Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

The Giant Garden Slug, Limax maximus, has charmed me again. I haven't seen one since I was four years old, in Seattle, Washington. The subtle colours, the handsome spots and stripes, the graceful reaching, tentative progress, delicate cool touch - I've been enthralled and delighted all over again as I turned the scrap of dampened board this way and that to orient the creature according to my painting as it crawls, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.... faster and faster just to stay in the same place. This individual was collected along with a young one, in a tangled copse of mixed woods in a town on Georgian Bay named Dyers Bay on the Bruce Penninsula, Ontario, in August of this year. This marvelous mollusc is about 12 centimetres fully extended, and I think it is not quite full grown!

Prophysaon andersonii , one of the tail-dropping slugs from British Columbia. 50mm head to tail. You can see the change in texture , diagonally, about a quarter of the way forward from the tip of the tail. I didn't challenge it to drop its tail, for obvious reasons. The interesting thing about the personality of this slug was its liking for doubling back on itself - turning and crawling alongside its body. Another BC slug, Arion subfuscus . 35mm head to tail. This species likes to curl into a circle to rest, head to tail-tip, which gives me the impression of a child sucking its thumb. Arion slugs seem dense and muscular, and their tails have a ribbed texture. This massive black Arion slug is now called Arion rufus after the reddish colour phase. But I prefer the old name, Arion ater, which I believe means "black". Totally awesome, this beast! The first one I ever saw in the wild was in a roadside bed of tall Horsetail on Vancouver Island. I shouted excitedly to...

After three windy mornings of sitting with my oil paints and canvas on an old licheny tree fort platform, I feel that I've been given a vision of the world of this ancient Burr Oak. Older than Manotick, the rural village that is aptly called "Jewel on the Rideau", this Oak has leafed out each spring for over two hundred years, in the wind that blows free over woods and fields south west of the village. The view that it shared with me here is planned to be filled in a very short time with the roofs of houses. This old Burr Oak, forest-edge fort for generations of children and witness of the history of Manotick is slated for destruction along with three other ancient Oaks and groves of venerable Hickorys and Basswoods. In respect for the history they have participated in and the biodiversity they help to maintain, these trees must continue to live, with their home intact and enough of the field to give them breathing space. A natural treasure for present and future resid...

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.