Here is another view from the studio window, on February 16, interrupting me with breathtaking crystal wedding of ice and sky as I laboured with watercolour details of a crayfish. ….yes, the top photo is flipped vertically to join the horizontals.
And here is a fairy fantasy detail of the tips….
Now I’ll show you the scene of my painting. The crayfish Orconectes limosus, an immigrant to Quebec from the northeastern US, is making progress westward in the St. Lawrence River toward Ontario. This is the final watercolour of my series of 10 Ontario crayfish species, originally painted for the fishing bait identification book, “The Essential Bait Guide” and now being used in a crayfish identification guide to be published this spring by the Toronto Zoo. Fred and I have designed the layout, and will soon finish editing the penultimate draft. You can see the poster I designed a couple of years ago, propped up on the left as a comparative reference for my work.
Jean-Francois Desroches sent me a photo that he took of O. limosus alive in an aquarium. I was very pleased to get this side-view, as it is a comparable ‘side view’ to my paintings of the other species.
Then we received several preserved specimens in the mail. They had been taken by Parks Canada personnel from a newly introduced population on Cape Breton Island — in a province that has no native Crayfish. Don McAlpine mailed them to us, as he said “preserved lightly in formalin”. I selected one to paint and immersed it in water, in the same little viewing tank that I used to paint living examples of all the other species.
In order to spread the tail in the right position, and lower the claw so that the diagnostic spines on the side of its head can be seen, I tied the specimen down with thread to a rectangle of hardware cloth. It looks rather like an invertebrate Gulliver, captured by the Lilliputians, doesn’t it? I have a fishhook holding the antenna at the correct angle. I would rather paint a live crayfish, but I must admit, this one stayed most wonderfully still, for looking so alive! We are amazed at how the colour was so perfectly preserved. It looks so like the photo that was sent to me of a live one in an aquarium.
So here, finally, is the watercolour – and as soon as I insert the image into its spot in the layout, I’ll turn to drawing a labelled anatomy to help explain the body parts referred to in the species descriptions, while Fred edits the text according to the helpful comments contributed by our “Project Crayfish” group.
Yesterday evening our Bishops Mills neighbour Lou Jerolli stopped his truck out front. Marigold, who was down in the lab, barked so insistently that I got up from supper and rushed down to see what was the matter. There was Lou, outside the front door. When I unlocked and opened, he invited me out to see the “present” he’d brought. There was a fresh road-killed Coyote in the back of his truck, and I thought, “Oh, no – I have no time to do anything with it!” Lou was sure I’d do a nice painting of it, as he was the proud owner of a print of my watercolour Fisher portrait. I explained that we were rushing to prepare for a meeting in Roebuck about Limerick Forest Advisory Committee, so he asked where he could leave it. I gave in, and said the back porch. I went back up to finish eating supper while Fred was down attending to the printing-out of documents to take. I didn’t think about the Coyote again until we left for the meeting. There was the Coyote, stretched out on the full length of the old washtub stand on the back porch, its eye still gleaming, and its ears and legs still supple – the body still warm. I ran back up for my camera – couldn’t find it. Came back down. It was in the car. I turned it on, surprised that it still worked fine entirely below freezing!
Took a few photos of the head, with details of the eye, in the porch light, and by flash, and then we left for the meeting, the Coyote still on the porch. This morning when Matt came to work, he asked where the “Coyote-sicle” came from… We were careful all day to keep Marigold from making contact with it, and in the late afternoon I went down to sketch it in pencil on a journal page, standing hunched over to look down upon its head. The ear was stiff, and the eye a tiny bit sunken, and in the pupil that had been clear and black last night, a hazy blue moon. But I sketched the eye as I’d remembered it.
Eastern Ontario Coyotes are large, possibly crossed with Canis lycaon, the “old North American” Algonquin Park Wolf, which is much closer to Coyotes than the Eurasian Timber Wolf Canis lupus of the north and west. This one measures 129 cm. from nose to tail tip, and weighs 17.7 kg. Fred and I both noticed how the nose turns up. We will put it in a freezer now – I may yet paint that portrait. In any case, we will eventually have the skeleton. Lou said it was killed in Ottawa, on Albion Road, 1 km south of the racetrack. There has recently been a furor about urban Coyotes in Greely, not far from where this one was killed. Ours looks in far better shape than the one in the article’s photo – no wonder it was eating people’s pets!
I took photos of all this, so I really should post the followup. On 4 January we had more snow, drifted again from the back of the main roof to the garage roof, obscuring my studio light again…. but even if we pushed a hole in the drift from the window again, the weather forecast worried us.
The weather was warming, and by 5 January, we were sure the morrow would bring rain, and temperatures over 10C – that’s ten degrees above freezing! I imagined all that snow on the garage roof filling with rain like a gigantic, soppy, heavy, sponge. Even if the garage roof did not cave under that weight, I didn’t like the thought of all that waterlogged snow freezing into a giant block of ice, and stay that way until it one day slips off onto the hood of the car. I was really feeling gloomy about this when Judy came to work on the 5th. When I explained my foreboding to her, she offered to go out the window and shovel off the roof, with the enthusiasm of a rock climber with cabin fever! So she and Fred tied a rope around her waist, with the other end wrapped around the handle of a dipnet braced inside the window, and out she went -
our garage roof hero!
On 18 December 2007 I found my “north light” almost entirely blocked by a wall of snow. All night long it had snowed, drifting off the main roof onto the garage roof just below the north-facing Gallery windows. The Gallery was in gloom, as if curtains were drawn. Before I resumed my Sparrow watercolours, which I’d set up on the glass counter just under the best north light window in the building, I had to remove some snow.
After poking at it with a sponge mop until about half the window’s view was cleared, I noticed that the remaining snow bank reflected more light into my “studio” than I was getting from the heavily overcast sky, so I left it like that and resumed painting.
Purple Finch compared with House Finch, for the online bird identification quiz on The Green Bird Network Note the study skins on the left of the tray – borrowed from the research collection of the Canadian Museum of Nature. I prefer to paint from a fresh bird, but such cannot be found on demand, so I am referring to study skins and photos on the web, and drawing from my experience of having birds in the hand to paint, both dead and alive. Comic relief: Fred realises that after shutting his computer down for the night and letting the dog out for her pre-bedtime tour of duty, that he’d forgotten to record this evening’s Mudpuppy observations. He says “What’s freedom from worry for, anyway, if not to work yourself down to a state of total exhaustion!”
This morning Fred “did the streets” – his routine before turning in at night and upon leaving the house in the morning. Sometimes it is Cepaea snails, alive or crushed by tires (one notable snail became roadkill after crossing the road to feed on a squashed frog). Most of the time there is a frog or two (Leopard Frogs, mostly) and every so often a Toad.
I think if our village did not have street lights, the road mortality (except for snails – and worms on rainy nights) would be much less than it is. Most of the insects are attracted to the lights and the brightly lit street, and the frogs (when they’re not simply crossing the road on seasonal migrations) may come out to catch insects, appreciating the clear view for hunting at frogs-eye level.
There are always changes – seasonal, weather-related, and differences from year to year in both abundance and behaviour. Fred recently found our first autumn Red-belly Snake of the year , and this Giant Water Bug (Lethocerus americanus) or “Toe Biter” or “Electric Light Bug” is our first this fall. There were only very few in the spring. Some years we have a lot, and some years hardly any. These formidable aquatic predators fly from the woods to the ponds in the spring, and back again in the fall, to hibernate in the leaf litter and under logs.
As for the moths – Fred went to Lynn Scott’s moth site http://www.acleris.com/dls/07939.html and guessed they may be Furcula occidentalis. One gradually gets to notice smaller and smaller animals each year. Fred would have noted “little furry black and white moths” if there hadn’t been four of them all on the same night. I thought the assemblage of the slain looked artistically intriguing in the steel bowl he used to bring them to the Lab for identification.
Returning from a funeral in Ottawa on the 18th of July, I stopped to visit my favorite spot on the Jock River. The riffle, at summer low-water, was a pattern of dry stepping stones emerging from a cobbled bottom tapestried with fluffy yellow-green filamentous algae.
Several Honey Bees were roving about, sipping at the soft wet algal fringes of my stepping stones.
A female Mallard was quietly minding her own business, leading her three nearly full-grown ducklings to dabble in the shallows. One, which seemed darker plumaged than the others, napped on a stone.
I searched about for clams and crayfish among the stones, not willing to get my feet wet today, but all I found were a few clam shells and the shed skin of a Crayfish. No Zebra Mussels. If they’re here, they are not obvious yet. The smaller shells were Strophitus undulatus, the clam that fascinated Fred at this place when he began to study fresh water unionids a decade ago. Then I pulled a heavy dark, slightly gaping, empty pair of valves from the crevice in which the owner, a Lampsilis, had lived for several decades. This clam measures 138mm long x 80mm high — well into the “largest invertebrate animal” class.
Gathering a small handful of Viviparus snail shells, also empty, I noticed a movement, black and roiling, a school of little Brown Bullheads, Icthalurus nebulosus, velvety black and heavily whiskered, about 4cm long. The parents must be elsewhere, shepherding the rest of their family. These are very shy, and I took many photos of nearly nothing as they sheltered away from my closely looming shape.
Recent wildlife sightings : On the evening of 13 June we interviewed (measusred and photographed) a large female Blandings Turtle on Bolton Road north, and less than an hour later, a large female Painted Turtle which was lying upside down on Highway 29 south of Almonte – there must be a name for balancing on your back like that, unable to do anything about it…. She was doubtless relieved to resume control of her locomotion in the safety of the grassy ditch after we’d measured her. There were just a few chips abraded from the edge of her shell by the vehicle that had flipped her.
Then on the 14th, during his visit to the South Nation River at Crysler, Fred watched a Great Blue Heron swallow a Sucker which was as long as the Heron’s neck! He wrote: “…at the parking area below the bridge at Crysler I watched Great Blue Heron barely capture, stagger to shore under the weight of, and then gracefully swallow, a Sucker (Moxostoma?) that appeared to to be at least 45cm long — the largest prey item I’ve ever watched a Heron process” I wish I’d been there with the camera!
And while he was away from home, a neighbour came by here with a big mama Blandings Turtle. He’d been thinking it looked like a Box Turtle – well, Blandings do have a hinged plastron, but they can’t quite close the back half as well as Box Turtles can. Jennifer and I took photos of it, measured it, and gave it a dunk in our rain barrel before it was returned to where it had been found on the centre line of County Road 18, south of Oxford Mills.
Admiring its bright yellow throat, Jennifer described how it fools male Green Frogs into thinking the yellow throat of the approaching turtle is that of a rival. This turtle may be fourty or fifty years old, or more – it measured over 22 centimetres, plastron length, and I could feel eggs when I poked my thumb infront of her hind leg. Blandings aren’t reproductively mature until the age of twenty.
Our neighbour said he feels honoured to have seen two of these venerable reptiles this year, and helped them get safely off the road. Fred recalls a time when we drove Bolton Road (the main route north from Bishops Mills) on our way to a friend’s place near Burritts Rapids, at least once a week from 1979 until 1983, never seeing any Blandings Turtles. They are rare over most of their range, but seem to be increasing around here. Local people say that the Beavers came back in the 1960′s, and we first started to see nesting Blandings Turtles on the road around here in 1990 – maybe the first generation of increase in the Beaver-enhanced wetlands along the creeks.
On the evening of 6 June I counted two Snowshoe Hares on the Bolton Road Hare transect, but I couldn’t count this Hare – it was south of the transect – almost where the gravel road named “Kyle Road” meets the equally narrow but paved “Branch Road”.
This Hare saw me and hesitated, then dashed right in front as if he were on a suicide mission. I didn’t brake too hard for fear of spinning out on the gravel, so I was surprised to feel no bump. A split second later, out of the corner of my eye I saw him spin around beside the van, and when I glanced in the rear view mirror there he was sitting in the middle of the road behind me, looking as saucy as a jaybird. It seemed to me that he was challenging me to a chase, or perhaps watching to see the van lose control and slide into the ditch – like others had before?
Hares are intelligent, and this is a good year for green growing things, and for creatures that eat green growing things. Hare populations are on an upswing, but not high yet, so life must be pretty good – even time for sports, like challenging cars!
We have been recording Snowshoe Hare observations along the southern end of Bolton Road (formerly Cristman Road) in Grenville County, Ontario, since the early ’90′s, and have a NatureJournal data sheet for those who regularly drive Bolton Road south. It explains the 10 – 11 year cycle in Hares, its relationship to the sun spot cycle, and is set up with tick boxes to record observations. The Hare cycle is the most spectacular multi-year pattern that occurs in Canada, but everyone is totally silent about it, as if it wasn’t national news! Perhaps it happens over too long a period of time for commercial people to notice. It involves incredible abundances, spectacular population crashes, fascinating correlations with other phenomena – what more do they want!
Fred has written an article about ten year cycles in boreal wildlife. See Nonfibre Values .
I will send a stack of datasheets to anyone who is interested.
The photo artist and conservationist C. Bayne of BayNiche Conservancy sent me this beautiful photo of Marsh Marigolds,
…in thanks for viewing on my browser their web pages and slide shows, “Manifestation Superior” and “Snapping Baselines”, and sending comments on how they look from here. I got all excited! In “Manifestation Superior” they invite everyone to hike, canoe, and kayak the shoreline of Lake Superior during August 4, 5, and 6 this summer, with a view to conservation – marking points in time and place with each person’s observations. “Snapping Baselines” introduces the concept of photo point reference, an invaluable technique for recording changes in the landscape that is simple enough for anyone who can point a camera and click. All that is required to turn tourist photography into a powerful tool for conservation in any part of the world is a well-marked point of reference and some dedicated person or institution to archive the photos in a database for long term storage, retrieval, and comparison. Like snapping a carpenter’s chalkline, we can snap images of the landscape in a baseline with which to measure changes in vegetation patterns, clues to disturbances like pollution, alteration in drainage, climate change, new patterns of animal use, insect infestations, and even natural forest succession. “Snapping Baselines” also describes how Geocaching naturally provides points of reference for repeated photos through the seasons by strangers who are keen to share what they have found. This is Citizen Science at its best – and simplest! Bravo BayNiche!
I have a .pdf of the flyer for “Manifestation Superior” that I can send by e-mail if anyone would like to print it and/or distribute it. Gathering data about an awesome and vulnerable shoreline will transform for many people what might have been a simple holiday excursion into something much more meaningful – to themselves, and to Superior itself.
In the face of a very tight schedule over the next few days, I respond to the seasonal imperative of spring sprouts, and head out to Actons Corners to harvest fiddleheads. Fred checked the database and gave me instructions on how to locate a big patch of Ostrich Fern that he had spotted on 27 May 1993. As I drove a bit too far east while searching for the area he described, I saw a Bittern fly up from the ditch along Actons Corners Road, and heard Toads trilling, at 11:45. Creeping down onto the fern flats of the creek called Murphy’s Drain, I walk among fountains of Ostrich Fern fronds in all stages of unfurling, rejoicing that I am not too late, and after taking some photos, settle down to picking contentedly, snapping one or two tender, green, orange-scaley knobs from each clenched fist of rhizomes, leaving the rest to grow up into feathery fronds.
At home, I tipped the bag into a pot of boiling water, and after it returned to a boil, waited for a few minutes as their green deepened, before dipping them out into a collander and then rinsing the chaffy brown scales off in a sink of cold water. Three ziplock bags of fiddleheads went into the freezer – except one bowlfull that I marinated with fresh lemon juice, a dash of Umeboshi plum brine, and olive oil, as a supper salad. Then I cooked up the more loosely curled fiddleheads for Fred and I to enjoy right away with butter, salt & pepper. As long as the frond is new and tender, it is good to eat!
