14 April finds me in Spencerville in the late afternoon of a pleasant sunny day, so I clambered down on my favorite side of the bridge, downstream from the Mill and the weir. We waded to catch Mudpuppies here in the summer of 1996.
Today a Great Blue Heron is fishing, beside a rock quite far downstream. It stretches its neck very straight and tall,and points its beak inone direction for a few minutes, and then in the other, holding the beak horizontal and casting a sharp eye into the water. Suddenly in one motion it turns, crouches, and strikes. When it stands again the small prey is already swallowed. I watch it for several minutes, magnified through the camera which I steady on my painting stool, and then it spread grey blanket-like wings and lifts up, circling once before heading farther downstream.
My concentration is released from the Heron and now I hear Robins laughing and Redwings singing “burgalee”. The breeze has freshened, but it is still soft and warm. Tufts of grass are bursting in vivid green explosions from the flooded bank, and the tiny green leaves of the maples still let most of the sky thruogh. The trees along the banks are tilted and rearranged by the river and the more I looked at them, the more fantastic and mysterious seemed the scene – so I decided to paint it.
13 April finds Fred and me, glad of our hipwaders, walking along the track into Fairmile Wetland, north of the Rideau River, off the old Highway 16. Our mission is to collect Leopard Frog eggs, and find a painting spot, of course. We went in here in 2004 to find breeding Leopard Frogs. This time, once we got past the deeply trenched and flooded right of way and all the devastation wrought by machines clearing roadways for a planned housing development, everything was much the same.
Nature keeps things the way they should be. The old ATV track is there, where the hunters go in deer season, the tracks filled with clear water and fallen leaves. A ground beetle swims across a flooded rut. The water is clear and the untouched bottom is lined with last year’s fallen leaves. The ferns push up from mossy beds and the trees stand in the wet places with water-soaked, mossy bottoms to their trunks. Some of them are still arched like bows from the ice storm of 1997. Deer tracks in a muddy spot are accompanied by miniature deer tracks.
12 April – Honesty, or Moneyplant, Lunaria annua has always grown along the path beneath the Manitoba Maples behind our house in Bishops Mills – at least since we first moved into the village in 1978. Its magenta (or less often white) blossoms are showy in late summer and its seeds spend the winter between moon-shaped layers of thin parchment, the “money” in one of its names. Over the past few years we’ve noticed it spreading farther into the tangle of Manitoba Maples, Buckthorn, and Canada Plum, and we’ve begun a campaign of harvesting as much of it as we can find for salads, steamed greens, and to feed our caged Rabbits. Fred and I haven’t noticed this European plant spreading invasively in any other place, though I remember it as a child in Guelph. It is a mustard and seems to now be spreading like the invasive Garlic Mustard. For the past three years we’ve been trying to eradicate it entirely here so that it doesn’t become invasive elsewhere!
I have been waiting for Violets to bloom, but the big patch of purple Violets is only yet a ground cover of small heart-shaped leaves. I found the Honesty invading one of our patches Allium tricoccum (Ramp or Wild Leek), and it pulled up easily, as its root is mainly a long tuber. One of them I painted, sitting in the sun on the back porch. Fred tossed the leaves of the plants I’d pulled into a pot of vegetable broth. In a small amount it added a pleasant bitterness to the other flavours in our stir fry. Fred and I use the leaves in our wild spring salads, but haven’t tried boiling or pickling the root.
The lower leaves stay alive through the winter. Those are the pair of reddish ones in this painting, “sunburned” from last year. The rest of the plant is shooting up in this years new growth.
9 April finds us in Eden Mills Ontario at my dear friend Elizabeth’s house beside a dam on the Eramosa River. The ruins of an old mill on the other side has been stabilized and partially retrofitted as a very nice house, but Elizabeth’s house, which was built as a residence, has an old wooden waterwheel beside it and a spillway running behind it. This White Cedar with interesting roots stands with its “toes” just above the water at the head of the spillway.
Pike go over the waterfall and then come up the spillway and congregate just below the back yard. So many kinds of fish come and it’s lovely to look down at them. There are clusters of Catfish that gather just under the footbridge, and there are many other fish, including Chub, Sunfish, and Bass.
This is a very complex painting, all full of interlocking shapes, and took longer than I’d expected – but I like the way the composition has so many triangles. The clear golden water is a contrast to yesterday’s painting of the stream opaque with suspended clay.
Elizabeth tells me that there are two “sinkholes” near this tree, which have needed to be plugged each spring for the past couple of years because they take too much water down into the aquifer, away from the river. Once it’s fixed the water flows as it should down the spillway as well as over the dam. There are leaks under the dam, and this causes the water to go through he spillway. But instead of working just in flood times, it works all the time because of those leaks. The water is very slight down the spillway now because the lake hasn’t come up to its usual level after the sinkhole repair. From now on, the spillway level will be mostly affected by precipitation. There is a millpond association in Eden Mills – mostly the immediate neighbours of the dam. People take turns monitoring the dam and looking after the pond. Annual work bees clean up the floor of the pond. they put down plastic lining so that people can swim there and the weeds (mostly the long narrow-leaved Vallisneria) don’t take over the bed of the river.
Up to 10 years ago the community used to get the water in the pond tested and every year it tested almost clean enough to drink. There have been no major changes upstream, so it probably is still just as clean. They want to put an industrial park within 3 km, at the intersection of Co Rd 29 and Highway 7, but the community has a strong contingency battling that.
The bird life is rich as well. Elizabeth sees Great Blue Heron, Green Herons, Osprey, Kingfishers, Lesser Yellowlegs. Canada Geese are here all year long. She hears all the owls – Saw Whet, Screech, Great Horned, and Barred. Some of the migrants are Red-breasted Mergansers, Buffleheads, occasionally Loons, and Trumpeter Swans in the spring. Mink are common, and River Otter, rare in these parts, has been seen in spring, and several people have seen Oppossums.
April 8 on Cataract Road, just north of Seburn Rd, a claywater creek flows bankfull among huge willow treees in a valley of green grass and Ash trees, Sumac, and grapevines, north of Fonthill near St.Catharines, Ontario.
The eastward, downstream side tof he creek is straight, and the Willow trees that stand with their roots in it are dark and gothic looking, their blackness in contrast with the milky tan, clay-filled water. On the upstream side the creek is shallower, winding between tongues of bright spring grass. I clamber down the steep bank on that side, Teasel with old burrs spaced so that I can pass between them, still snagging my skirt on red, prickly arching raspberry canes. I photograph the willows from all angles, getting my shoes muddy on the new-grassed floodflats.
A Muskrat like a diving beetle, flagellum-propelled on the surface, swims on the opaque water into the culvert but doesn’t emerge from the upstream side. The sun peeks out from the clouds that have greyed the sky all day and emblasons the new-leafed tips sof the Willows that rise high out of the creek bottom.
I collect Succinea snails from the traprock and drifted grasses by the big cement culvert that the creek runs through. Collected some drifted grass & sticks from the ne bank by the cement culvert – mostly inhabited by Succinea, Deroceras laeve, with a few empty Cepaea shells, immature. Also found one live one on higher drift. A wet paper bag is favored by hundreds of glossy dark brown and blue-black millipedes, some curled into a double coil, some young ones in a mass, and some curled nto a double coil.
Leaving at 19:30, 10.5C, F2BRZ
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.
7 April is cloudy and damp, with temperatures in the low teens. We are finally geting our April showers after a very dry March. Fred announced this afternoon that he’d found the first non-cultivated flowers blooming, and he led me to a curb on Mill Street close to Bishops Mills’ main intersection. Two bright yellow blossoms are opening on one of the Dandelion plants that root in the crack between cement and asphalt. Some of the plants have broader leaves, but those with narrow, deeply incised leaves all show tight knobs of flower buds. Taraxacum palustre blooms earlier than the common T. officinale, and here it is, blooming! Palustre means marshy, but we also have them out in the limestone barrens of our “outback” old field, where conditions alternates between soggy and parched.
6 April, the evening of a beautiful spring day, finds Corey and me driving County Road 29 home from Arnprior. Just south of Pakenham where the Mississippi River runs close along the highway, the reflections catch my eye again, just like they did this afternoon. The repeated triangles of the steep, gullied bank, accented by Cedars and bare tree trunks all faithfully reflected in the polished black diamond of the Mississippi River.
We stopped just south of the last trailers of the “Riverbend” trailer park, and as was I was taking some photos in the rapidly falling dusk, Corey noticed a large turtle in the flooded end of the narrow field between the river and the road. It’s front end was tilted up out of the water, but its head was down. It seemed to be mounted on something about its own size – Snapping Turtles mating! As I took photos and notes, successive flocks of Canada Geese flew north along the route of the river as if they were following an aerial highway. By the time one flock had passed out of sight and hearing, another would come, some families of 5 or 6, and some flocks of 20 or 30. Robins began to sing vespers, a group of several ducks coasted down to the dark river surface and skied in noisily quacking to their watery camping spot for the night. A Spring Peeper began to call, and after a while was joined by another. They sang a duet for a while, and when we were seriously losing daylight at just about 8:00 we had a small chorus. The turtle on top was barely visible, protruding like an oval rock from the river flooded field pond.
45.312699, -76.286809, at the south end of ”Riverbend” trailer park
5 April, warm, sunny, and windy, finds us revisiting the larger of the two ponds at Lakeland Estates in the south end of Ottawa. This is the third year that we have been monitoring the health of these urban lakes for Larry Pegg, a friend of ours who has been resident there since the mid-eighties when the “Estate” was established around two retired gravel pits.
Its developer stipulated that the lakes be managed on ecologically responsible principles by the residents, and this was very important to Larry and Angela’s daughter Kelly, who made this inukshuk on the lawn behind their house.
Larry commissioned this painting in memory of Kelly. I feel as if I am visiting with her as I sit in the sun beside her lively arrangement of stones. The lake glitters in the sun, and there are two other stones, one standing nearby, and one crouching a little farther away. Sometimes the inukshuk looks like a little person, standing stalwart and gesturing to the right. Sometimes the middle stone turned into a swimming fish, and the stone above it became a resting rabbit.
Switch, the German Shepherd, came to visit on his perpetual campaign to persuade someone to throw his frizbee, and for a while he lay beside the standing stones, watching me and wondering whether painting could perhaps be my way of preparing to play with a polite and patient dog.
A very warm early spring day, 2 April dawns on the road killed frogs of last night along Limerick Road. This female Wood Frog was not crushed, but was hit in such away that her egg mass all spilled out. The eggs are all dark, pigmented to resist damage from sunlight, and each has a thin coating that would have expanded to clear jelly if she had survived her road crossing to arrive at the pond and lay them in the water in the tight clasp of a male.
Rudyard Kipling had the wolves who adopted the baby Mowgli call him “little frog” in his Jungle Book story. I believe that people have a soft spot for frogs because they have bodies resembling our own, with arms, and legs with knees. The frogs, being amphibians, are naked – and so are we, unusual among other mammals.
This scene for me, is not so much about the vulnerability of the little naked frog body, as it is about the spilling of her eggs on the road. The tragedy for me is about the waste of all those potential Wood Frog tadpoles, who would have transformed into baby Wood Frogs this summer and set off into the woods to hunt for invertebrates, carrying out their little Wood Frog lives – the males for one year and the females for two years before they have to cross the road on their way to the mating ponds.
