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

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.

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).

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, 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.

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!

On August 3, we picked up a DOR (”dead on road”) Least Bittern on Highway 43.  At the time I wrote: “Fairly fresh, but I couldn’t get to painting it immediately as we had a full day of Sunday visiting yet to do.  It’s photographed and in the freezer now.   I’m not sure what I’ll do with it – maybe make a watercolour portrait…”

Fred commented: “It’s a very interesting process, watching how the modern Audubon works.” (and he speaks as my Lucy). “First we find the Bittern DOR, waypoint it, bring it home for exhaustive photography, and laying out on a tray for freezing, e-mail the MNR to say we’ve found a ‘Species at Risk,’ and then wait for a year until the Stewardship Council wants a painting… Then there’s a scramble to find the photos on the drive, and the Bird in the freezer, and a google to find various poses of Least Bitterns, select one that’s in the best pose, stretch the paper, immobilize the artist in front of the specimen and the computer by cajoling & threats, and hope for the best…”

But that exhaustive photography sure was useful! I spent an entire afternoon drawing the legs and feet from my macro photographs, and it’s a whole lot easier and more satisfying than trying to interpret feet from indistinct photographs in other positions and the feet of a freezer-dried specimen! Having the photos I took of this individual, freshly road killed, is next best to painting it from the fresh specimen!

The reason Fred compared me to Audubon is that this is the way I did the Sparrows for the Green Bird Network, so it’s an established practice. We imitated Audubon’s methods of posing freshly collected Birds in the “Birds of the West Coast” trip, but it was the “specimens + internet” method that made it so easy to do the Sparrows.

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, while Fred readies himself to lead the Invertebrate Walk.

12:00 We hadn’t gone far along a trail when it passed close by a dried-down vernal pool, still taking its summer rest, its dry bottom plastered with blackish leaves, criss-crossed by moss-crested logs, and shaded by tall old Maples green-skirted with mosses and ferns.  My eye was caught by a conical-capped mushroom that had matured from orange to a dark cherry red, but before I could decide on the composition, Adam had collected it and was in the process of identifying it.

I was also taken by a nearly dried-out Helleborine Orchid, its parallel-veined leaves turning dry and pale, and its spent flowers scraps of brown tissue at the ends of swollen green ovaries.  But I couldn’t find an exciting composition – in fact, with a wealth and diversity of fascinating forms and textures all around me, I felt like a confused hungry person in a restaurant with too many choices on the menu.  And many potential scenes depended on patterns of sunlight which would shift and change.  Finally after nearly an hour of indecision, I settled down behind a mossy log graced lacy ferns with fine-stems.  Adam found the shell of a fingernail clam – a live-bearing inhabitant of the mud of temporary pools and ponds.

12:45 I start with a dull purple underpainting, the colour of the light on blackish leafy bottom of the dried down pools, nicely contrasted by mossy green.  Adam takes his mushrooms back to headquarters to contribute a couple of species to the tally, and the Seburn family finds me and sits for a long time, quietly watching me paint, and intermittently sharing bits of the summer’s news.  It’s a perfect day, the last of our 10 day pilot trip, and I’ll be returning home tonight with ten paintings.

At 14:30 I stop, and pack up to go with Adam to pick up his car in Aylmer, leaving Fred to stay for the barbeque.  I will have to fill in some moss and crisp up the leaves before I can upload this one to the daily painting blog.

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!