January 2021 - March 2022

January: This covid-sequestered year began with our weekly Friday evening Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills, mailings-around of NatureMatch games, and a visit to Mike Nickerson and Claire Beetge’s Lanark Eco-Village. Then virtually, a busy schedule of on-line meetings… the North Grenville Historical Society (Fred newly on the board), the municipal Environmental Advisory Committee, the Kemptville Faith & Science group, the Rideau Valley Archeological Society, the Ontario herp atlas publications committee, and the South Nation Conservation Fish & Wildlife Committee. 

February: The municipal heritage advisory committee passed a resolution -

 

"The Heritage Advisory Committee recommends the North Grenville Council acknowledge the data and specimens accumulated by Dr Fred Schueler and Aleta Karstad as an important element of North Grenville's heritage, and take appropriate, prudent, and affordable action to assist them in finding homes for their specimens, and in making use of their data and specimens for research and public education."

 

Aleta resumed cleaning for Jennifer’s “ Blissful Home Cleaning” house-cleaning business, and there were alarms & excursions about the health of Skyea the Cat, and a zoomed Darwin Day phylum feast, followed up with a “biodiverse” list of what everyone was eating. 

March: began with meetings about sites for canoe launches along Kemptville Creek, and the North Grenville Arts Guild’s program of circulating paintings, each one added to by seven acrylic-weilders.

 

As was the case across the province, sugaring produced much less syrup than usual, even though we had tapped some trees on Kevin Willey’s land across the street. 

 

Frogs began to call on 20 March, which began a quest for Chorus Frogs for Vance Trudeau’s lab’s captive population, which is to provide stock for reintroductions to sites where this species has been lost – actual conservation action for Chorus Frogs 20 years after we held the first conference on their decline. We also, as usual, caught Wood Frogs for the Storey’s work on their freeze tolerance.

 

From 1 March to 1 August, Fred listened around the houses at night, recording any frogs, birds, or mammals he could hear, in "auditory monitoring from home." These records were entered into the Database, as well as all nature and weather observations throughout the day, all year round.

April: Chorus Frog work continued through April. Cary Gibson trimmed dangerous branches from all of our Maples, and we squished through the Fairmile Swamp and kayaked the Jock River, looking for Leopard Frog eggs for Vance’s lab. On 20 April we went to Brockville for our first COVID-19 vaccinations. Fred found a freshly road-killed Fisher in Limerick Forest, which had had a lot of flesh removed by Turkey Vultures. Since the Vultures had left the skin intact, we froze and shipped it Xpresspost in a cooler to the New Brunswick Museum, which was astonished to find that the cost of the shipping was $450. They immediately prepared the skin and dried the skeleton.

On 18 and 19 May we went out with Judy Courteau to collect local Gray Tree Frogs for freeze-tolerance work at the Storeys' lab at Carleton University.      

June: the Chorus Frog work continued with collecting tadpoles for Amphibian breeding program at Ottawa University.

 

We joined the campaign to make the Bishops Mills Cheese Factory a municipal park, inserting the idea that invasive Buckthorns and Emerald-bored Ashes should be removed, and the site made a demonstration area for depleted native plants.

 

Aleta accepted the “Participaction” challenge for the month of June, and accomplished it barefoot, enjoying a whole month of firefly displays as she walked our road at night. She painted a small watercolour of this phenomenon from memory. 

At the end of the month, Joyce and Tom & Wanda were clearing their drive shed of Francis Cook’s accumulated papers, and we took on 86 bins of papers and stored them in our museum trailer, hoping for time, space, and assistance to go through them, to preserve & analyse the data they contain, and archive the papers that need to be preserved. 

September: 7 September we attended from home, the South Nation Conservation virtual meeting of Fish & Wildlife Committee, where Fred sits as Chair and Aleta as a member, taking notes. We begin in earnest to clear and sort storage areas in preparation for the replacement of all the windows in the little red “Pipers House” which is our current residence.

 

In early September Jennifer announced that she was pregnant. The baby will join Fred, Jennifer, and Sam in having a May birthday. In response to a request from a lab at Queens University that is doing environmental DNA in streams tributary to Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River, we went with grandson Sam to Lyn & Golden Creeks for a sample of the rare mussel Ligumia nasuta.

 

At the Canadian Herpetological Society, 2021 Virtual Conference, we gave presentations on “Possible Hibernacular Limitation of Snake Species on the Eastern Ontario Champlain Sea Plain,” and  “Francis Cook's Herpetological Papers: Is There a Plan?”

 

Aleta’s visit to her parents, Lars & Martha Karstad in West Kelowna, began on 27 September to try to get her mom out of the COVID-overwhelmed hospital, set up palliative care for her, and to stay by her side until she passed. The family gathered round – Elsen from Kenya and Mark & family from Osoyoos B.C. -- but their 96 year-old mother recovered, and continued to improve under Aleta’s care and companionship. 

October: 11 Oct Fred to Jennifer's house for Thanksgiving dinner with Tanners and Joyce & Thomas Cook. Fred collected the land snails Cepaea nemoralis from home, and Xerolenta obvia from the Hwy 416/43 interchange in Kemptville, for the Storeys to study their freeze-tolerance.15 Oct marked the first Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills of the 23rd season.

November: The Volvo developed a tendency not to shift into gear, which entailed repeated visits to the Sports Car Factory in Hallville.

On 20 Nov, Kemptville's largest ever Xmas parade included grandson Sam on the Municipality of North Grenville's float.

March: Aleta arrived home from BC on the 9th, just in time to help with the longest and most productive sugaring season we've ever had - 18 litres of Maple syrup from less than a dozen trees. Pipers House exterior insulation with aluminum-coated foamboard was completed just before she arrived home, necessitating some modification of our phone and internet arrangements. We Zoomed our first Board meeting of Fragile Inheritance, and the Historical Society moved its archives into a spacious upper room in a building on the Kemptville Campus. 

We plan to resume nominally monthly Fragile Inheritance newsletter, "One Thing and Another" with a report on April's frog season.