Eagle River Hatchling (oil on canvas 7 x 9 in.)

24 October 2014 finds me clambering down the steep embankment from Highway 17 beside the bridge over the Eagle River, a little over two kilometres north of the town of Eagle River, Ontario. 

This is a broad, clay-bed river with boulders scattered along its edges and also emerging from the flat yellow-grassed clay and gravel shores.  A tall crest of Pines and Spruces reflects darkly from the far shore. I am searching for a scene.  

The soft wet sandy shore looks like a highway for wildlife. Deer tracks predominate, large and small cloven hoof prints - added to them are fox mink and Racoon, duck and Heron. The water is not quite clear, and olive brown.  An overcast day with a light breeze that one would call quiet if it

Muskrat's Island (oil on canvas, 7 x 9) Sold

9 September 2014 finds me in the bow of Scott Haig's canoe, exploring the perimeter of a small island in the Mattawa River, east of North Bay, Ontario. Scott has brought us through the eastern tip of the deep, spring-fed Trout Lake, to the Trans Canada Pipeline crossing at "The Narrows" of the Mattawa, where it flows into Turtle Lake.  

The island is pictureque - a pyramid of rock and trees, backlit by the afternoon sun. Paddling over to visit it, we find Leatherleaf and Sweetgale, leaning out to their reflections from lichen patterned rocks. Golden green mosses flow down over the shoulders of the granite rocks at the feet of tall slim White Pines and Cedars. As we paddle along the shaded north east side of the island, I notice open mussel shells glimmering submerged among the

Trent River Oak and Willows (oil on canvas 6 x 8 in.) Sold

10 May 2014 found me admiring spreading willows and a magnificent old Burr Oak on the bank of the Trent River at a Conservation Area near Glen Miller, Ontario. We'd come for spring drifted mollusc shells, and we only noticed the "Line 9" pipeline river-crossing signs just as we were leaving. Our colleagues Amanda Bennett and Matt Keevil evidently hadn't noticed the pipeline crossing either, during years of launching their boat here as they studied the turtles in this stretch of the river. Our formal description of this “limestone savannah rare habitat” is “lawnpark bank of rapid canal-river, in residential area.”

After a day of collecting spring-drifted shells from creeks and rivers in Toronto we zoomed alog the 401 to the parking lot here and slept in the seats of the van until dawn. While I made breakfast, Fred sprinted for our traditional drift sample up near the

Summer Calm South Nation (oil on canvas 8 x 8 in.)

19 June 2014 finds me three kilometres northwest of Winchester Springs, Ontario, painting a view across the South Nation River from a steep grassy bank on its north shore. Tall grasses screen the river's edge. I have flattened some of the Bromus and Reed Canary Grass into a nest for sitting in the combined shades of a licheny sprawling Manitoba Maple and a stocky low-spreading Ash tree.

The elegantly up curved twigs of the Ash frame the right-hand part of my

Hoople Creek in Winter "Icebound Treasure"

19 March 2014 found us on County Road 14, 2.3 km NNW Ingleside, Ontario, looking across a snowy field where Hoople Creek winds toward the bridge on Highway 401. An intermittent stream of long trucks flowed from east to west and from west to east, while the creek itself appeared motionless, its stream running beneath ice and snow. Its path where water had melted and re-frozen, showed pale sea-green and amber. We were 700 metres east-south-east of where the Transcanada and Enbridge pipelines cross Hoople Creek. This was the first of our visits to stream crossings along the route of the pipelines that are proposed to carry the Energy East bitumen to New Brunswick. 

Launching an independant assessment of the Energy East pipeline route

This is a painting that I did at our long term amphibian monitoring site near the Trans Canada pipeline crossing of the Wicklow River, south of Cochrane in 2010. The young Spruces here are growing under Aspens and Poplars on claybelt soil that was an open field when Fred and Jim Rising first caught Wood Frogs here in 1972. We've learned that the highway was re-routed in 1960, about the time of construction of the Trans Canada Pipeline, and it may well be that these two events were coordinated.

Landscape Art and Science is what we do - the partnership of a biologist and an artist for exploring and documenting Canada's landscapes in the face of environmental change. In 2014 we are launching an independent assessment to find out what the characteristics of the rivers and streams are that the Energy East Pipeline would cross. Our field work will focus on Ontario through spring and early summer, and in the late summer and fall, we'll explore the route from New Brunswick to Alberta and back.