The last fish we saw here this season was a cold-stunned Rock Bass, waving its pectoral fin helplessly in the air as it was carried around in an eddy after having been swept over the dam.  Traditionally fish let themselves drift downstream towards Kemptville and the Rideau River when winter chills the upper creek.  In the summer below the dam we see Pike and Perch, Rock Bass, Sunfish and Bullheads – and large Carp too.

On early winter Mudpupy Nights we have netted a Fallfish or two, and once Fred took a rare Rhynicthes cataracta (Longnose Dace) out of the mouth of a Mudpuppy – but fish sightings are rare here after the beginning of December.

After we settled at our table in the Brigadoon Restaurant Fred passed me his journal page so I could do a memory sketch of the fish I’d seen “running” up toward the dam in a tight school – because we’re not sure what they were!  They were grey with noticeable scales and a broad dark green lateral stripe.  I took two photos, which mostly show beautiful ripples and a couple of probably warped fish head shapes.  Perhaps they were Fallfish, but why they were tightly schooled and approaching the dam is an interesting question… The school of about thirty individuals, each about 3o cm in length, dispersed as it went past me, and we saw no more coming after – except a half-sized one hanging out near the bridge on the west side.

Life is an adventure – you never know what’s going to happen once you put your waders on and get out into it!  (Fred’s waders have holes in them – that’s why I’ve been delegated to Friday night wading on Mudpuppy Nights).

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, and I figured that it did, so Fred walked ahead to the Scotts’ place, to give them a loaf of Stollen bread, and I sat in the drivers seat with the passenger’s window open, two wheels deep in the snowbank by the guardrail on the south east corner of the bridge.

The striking feature of this scene was the corrugated drifts of snow on the yellow-green slush below the bridge. It’s hard to imagine what aerodynamics would have caused this series of drifts: perhaps wind blasting under the bridge as the creek was slushing over. Upstream of the corrugations there was a 2 x 3 m patch of thin clear black ice, which must have been the area that froze over most recently. The trees were all burdened by what may have been about 6 mm of excess diameter ice (seemingly more here than around Bishops Mills), but the temperature has remained marginally above freezing so that most of the drizzle doesn’t accumulate, but rather drips off without a net removal of the ice that is already present. I started with a fresh underpainting of greyish lavender, as the forest branches seemed to blend into that colour in the evening light. The upper surfaces of snow appeared to be picking up a pinkish glow from somewhere even though the sky was heavily grey – but the faces of snow was bluish.

These tints are very difficult to perceive, and never show in photographs. I sort of have to unfocus my eyes, or look with colour-seeking glances in order to identify different hues in something as subtle as snow. The colour of the open water over ice also took quite a lot of ‘glancing’ to figure out what it was, and to decide to mix it with cobalt and yellow ochre, dulled with a hint of ultramarine and dark red.

The multitudinous twigs were also a challenge. I decided to try brushing them in with sweeping overall gestures of thick pinkish white, sparkling only a few crisper individual branches and twigs as representatives. Yes, they are all individual twigs, but they can also be seen as masses of twigs – which works in a time sensitive plein air painting.

After an hour to work I lost my daylight, so I packed up and drove down the Scotts’ lane (nearly slid into their ditch!) to meet Fred. We visited with Scotts for a while, admiring their Christmas tree. The heat from their woodstove felt wonderful!  We returned home in the dark through Limerick Forest where we spread two buckets of bedding from our chickens to fertilize the trees at the Headquarters – home to steam Blue Mussels for supper from our “30 Years Later” visit to Bar Road, St. Andrews in New Brunswick.

It’s been a happy birthday – my 58th!

Fred’s database entry for this painting reads as follows: Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Oxford-on-Rideau: Co Road 18/Middle Creek, 3.1 km NNE Bishops Mills. 31B/13, UTM 18TVE47 458 717 44.89865N 75.68608W. TIME: 1533-1630. AIR TEMP: 0.5, drizzle, breezy. HABITAT: slushily frozen-over slow creek/Red Maple swamp@rd embankment & bridge. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Frederick W. Schueler. 2009/335/a, visit () (event). natural history, oil. birthday painting of channel & swamp below bridge. Co-ords corrected from 44.89865 N 75.68608 W to 44.897753, -75.686215 on the basis of Google maps.

I have just finished the third dorsal view of this ubiquitous slug introduced from Europe, Deroceras reticulatum, the milky-slimed muncher in every garden, variable in colour and fast moving. You can see the flat spot in the rear portion of its mantle, where the vestigial shell sits, internally. The finger-print wrinkles are slighter just over this bit of shell that reminds us that slugs are relatives of snails. It has two characteristics that make it easy to tell apart from its native cousin D. laeve. D. reticulatum has a large pale area surrounding its pneumostome, or breathing hole, and when the animal is touched, it exudes exceedingly sticky white mucous which is hard to get off your hands, and can cause dermatitis in the slug collector.

The lateral view and first dorsal view were painted from a 45mm individual collected by Judy Courteau, from under an Elm tree near Dunville, Ontario, on 23 September. The second dorsal view was collected by Fred, from under the “Novisuccinia board” here in Bishops Mills, field number 2008/279/db, and the third dorsal view (the pale one) was collected by Judy in the spring, from a greenhouse in Smiths Falls.

Deroceras laeve

is native, a feisty little slug. It moves even faster than D. reticulatum, having a very narrow foot on which it practically runs about, sometimes chasing other slugs and biting their tails. It is more or less dark brown with chestnut mottling, especially on the mantle, which is boldly wrinkled – but from above and without magnification, it appears black. When disturbed, it exudes a clear mucous which seems to fill in all the wrinkles and make its body appear smooth and shiny. The pneumostome is not as noticeably pale as it is in D. reticulatum. The individual I painted here is 28mm from head to tail, and was collected by Judy Courteau on 17 September at Highway 90, east of Angus, Ontario.

Pallifera dorsalis

is a tiny native slug of forests east of the prairies. On close inspection it is unmistakeable, having a smooth (very slightly wrinkled) gray mantle covering its entire body, from head to tail. The eye stalks are darker, and the front of the foot, near the mouth, is rusty coloured. This individual, 12mm from head to tail, was bluish-gray when it was taken into captivity at Little Cove on the Bruce Penninsula, by Matt Keevil. For the first week it did not stray from the little piece of moss that it had been collected with, avoiding the scrap of Romaine lettuce that is the fare of all of our captive slugs. But after a week or so it began to eat the lettuce, and by the time I got around to painting it, its body colour had changed from blue gray to more of an olive gray. I made a compromise and painted it somewhere in between.

Arion intermedius

is another small slug, delicate, yellowish with tints of blue, a yellow foot, faint lateral stripes, and black eye stalks which give it the classy aspect of a siamese cat. Along with the other Arion slugs, it is an European immigrant. The few individuals that we caught on our trip in August of this year (at least two localities) are the first slugs of this species recorded in Ontario outside of greenhouses. They may have been “naturalized” for decades, but being easily overlooked, and since the landscape was not crawling with malacologists, they were not reported until we discovered them. Robert sent me one from British Columbia (where they live along the coast) earlier in the summer, but it must have either perished or been eaten by one of the larger slugs, because I searched through its box in vain. I was very happy to have this one to paint, 25 mm in length, and collected near the Durham Conservation Centre, West Grey, Grey County, Ontario. As I painted its portrait, I delighted in its unique aspect and charming habits – one of which was to curl up like a cat, head to tail, to have a nap. When disturbed, it assumed a classic Arion hump-shape, which I have also painted here.

Arion distinctus

This slug we suspected is Arion hortensis because of its orange foot, placement of lateral stripes, and dark colour. Robert decided that it is Arion distinctus, in the A. hortensis species group. It is 40 mm long, which is the maximum length of the species, according to the European Land Snails book. It was collected by Judy Courteau from a greenhouse on River Road in Ottawa, another European introduction. Like Arion intermedius, it also curls up like a cat, head-to-tail, to sleep between meals. It hollowed out the yellow snap bean, favours the green ones less well, but avoids Romaine lettuce, which is a favorite of most of our molluscan guests.

Arion fasciatus

from Coburg, Ontario, is 50mm long from tiny dark head to the tail at the end of its exceedingly extensible body. When it was crawling fast, it just got longer and thinner like an earthworm, at least 15mm longer than the position in which I have portrayed it. The yellow tint below its lateral lines is a diagnostic feature, as is the pale yellow foot.

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.