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

Vulnerable Natives

Aleta's watercolour of the rare Hickorynut mussel, Obovaria olivaria

In May 2013 we found ourselves rushing back from Lake Erie to address the St Lawrence Institute's 20th Annual Symposium on the Great Lakes / St. Lawrence River Ecosystem, on the subject of "St Lawrence tributaries in Ontario as refuges for Unionid Mussels." Several of these tributaries are crossed by the Enbridge/Transcanada pipelines, and consideration of their refuges must be part of planning for any changes to the pipelines.

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.