13 May finds me again painting a little spruce tree, but this one is not young like yesterday’s sapling in the woods. It is a Black Spruce, and no younger than the tall club-tipped Black Spruces at the edges of the bog. We’ve known this bog for many years, and I’m pleased to be able to paint in it again.
From the highway, you can tell it’s a bog by the way the trees are shorter toward the centre, and spaced out by moss and shrubs. The pillow of moss that is growing up around the base of this little tree is Sphagnum, the acid-producing environment of everything that grows in the bog. Growth here is very slow, as organic decomposition almost doesn’t happen. The living and dead Sphagnum, and the water that it holds, is antiseptic. Nutrients are available to the roots of plants mainly through the action of micorhyzal fungi. Most bog plants retain their leaves through the winter, as it is expensive to grow new ones.
Many of my old bog friends are here. Leatherleaf is in bloom, each vertical-leaved stem tipped by a row of tiny white bells. Bog Rosemary also, but smaller, glossy, rolled-in leaves with white undersides (also held vertically) is blooming in pink. The droopy-leaved plants are Labrador Tea (with orange fuzz on the undersides) and Bog Laurel (with smooth undersides). The pale, thin grass-like leaves are last year’s Carex. It will grow new this summer, as will Bog Lily, whose old leaves litter the sphagnum in places like scraps of wet brown paper tissue.
Walking with long strides like a heron, trying to make minimal impression in the garden-like bog surface, I spot an artifact that appears to be balanced on the branches of a low spruce – a dry fox dropping entirely composed of compacted mouse fur and tiny bones. The felty fur inside is slightly yellow- dusty with what I guess must be the fruits of a special fungus that finished off the fox’s meal. The next step in the processing of this dropping will be to break it up, extract the teeth, and send them to a mammalogist to find out what kind of mice the fox was eating.
12 May finds me sitting in the woods near Highway 11, not far from the rest area at Long Lake, south of Cochrane, Ontario. Attracted by glimpses of sun-splashed moss under conifers, I crossed a narrow ditch from the grassy field of clay mounds left by bulldozers that had constructed the new highway forty years ago. Stepping over fallen Aspen branches I came into a foresty feeling place – at least moss and rotting logs means forest to me. A little White Spruce, glowing in a patch of sunlight, stands in the middle of a thick patch of soft tufty moss, lending itself as a subject for painting.
Having settled myself down with stool and easel and decided on the orientation of the canvas, I find myself noticing how this and the other moss patches are obviously in the process of expanding to cover bare clay littered with poplar leaves and twigs. At first I thought that the lumpy surface with crumbly spots showing among the dry leaves must be the work of earthworms, invading the forest even here in the northern clay belt – but Fred reminds me that the action of frost can also produce extruded-looking pellets on the surface of soil.
It takes the forest a long time to reclaim bare clay. The initial cover was Aspens and Fir, and the White Spruce is coming up underneath. The Aspen all around here are dying. They are not shade tolerant at all, and lots of Fir trees die young. Their fallen bodies help to give organic structure for mosses and other forest plants to get started. Off to the right of this scene, I can look into a more mature Spruce/Aspen forest with a much more diverse undergrowth.
11 May finds us exploring a logging road north from Opasatika Ontario, in search of the freshly burned area that we explored while I was writing Canadian Nature Notebook. We spent an exciting afternoon of seeing bears (total count of 5), a Bald Eagle, and a Sand Hill Crane, and photographing Moose and Wolf tracks, we found an area of fallen trees with some old weathered charring, pieces of charcoal under dense, rusty-green moss, and fire hollowed roots where the fire had burned down into the duff, to mineral soil.
The area is approximately 24 kilometres north on the Waxatike Road. As we drove south again, we investigated a small entrance road and walked in, looking for the place we had camped to explore the fresh burn back in 1977. We followed the track alongside a cattail-filled ditch up to an impressive, freshly maintained beaver dam. We were astonished to see the dam turn at right angles and continue in the direction of the track, snaking along the whole side of what opened out to be a sizeable lake. This Beaver dam is holding up a lake! Following the outside of the dam, the footing is good along the double ruts of an ATV track, and we marvel at the evenly spaced, parallel logs placed by the beavers against the steep slanting outer wall of the dam like a sloping pallisade.
At its highest at about mid lake, the dam is over two metres, and we saw where the Beavers had repaired three breaches into the dense forest of tangled, scrubby old willow bushes, in the gloom of which Marsh Marigold is just beginning to bloom.
In the distance, at the rounded end of the lake we spot a large Beaver lodge, but here, across from the mid-point is a narrow marshy spot, where we heard repeated squeaks and watched Beavers swimming. There appear to be holes in hummocks and under the roots of willows that may be the Beaver’s summer quarters. There is much coming and going of Beavers, and I would like to stay until dark, to watch them working on the dam.
Later, Adam has found the lake on Google Earth, and made an approximate calculation of its size. The length of the dam is approximately 490 metres, and the area of what we call “Lake Beaver” is about 14,000 square metres.
10 May finds us revisiting our old camping spot on the unused loop of highway at Long Lake, 15 km south of Cochrane, Ontario. Behind the roadside park is a track that goes down to the east end of the lake, and this is where it becomes a path descending to the water. I like the way the view is framed by the licheny branches of the old White Spruce, so am painting from the driver’s seat, just where the track ends and the path begins.
At first we tried the one on the south east loop of old highway, but the place where it usually flooded was increased and we could go no farther. Fred found water draining down through a hole in the pavement, with no evidence of its source. Farther along the narrow old asphalt road ia the hydro right of way, yellow with Carex and boggy with Leatherleaf and Cotton Grass. I used to use it as an approach to the ”fairyland forest” of of stunted spruces, mushrooms, and mysterious little bog pools in the Sphagnum.
Now we are back at the Long Lake access, near the RV tracks where we surveyed Wood Frogs between 1972 and 2004. As I paint the lake framed by the old spruce and Red Squirrels chase each other about, making little growling noises, Fred wanders around, finding no frogs, but an egg mass at one of the three little cattail ponds where the frogs breed. Most of the eggs have been killed by freezing during the recent cold spell, but the remaining 20% are hatching out. It is 12C and partly sunny, a relief from the cold weather that greeted our arrival in Cochrane.
8 May finds us enjoying poutine in the cafe of the Empire Theatre in Cochrane, Ontario. This is an old fashioned big screen theatre built in the 1950s and still in operation. Owned and managed by our friends the Brissons, who have expanded its service to include a cafe with a full menu and a movie library, the Empire now draws its clientele from as far afield as Smooth Rock Falls, Matheson, Iroquois Falls, and Kapuskasing. While all other theatres in the region have closed down except in the large city of Timmins, the Empire thrives as a diversified family business in the little town of Cochrane.
The scene I have chosen is Cochrane’s main downtown street, 6th Avenue, looking south toward the railway tracks. The wide thoroughfare with its wide sidewalks gives me the impression of a wide, flat prairie town – but beyond the tracks rises the boreal forest, and behind the theatre one residential block slopes dramatically down to Commando Lake, where Loons dive for fish in front of the band shell, Mallards dip and preen at the edge of the mowed park lawn, and Fred discovers that there are still Mink Frogs.
For sale at Burlington Art Gallery $425 framed
7 May finds us at a boat launch on the Blanche River, north of New Liskeard, Ontario. This is the clay belt, extensively cleared and farmed, but there are still enough licheny granite to feel like boreal forest. Fred found the mussel Leptodea fragilis in the river behind me as I sit at the side of the boat launch entrance road, gazing up at the glacier carved Canadian Shield, painted, carpeted, and tufted with lichens of many kinds. Now he is clambering around up there, collecting samples to identify.
I feel so content here, where very little seems to change. The water is clean and so is the air, and lichens feed from the rain with the assistance of the cells of green algae within their bodies. Here the White Spruce grow in so many shapes that it’s hard sometimes to tell whether we’re in Ontario or British Columbia.
May 6 finds us well and truly “in the field”, revisiting the Shaw Woods after 35 years! This old growth forest north of Eaganville, Ontario, is a protected area, but apparently not from ecology-altering forces that operate underground…
As we duck under the branches of trees by the road and step through the bordering stand of Equisetum hyemale, the leafless horsetail that is “put together” like drinking straws inserted end to end, the forest is still there – the old Maples, Beeches, and Basswoods standing tall, older ones lying all over, and young ones growing up around them. But the forest floor is an even sea of Trout Lily leaves. My first thought is “Where’s the diversity?” I expected to see all of my old friends the forest floor herbs, bloming or sprouting – Wild Ginger, Squirrel Corn, Twin Flower, Bunchberry, Star Flower, Cohosh, and Wild Ginger. Trilliums Bloom here and there, mostly white in small groups of 4 or 5, and some single Red Trilliums at the bases of trees. Fred saw one Cohosh down by the pond, and one clump of Jack in the Pulpit near where I settle to paint this Red Trillium.
Tell-tale crumbles of soil peek from between last year’s dry fallen leaves. Last year’s leaves seems to be all there are…. the rest has been pulled underground and consumed by invasive aliens. Earthworms have been here for as long as the Europeans who brought them, but increasingly we’ve noticed that they are changing the ecology of forest floor, first in urban parks and now even in protected old growth forests!
I rise from my crouched painting position to stretch and drink hot tea from a thermos, and turn a log segment to see if there are any snails. At least ten earthworms flinch and retreat into their holes, and the dark earth is well churned. Wayne Grimm introduced us to this special forest in 1975, and I remember the deep layers of leaf litter he sifted through in search of tiny snails – leaf litter that was home to complex communities of everything from nematodes to springtails to sowbugs to centipedes, to salamanders. Today we find no salamanders, no snails, and of slugs, only a few shiny black Deeroceras laeve and a juvenile Arion sylvaticus.
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!
3 May finds me on the phone, noting a contact about trailer hitches, and munching an apple. This will be a full day of multitasking in preparation for the departure of the 30 Years Later Expedition in the direction of Cochrane Ontario. We hope to be on the road sometime during the day on Tuesday, and if all goes well, I’ll do the first of this week’s paintings on Tuesday evening.
1 May finds me at the Lester Road wetland on the south side of Ottawa. We parked by the tracks, and Cheryl said “Come see!!” She led me along the road shoulder flanking the wetland. The air is full of traffic noise and Redwing Blackbird song. The shrubby gray barked willows are all breaking out in misty green leaf. Scanning the edge of the marsh and looking for something like a Redwing Blackbird nest, I suddenly saw the Canada Goose, head down, hiding… enthroned atop a huge mound of cattail leaves, piled up within a willow clump. The weight of what must be several years’ accumulation of dry yellow blades has spread the willows’ stems into more of a splayed shape than those of its neighbours. The straw texture transitions to a fluffy layer of goose down at the top, and atop that, the Goose herself, matching perfectly! Cheryl says that the male’s cheek patches meet at the top of his head, and she figures that this is the female because she’s on the nest more of the time.
At 14:26 Fred and Cheryl are walking the railroad tracks to monitor the Cepaea snails, and have left me here with the goose. As I sit, she eyes me warily. Her head is raised now. The cars rush past behind me, a noisy part of the landscape, but I’m a new addition to the neighbourhood and must be watched.
Blades of grass emerge green from the water here and there, but the cattails leaves have not started to shoot up here yet. We’ve already had a meal of them at home.
