shore of Big Rideau Narrows, across from Murphys Point Provincial Park, and I accompanied him on his first visit to the site. The ground was dry, as it has been unseasonably warm and sunny for early May - and I was surprised to find the slug so exposed. It was lying full length but with eye stalks retracted, and when I touched it to see whether it could be roused into activity, it c...

Judy collected 15 slugs from beneath flower pots in a Richmond greenhouse on 19 February, for me to paint for the book "Identifying Introduced Land Snails and Slugs in Canada, With a Guide to Native Genera". I've been keeping them in a clear plastic salad box with damp paper towel, crushed eggshell, and romaine lettuce, calling them "my little pigs" for the way they devour the lettuce, turning the heavy-veined leaves into soggy lace, and then lying packed together in clusters like miniature piglets, sleeping it off. They have also been laying eggs, which you can see glowing like a mass of pearls through their translucent sides - most visible on the right hand side. There are paler and darker individuals. The darker ones appear to be more mottled, and the paler ones show the characteristic "watery tail". The slime is clear and the breathing hole, or pneumostome, has a pale rim. The best character for identification of this rather nondescript lookin...

April 7, 17:30 Fred called us down the road a little way to a discovery he'd just made while checking for the big banded Cepaea land snails that hibernate at the edge of the ditch across from the Pentecostal church. He wrote in his journal: I decided to pull up the grass along the metre of the bank where we'd found the most last year, but I only turned up a few dead shells along most of the metre. But when I got to a little notch in the shore where I'd found some dead shells last year, there were a lot of dead shells, and as I pulled them out and felt further in, there were yet more shells. By the time I'd pretty well come to the end of two 30cm burrows, about 6cm diameter, and a big central chamber, about 10cm diameter and packed full of shells, and a central burrow about 40 cm into the bank, I had about 2 litres of shells, with a few living snails admixed. All were Cepaea nemoralis. This certainly looks like the accumulated shells left by a predator -- but which one ...

3 April 2008 Highway 2, 1.9 km. west-southwest of Maitland, Grenville county, Ontario. The birds are back in force, but the landscape is still in the grip of winter. the ground is locked beneath snow which is still knee-deep in places. Nonetheless, there is motion evereywhere we look, and sound to accompany it. Robins, standing tall, patrol their boundaries, Starlings pop in and out of the eaves, performing their sliding whistle, Grackles fill treetops, screeching, Geese travel in phalanxes overhead, honking back and forth, and Kildeer fly up suddenly from the roadsides. road traffic is a mortal danger to birds distracted by spring . This lovely female Robin had collided with a car. We had passed her but Fred ran back. Looking into her still brown eye, I knew I had to further postpone my slug watercolours to paint her portrait on a journal page.

Here is another view from the studio window, on February 16, interrupting me with breathtaking crystal wedding of ice and sky as I laboured with watercolour details of a crayfish. ....yes, the top photo is flipped vertically to join the horizontals. And here is a fairy fantasy detail of the tips.... Now I'll show you the scene of my painting. The crayfish Orconectes limosus , an immigrant to Quebec from the northeastern US, is making progress westward in the St. Lawrence River toward Ontario. This is the final watercolour of my series of 10 Ontario crayfish species, originally painted for the fishing bait identification book, "The Essential Bait Guide" and now being used in a crayfish identification guide to be published this spring by the Toronto Zoo. Fred and I have designed the layout, and will soon finish editing the penultimate draft. You can see the poster I designed a couple of years ago, propped up on the left as a comparative reference for my work. Jean-Fran...

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...