Today we pulled into a municipal park at Lake Dore, in Renfrew County, west of Cobden, Ontario, and as I was setting aside my laptop and preparing to open the door, large shadows of slender insects fell on me – from the centimetre-long midges that had suddenly landed all over the van!
It’s the annual Chironomid Festival at Lake Dore, and we’re included! I tried to photograph one of over one hundred that were using my side door window as their staging ground, but my camera preferred to focus on the background rather than on the insect – so I sketched it instead!
Adam also did a sketch in his journal, including the vehicle from the position of the besieged.
In places the air was positively thick with dancing, whining, fluffy-antennaed males, bobbing up and down in columns. It was a windy day, and as I walked back from the lake the midges gathered in my lee, gradually including me in a swarm. I could feel them brushing against me, but they didn’t land because they were busy dancing!
As I prepared this photo for including here,
one of the Chironomids that have hitchiked with us since we left the lake, landed on my computer monitor, dwarfing the images of her relatives on Adam’s window. I laughed out loud and took another picture!
1 April finds us in a Wood Frog breeding pond which Fred calls “Site F” along Forsyth Road in Limerick Forest, Grenville County, Ontario. I pushed through willow bushes and past dry spruce boughs which caught at my sweater, stepping on mossy logs in the shallow pond edge, until I paused at one of the last two remnants of melting ice. The frogs quietened as I came out into the open, but resumed their chorus gradually as I stood still and got out my paints.
Most of them are calling from the dead cattails on the north side. Individually each Wood Frog call sounds like “duck, duck, duck” but as I made my preliminary pencil sketch, all together they sounded jubilant – a clamour like children in a playground. Later I noticed chuckling, and still later it seemed to me to have changed to laughing.
I painted the patch of ice first, but when it was time to leave I noticed that it had further melted to half the size! Fred took the water temperature over near the chorus and it was 14C, the same as the air. No breeze, but very few mosquitoes. Wood Frog tadpoles eat a lot of mosquito larvae.
On Friday, February 19th, I was wading up to my knees in the main current downstream of the dam at Oxford Mills, counting Mudpuppies. The count was 140 that night – 20 shy of our record! I was training the big spotlight on the pinkly glowing sinuous shapes of giant feathery-gilled salamanders when I was startled by a phalanx of large, ghostly grey, linear shapes moving upstream toward me.
Attending the egg-laying of this amazing creature was a ‘formative’ experience for me. Since I wrote this journal page (detail shown above – full page shown below), we have been launched into a survey of giant urban slugs – by the enthusiastic public response to an article in the Toronto Star. I received over 30 e-mails about giant slug sightings from Burlington to Bowmanville, and ranging as widely as Rockwood and Wiarton. There was even mention of them being seen in Sudbury, but the identity there is still in question.
We made a map of localities at http://www.doingnaturalhistory.com/?p=37 where people can post comments and watch the progress of the survey.
26 December 2009 4×6 inches oil on canvas
Such short days we have, and especially when they’re cloudy! My Birthday December 26 has been darkly overcast with freezing rain. We drove out to “The 18 & 20 Bridge” a few minutes from home, to see whether the familiar Maple swamp offered an interesting composition for a quick painting, Read the rest of this entry »
This spring, the Grenville Land Stewardship Council commissioned a watercolour of a Least Bittern, as a “Species at Risk”, to be given as a prize to someone who responds to a questionnaire about their SAR educational campaign. And it wasn’t very long before a suitable subject presented itself! Read the rest of this entry »
Clayton vernal pool
11:00 Fred and I are booked as Invertebrate (non-insect) experts at the Bell Property Bio Blitz on Clayton Road. This is the last Bio Blitz of the season – a very late one, at the end of a summer of more Bio Blitzes than any before. Taking one look at the Headquarters, several tables arrayed with books, microscopes, jars of insects and rainbows of mushrooms, and computers, all set out under a series of canopies in the woods behind a banner for the Mississippi Valley Field Naturalists, gives the impression that this is perhaps the best organized Bio Blitz ever!
Adam and I, equipped with mushroom guides and painting kit, wander off into the woods toward a patch of sunlight where we’ve been told there is a wet area with lots of ferns, Read the rest of this entry »
Paudash Lake
19 September 2009
There used to be a creek running through a culvert under the highway here, but there was only an energetic volunteer fireman to tell me about it as I sat painting just inside the guardrail from the shoulder of the road, looking south across the wetland with my back turned to the lake. He said that when the highway was repaired they neglected to replace the caved in culvert, and now there is still a wetland but no more creek. His brother lives in the house to the west of the wetland. I can hear sounds of children playing from the house.
Most of the forest is in its own shadow as the sun lowers in the west, but the billowy Maples still have their tops in the sunshine and the late afternoon sunshine is on the marsh. Patches of autumn-bronzing Pickerelweed make crisp dark reflections of thin curving stems and curling arrow-head leaves. We hear a splash from the lake across the road, and my new friend returns, announcing that there is a very large Beaver “checking out” the place where the culvert used to be.
I began with a dark indian red underpainting, well rubbed in, and had it all finished except the signature by the time the sun set. Returning to the trailer, I find that Fred and Adam have left some supper in the pan for me. Then we push on down the road as we must get to Clayton tonight.
17 September 2009
Dutrisac Bay, we drove into a commercial campground/trailer park, as the sun was setting,looking for a beach to hunt crayfish and a lake view for a very fast oil painting.
We were given permission to park our rig and told that the rocky shore was to the left, and the sandy beach was to the right. As I approached the beach, the wind was strong in my face and the waves were whitecapped all over the angry blackish blue lake. The sky glowed peach under, behind, and through purplish-grey clouds with a hint of green. I parked my stool in partial shelter of the corner of a marina building, took a photograph, and began to paint as fast as I could, leaving the strange row of trees on a mid-distance island to add later from my photo.
At one point I noticed a movement near my feet, and there was a Toad of about 5 cm long, beautifully patterned with tan, olive, black, and white. It was heading past me toward the beach. I wonder what it does there in the evenings, and whether it noticed the wind…
As it got dark, I added some white caps, sharpened and darkened the horizon, and packed up – only half an hour this time, but I got the canvas covered and the colours all right!
