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Volume 2 Number 2 December 2020 |
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The Museum Trailer
On 6 October our “museum trailer”, containing cabinets, shelving, and specimens, was finally moved 300 metres from where it has been waiting for six years at the end of our field, to a spot offered by our neighbour Kevin Willey across the street from our house.
Algonquin Towing had made an attempt to move it in July, but a number of its 12 wheels were seized. After Kevin had soaked the brakes a few times with penetrating oil, we made, we called again for the big 401 tow truck. One pair of rear wheels were still seized, and after the end of our culvert was crushed, and deep ruts ploughed in the sandy ditch, as the trailer tilted dangerously.
A second, even larger tow truck was called to help the first one turn onto the road, and then to drag the rear end of the trailer sideways to achieve the right-angle turn as the first truck pulled it into its new location. A black stripe of melted rubber from the smoking tires can still be seen “painted” all the way down the centre line.
It's a relief to have the big trailer right across the road from our house. It's such a big room, like a mini-museum, with beautiful daylight glowing through its fibreglass roof, and so many shelves and cabinets... it even smells like a museum. In here we will curate, with the help of volunteers, and from here specimens will make their way to larger museums for "saferkeeping".
Here is the Museum Trailer "at home" with the November full moon rising.
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THANK YOU, Matt Keevil & Amanda Bennett, for tipping eight tall cabinets back into position, and picking up the chaos of fallen boxes! Since then, Fred and Aleta have been working to pack the end of the trailer snug with boxes of mussels and the "Canadian Library of Drifted Material", relieving the congestion of their living room, in preparation for having the house foundation repaired and floors straightened. ONWARD! |
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single
Obovaria olivaria shell, collected on Petrie Island, Ottawa River, on 23 September. |
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This droughty early summer of record low water would have been perfect for doing shore surveys for Unionid mussels, the Ottawa Field Naturalist Club had granted funds to cover our mileage to do just that, and we struggled all through the drought to arrange a contract with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to survey
Obovaria olivaria, the Hickorynut, along the Ottawa River. DFO staff were not allowed to do fieldwork in the summer of COVID-19, and neither were researchers at the Canadian Museum of Nature, who have been collaborating with them on mussel surveys. So our CMN colleague Andre Martel encouraged us to submit a proposal to the DFO for shoreline surveys of the upper reaches of the Ottawa River.
There was, however, something stunning about the combination of pandemic and hot dry weather, and we only got out to do one survey - the upstream branches of the Castor River - http://www.doingnaturalhistory.com/2020/07/visits-to-castor-river.html - which proved surprisingly underpopulated with Unionids, but did provide the plant press with the first specimens of
Cannabis we’ve ever encountered in the wild.
Unfortunately our
Obovaria methodology was premised on the severe drought that we were experiencing right up until late August, when the contract was issued and the heavens opened and the rivers came up. We set out on 3 September with Judy Courteau, and worked upstream, finding interesting stuff (notes & specimens aren’t fully processed yet), but no
Obovaria.
When we got to the New Liskeard area, where Robin Mellway & Fred had made 300 km range extensions of this and two other mussel species in 2000, the water was 1.5 metres higher than it had been then, and we didn't see a single Unionid (this is a familiar problem in surveying U-shaped prairie and Clay Belt rivers when the flow is high or normal). It also seems that the drought had hit Bishops Mills harder than anywhere else in the Ottawa drainage, and we hadn't inquired enough about what conditions were like elsewhere. When we got there, friends told us they'd raised lots of hay all summer in New Liskeard.
We made a couple of outings to the river below Ottawa, but the water was high there, too. On Petrie Island we did find one Hickorynut, and met Carol Howard Donati, posting mussels to iNaturalist. She was the first other 'musselhead' we've ever encountered in the field. She had found one
Obovaria there in June, and confirmed that "something had happened" to the big deposits of shells there.
In the process of these surveys, we did learn a lot about reaches of the river that we hadn't investigated before, and where we'll be able to stop in the future when water levels are lower. In arranging for a final trip (which we didn't take) we made contact with Debby Foley, a natural resources volunteer in Swisha, who said the water there was too high to find mussels, but to whom we've sent our mussel identification guide and the Hickorynut COSEWIC report, and she'll be on the lookout for us.
Recently, we’ve been discussing Obovaria with the Ottawa Riverkeepers - https://www.ottawariverkeeper.ca/what-we-do-2/issues/endangered-species/the-hickorynut/ - and there may be a citizen science project with them in 2021.
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When we were at the Niagara Dufferin Island Nature Area in 2008, we gathered some Poke (
Phytolacca americana) seeds to see how they would fare with climate change in Bishops Mills. This is a spectacular metres-high perennial broad-leaved herb, which produces spring shoots which used, before they were shown to contain a carcinogen, to be eaten in the spring as a North American analog of Asparagus.
Fred has written a history of our experience with this fascinating native plant, from 2008 until the present, which we've posted on DoingNaturalHistory
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Obvious Snails and Where They Weren't |
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Xerolenta obvia actively feeding on
Hawkweed, at the north side of Hwy 7a,
just
east of Yelverton, 44.16049° N 78.71592° W,
where
they were absent in 2010. |
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When we drove to Barrie to pick up the Kijjjji kayaks, our main research activity was stopping at places where we'd recorded the presence or absence of
Xerolenta obvia "Obvious Snails" at previous visits.
We had 37 of these sites, but we were rushed and dusk fell sooner than it had earlier in the summer, so we only stopped at 10 sites, of which four hadn’t had
Xerolenta at a previous visit, two where we hadn’t had them in 2010 (Hwy7a, E edge of Yelverton, and Hwy7a W of Hwy115,1.64km E of Cavan) and four at which we'd observed
Xerolenta before.
We’re also continuing to map the spread of
Xerolenta around the Hwy 416/43 interchange in Kemptville. We try to stop somewhere along each superhighway interchange to look for them, and we’re developing drive-by protocols for finding them along superhighways without stopping. |
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It's always World Something Day... I wonder if habitat destruction wonks have a World Drain-the-swamp day, or Don't-bother-to-test-the-new-chemical Day, or Swerve-to-run-over-Turtles Day?
...if corporations are persons, don't they deserve the same kind of mental health care that Human Persons get? ...oh you say that mental health care is very slow and erratic in Ontario?
...If we were a grown-up society there would be an app, based on human facial recognition software, which would burp out the probable karyotype of any photo of a member of the
jeffersonianum salamander complex - but alas, money is doled out by antropocentrics and the aristocracy (field biologists) are a persecuted minority. |
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The database is almost at 47,000 records, and is really more than an "eastern Ontario" library of natural history data, spanning as it does, the continent over 60 years.
David Hooey of Blue Anchora, has been working steadily away in the background, uploading records to servers in Toronto and Montreal, and coordinating services to retrieve it in flexible ways - reinventing or emulating the antique Foxpro that Fred still uses for entering his field notes, and for querying to answer questions posed to him by his colleagues.
When Dave has it all uploaded to Digital Ocean and Firestore, and into Elasticsearch for advanced querying (this one will even produce graphic rangemaps) ...we will dip into funds from the Glen Davis Conservation Leadership Prize to pay him for this first stage. Plans are afoot to upload all of Aleta's photographs so that they can be coordinated with Fred's records, and for coordinating with iNaturalist and other global biodiversity databases.
Then Dave will proceed with the second phase of the work - the user interface - the website portal of the database... and by that time we'd better have a name for it. All suggestions are welcome!
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The three month NatureMatch campaign on Indiegogo was a great success - over $10,000 raised, and we've had our second printing of 300 games.
The last of the "perks" ordered by our enthusiastic backers are being shipped out this week, and Aleta is waiting for another carton of 40, to satisfy local folks in their search for beautiful and educational gifts. We have placed them in "To Be Continued" a consignment shop in Kemptville, and "Co-Ba Studios" a print shop in Merrickville.
Our printer, "The Playing Card Factory" in Mississauga, Ontario, is prompt with shipping, so there's still time to order through our website naturematch.ca |
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Contact Aleta by e-mail <karstad@pinicola.ca> to order a
6.5 x 8.5 in. calendar of Aleta Karstad watercolours, featuring twelve images from the NatureMatch game. Price $18 |
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PUBLICATIONS & ARTICLES SINCE JUNE:
Schueler, Frederick W. 2020. "You will find appended field notes from a brief visit to the larger lake on 12 June 2020..." unpublished report to Lakeland Estates about herbiciding lakes. 21 June 2020.
Schueler, Fred, and Aleta Karstad. 2020. Co-existence of Unionids and
Dreissena in eastern Ontario & along the St-Lawrence River. in: Morris, T .J., McNichols-O’Rourke, K. A., and Reid, S.M. (Editors). 2020. Proceedings of the 2019 Canadian Freshwater Mollusc Research Meeting: December 3-4, 2019, Burlington, Ontario. Can. Tech. Rep. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 3352: viii + 34 p.
Schueler, Fred, and Aleta Karstad. 2020. Invasion of the South Nation River by Banded & Chinese Mystery snails (poster paper). in: Morris, T .J., McNichols-O’Rourke, K. A., and Reid, S.M. (Editors). 2020. Proceedings of the 2019 Canadian Freshwater Mollusc Research Meeting: December 3-4, 2019, Burlington, Ontario. Can. Tech. Rep. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 3352: viii + 34 p.
Schueler, Fred. 2020. An essay on the Robertson-headed Screw. North Grenville Times, 1 July 2020 – (photo by Aleta Karstad) https://ngtimes.ca/an-essay-on-the-robertson-headed-screw/
Schueler, Fred. 2020. Golden-Spangled Lawns [Bird's-foot Trefoil]. North Grenville Times, 5 August 2020. https://ngtimes.ca/golden-spangled-lawns/
Olson, Bob. (Fred Schueler, Kerry Coleman, Stew Hamill, Alan Olson). 2020. EVERYBODY IS SEEING MILK SNAKES! Here are several discussions about milk snakes. CHORUS, Newsletter of the Ottawa Amphibian and Reptile Association 36(2):3-5. triggered by our finding a Milk Snake dead on the road in Bishops Mills, 14 August 2020, after forty-five years when Francis Cook and Aleta & I have herped around Bishops Mills without seeing any.
Karstad, Aleta. 2020. NATUREMATCH - The game you can play with my watercolours! CHORUS, Newsletter of the Ottawa Amphibian and Reptile Association 36(2):10
Thomson, Hilary. 2020. Local biologists need help with specimen inventory. North Grenville Times, 19 August 2020. https://ngtimes.ca/local-biologists-need-help-with-specimen-inventory/
Thomson, Hilary. 2020. Local artist creates memory game with original art. North Grenville Times, 19 August 2020. https://ngtimes.ca/local-artist-creates-memory-game-with-original-art/
Schueler, Fred, & Aleta Karstad. 2020. The Marijuana scent of autumnal 400-series highways! North Grenville Times - 1 October 2020 - https://ngtimes.ca/the-marijuana-scent-of-autumnal-400-series-highways/
Karstad, Aleta. 2020. Letter to the Editor – Protect Historical Records, North Grenville Times 8(42):4 - 21 October 2020 - https://ngtimes.ca/letter-to-the-editor-protect-historical-records/
Schueler, Fred. 2020. Onset of Mudpuppy Nights in Oxford Mills. North Grenville Times, 28 October 2020 - https://ngtimes.ca/onset-of-mudpuppy-nights-in-oxford-mills/
Thomson, Hilary. 2020. NatureMatch now Available to Public. North Grenville Times, 12 November 2020. https://ngtimes.ca/naturematch-now-available-to-public/
Aleta donated the oil painting “Limerick Forest Pink Ladyslipper” to South Nation Conservation’s (SNC) first ever Art for Trees online silent art auction. The auction raised nearly $6,500 for the Conservation Authority’s spring 2021 tree planting season.
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