Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

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.

24 October 2014  finds me clambering down the steep embankment from Highway 17 beside the bridge over the Eagle River, a little over two kilometres north of the town of Eagle River, Ontario.  This is a broad, clay-bed river with boulders scattered along its edges and also emerging from the flat yellow-grassed clay and gravel shores.  A tall crest of Pines and Spruces reflects darkly from the far shore. I am searching for a scene.   The soft wet sandy shore looks like a highway for wildlife. Deer tracks predominate, large and small cloven hoof prints - added to them are fox mink and Racoon, duck and Heron. The water is not quite clear, and olive brown.  An overcast day with a light breeze that one would call quiet if it weren't for highway noise.  As I study the water to determine which way

26 December 2014  found me out painting on my birthday, on the east shore of the Rideau River at  Gideon Adams Park, 3.3 kilometres south of Osgoode, Ontario. This spot is a little over 1.5 kilometres downstream from where the Energy East pipeline route crosses the Rideau River. Having chosen my scene from the vantage point of a small boulder beside the boat launch ramp, I sat with my canvas on my knees and my boots in the sun-melted black muck. Its surface was covered with a felt of bleached and drifted Star Duckweed sprinkled with tiny white snail shells. To my right rose a winter-bleached screen of Narrow-leaved Cattails, and to my right bulged a shape rather like my boulder, but Fred identified it as a hump of old foam rubber with grass growing through it.  Fred moved along the shore as I scrubbed on the burnt sienna underpainting, collecting a "recycling bag" of the kind of litter humans leave, as well as carefully gathering handfuls of the most shell-rich d...

31 October 2014  found me watching rhythms in the rushing water of Aidie Creek at Highway 11, 9.5 km north north-west of Englehart. The air was calm and new snow clung to branches, whitening the leaf litter and melting on the rocks. In May of 2002 Fred and I stopped briefly here, taking note of the lovely rapids, but since we were hurrying up to cover our Cochrane area study site for the James Bay Expedition it was a short visit, with a shelly drift sample and photos of the low stepped falls. This time again our stop was brief, as we were headed south along Highway 11 to a meeting of the Ontario Rivers Alliance in North Bay. We pulled into the entrance to the picnic area just upstream of the Highway 11 bridge, and toured the extensive network of laneways among the rocks and trees, to find a spot to park near the river. We passed a lovely natural arrangement of Virgin's Bower ( Clematis virginiana ) sporting its ivory puff-balls among the

We are pleased to announce the fifth annual calendar of my paintings. This year it features 12 paintings from our Fragile Crossings expedition, from Alberta to New Brunswick.  The 13th month features an essay on the Energy East pipeline, the text of which we have posted at  our Vunlerable Watersheds blog.  Sales of the calendar help to support our Fragile Crossings project. Through the winter Aleta will produce more paintings, and Fred will curate specimens and work on our report, posted at  www.pinicola.ca/crossings/ The calendar is available for online purchase at  Lulu.com

23 October 2014  finds me at a boat launch on the Winnipeg River, at the end of the Miller Rapids Road, north of Kenora, Ontario, looking upstream toward "Tunnel Island" and admiring the contrasting colour bands of the late afternoon sky to the west. Fred and Teika Newton are inspecting the shore of the bay on my left, picking up handsfulls of rich snail drift and observing Deer, Beaver, Raccoon, and  Canada Goose tracks in the mud.  A pair of  Bald Eagles whimper-chirp to each other

8 October 2014  finds me gazing at the castellate bluffs of eroded loess along the South Saskatchewan River upstream of Alberta Hwy 41, west of Burstall Saskatchewan. We could see that there were interesting bluffs as we gradually descended along the highway toward the bridge, but here at river level, they are much more impressive - and the river itself is clear and green, ruffled by the wind into wavelets that weave green and blue into a new intensity of colour that even in a narrow strip, balances the strange bold shapes and stark contrasts of the wind-carved bluffs. We drove from the bridge to a kilometre-long area of campsites to a broad rutted area at the river that serves as a boat-launch. The Transcanada Pipeline crosses the South Saskatchewan River 8.2 km upstream of here. I settle on a view of castle-like formations directly across the river and perch my folding chair on a low grassy bank just back from the cobbly shore, near a seepage that leaves the pebbles crusty wi...