Canada Plum with Redstart - Aleta Karstad

Two-note Goldfinches brightly
Tinkle like gold coins
Through the Canada Plums.

The raspy castanet of the Wren clears them all away,

And then the August Sun rises to flicker
Dappling gold coins
on the tent fly.

A Mourning dove's low wood wind begins,
A soft slow pendulum for the day.

31 August, 07:30 Bishops Mills, Ontario

Sitting on my paint box in front of the tent, looking into the tangle of Buckthorn and Canada Plum that thicket about the twin trunks of a tall Manitoba Maple this morning, at about the time that we heard the Goldfinches swarm through yesterday morning and I wrote my poem.

No Goldfinches this morning. A brown and white striped bird chips once or twice and peers at me from within the shady tangle, muted against the sharply contrasted background of bright green-gold backlit foliage and the crisp dark filigree of the twigs and shaded leaves among dark sinuous branches.

Pondering the colour of the underpainting for a while, I decide on a misty, shady blue-green. So the cool dawn shadows will be a base for early morning illumination among the leaves. When the trunks and stems are all discovered and drawn in sepia I stop to take a photo to record this early stage. Then I lay in the brightest, clearest backlit yellows and yellow-greens - some as areas, some as individual points of light.

Fred comes up the path, bringing my morning tea, stands beside me for a while, and points at a Redstart on a dead branch to the left of my scene. I have never seen a live Redstart! Mine have always been hypothetical and potential Redstarts, improbably black and red on the pages of field guides. Looking up at it, the undertail coverts are a bright buffy yellow and the rest of the pattern of red-orange and black is too complex for my mind's eye to capture.

Later, as I toil away, deciding how leaves may be allowed to obscure certain branches, the Redstart appears in the "livingroom" of my thicket, flips its wings, cocks its sharp black head and is gone. I almost never include birds or mammals in my plein air paintings - unless they become a living part of the scene as I paint it. This bird did, but the painting remains a view of the thicket and I hope it's obvious to the viewer that the Redstart was there for only a moment.

Little Brown Bat on Bumper

24 August 2009, Bishops Mills, Ontario

I don't often get a chance to hold a bat! This one came to us on the bumper of our car, driven home late last evening by our son. He says he didn't notice a bat clinging to the bumper, but we saw it there this morning. The right wing was broken but the eye was still bright, which leads us to surmise the sad story that it spent the night clinging to the bumper after it had collided with the car, and finally succumbed to shock and exposure shortly before we found it.

Fred said "Look at its eyes" - which I thought was a strange thing to say, as a bat's eyes are so small that one seldom sees them. But held at the right angle under good light, they were tiny, but lifelike and bright.

All my plans for the day were set aside, and I devoted the next five hours to a watercolour, about twice life size, celebrating its particular beauty of fine detail as the least I can do to save something of its "bat-ness", to faithfully render as much as I can of the vitality that this Little Brown Bat will have no more. To capture the delicate straightness of the thin, tapered tragus projecting from the ear, and to try to show the dense black whiskers that screen the lips, and the interesting pointed black eyebrow - and the texture of the leathery soft tissue of the ear.

It seems that "White Nose Disease", spreading north into New York State, has not yet been found among the bats of eastern Ontario - but how long will their colonies be healthy?
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_the_white-nose_syndrome/
These flying mice are so precious - it would be so sad to lose them all!

View under the Schoolhouse Bridge

There's no two ways about it - I just have not done a journal page recently enough to post. But I have been sketching in nature - an oil sketch, on a 4 x 6 inch canvas. On Thursday, August 13, my husband Fred and I returned to the "Schoolhouse Bridge" over the Tay River, about 20 kilometres west of Perth in eastern Ontario, so that I could do a quick oil sketch, looking upstream beneath the bridge. This is one of the 27 spots along the Tay River that we surveyed last week for crayfish and fresh water mussels - and hope as I might, I didn't find any time for painting or sketching except this hour and a half in the early evening of the second-last day.

As Fred sat beside me at the corner of the bridge abutment, looking at the sunlit scene framed by the concrete bridge, we noticed a strange black and green insect with long trailing green legs, flying up against the wall below the bridge - the wall dancing with weaving sun reflections. It was nearly as large as a hummingbird, the Katydid Killer, Spex pennsylvanicus, a great black wasp actually carrying a Katydid! It was looking for a hole or someplace to store its large green prize, and failing, dropped it on the water. A fish rose to snatch the Katydid just as the wasp swooped down to retrieve it, narrowly being fish food itself! Fred had already found a dead Katydid on the ledge below the bridge - which he now thought might be one left there earlier by the same wasp.

The pink flowers in my painting are the blossoms of Decadon, our favorite river-edge bush, that sends arching branches into the water to root their tips and spring up again - watery branches swollen and spongy and fringed with roots. During the course of my painting, a Muskrat made several trips from behind the far corner of the bridge, across the scene, carrying large bunches of bright green vegetation to the Decadon bush, and backed in beneath it.