April - December 2022

Friend & tenant, Judy Courteau, in our neighbouring white ‘Weirs’ house, has again spent almost all of her time in Ottawa, caring for ailing family members... Numerous days of our own were degraded by the need for dentistry and other medical interruptions...

 

With all this going on, no posts were made to our blogs: daily paintings, adaptating, quiet curatorial time, doing natural history, or soundcloud, though we have continued to report to the NatureList. A series of misfortunes took down our personal website, pinicola.ca, leaving us with the not-completely-updated https://fragileinheritance.ca/ as our web portal.

 

Meetings, increasingly in person, continued, of the municipal Environmental Advisory Committee, South Nation Conservation Fish & Wildlife Committee, Herp Atlas Publications Committee,  and North Grenville Historical Society (Fred on the Board as “natural historian”)...  Weekly Mudpuppy Nights ran on Fridays until 18 March and resumed on 24 October, with lots of help from Matt Keevil & Amanda Bennett. Fred’s nightly auditory monitoring of frog, Bird, and Mammal calling began on 1 March, and continued until 1 August.

 

Two tree species gave very different contrasts between 2021 and 2022: the Honey Locusts in the Bishops Mills intersection had burgeoned with so many pods in 2021 that bushels of them were still present in the next March, but there was no flowering evident, and only one pod dropped into the intersection in 2022. Apples on the other hand produced well in 2021, and so exuberantly in 2022 that two major branches of our Duchess of Oldenburg tree were broken by the weight of the fruit.

 

All of this occurred along with the under-lying anxieties of Bill 23, mask-or-not viral variants, governmental inaction on climate change, and the Putinesque notion that despite the memories of the Holodomor, a brief rampage of war crimes would enthuse Ukrainians to accept governance by the vodka-soaked Russian plutocracy.

 

The account of March from last year’s letter foreshadowed much of how 2022 went: “Aleta arrived home from [six months with her parents in] BC on the 9 ^th , 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.”

 

...after the 2021 annual letter was sent out, in 2022 on 25 March: As the Artist returned from a trip to the dump, she saw the old specimen freezer had slid off the 15 cm mound of clear ice that the workmen had put it on when they moved it away from the walls they were sheathing. Her husband the Research Curator hadn't heard anything from inside as it slid over, and it announced a meso-scale "stinkeroo" by leaking odorous liquid onto the path beside the shipping container. So we wrenched the lid open and the Artist assembled empty bins, donned rubber gloves, and wielding rock rake and shovel, dug down to material at the bottom which clearly hadn't been frozen for some time. This included a 4 m Python from a big die-off of animals that Little Ray's Nature Centre had suffered in the early 2000s. It's now fertilizing the Buckthorn-to-Maple Grove, and when visitors come around in the summer, they'll find nice piles of Snake ribs & vertebrae. Then the Research Curator slipped on the mound of ice and seriously twisted his knee as the emptied freezer was being wrenched back into an upright position. [Later: we hosed it out when warm weather arrived, and moved it out to the road, where, dry and innofensive, it was taken by the salvager of scrap metal.]

April: Mannie Giles moved into the Boler trailer as a general volunteer, enthusing over gardening and construction. With Mannie & Judy we continued our spring quest for various Amphibians, getting an exceptional number of female Chorus Frogs for Vance Trudeau’s captive colony from the Merrickville population, and hearing a single male calling from the damp spot across the street from our houses, while the Volvo became a less-&-less reliable mode of transportation. We began our export of specimens by sending herps to Julia Riley, a professor at Mount Allison University, for her new Herpetology course.

May: We helped Jenn & Rory, who had moved in December from one Kemptville house to another, in the transplanting of favourite bushes and ferns to their new place and to ours.  Young interns Abbey Sugars-Keen & Corbin Greer began their two-months placement through Amphibian and Reptiles Conservation Canada by sorting Francis Cook’s books and papers. We began the restoration of Marsh Marigolds by planting a clump in the swamp at the foot of Hares Hill Road, and field work transitioned from frogs to breeding Turtles. On 21 May, as we were taking down our tent from Bishops Mills Day the wind called a "derecho" (much less severe here than in Ottawa) took down a big Manitoba Maple that had been weakened by trimming after the 1998 Ice Storm, and filled the Weirs House backyard with foliage. Aleta attended Jenn & Rory’s home birth of Sebastian Lars Harold Tanner on 28 May, adding to the plethora of birthdays & anniversaries with which May is thronged (Fred, Fred & Aleta, Jenn, Sam, and now Baz).

June: We camped for a night at Wintergreen Studios near Westport, Ontario, giving a workshop at the Land Art bioblitz, where we surveyed the meagre Molluscan fauna, fascinating the participants by finishing each other’s sentences as we introduced them to the orange-slimed slug Arion subfuscus. In the Kemptville Creek swamp at the Limerick Road Iron Bridge, the previously exuberant Buttonbush began to sprout from whatever had killed off most of the emergent stems over the winter, though none of the killed-back bushes flowered.

 

Aleta was stricken with a fever which took her to death’s door before it was diagnosed by a sharp-witted doctor at the Ottawa Hospital as Anaplasmosis from an undetected tick, which was quickly controlled by a prescription for Doxycycline. Fred addressed an Oxford-on-Rideau School  class on indigenous agriculture & post-glacial history, as part of an Historical Society programme of historical content. Our neighbour Lisa Poushinsky set up a decorated Street Piano at the Kemptville Library, and ran Sunday afternoon sing-along concerts. The Volvo’s odometer display began to fail, flirting with “666666 km” and other forbidden numbers, and work continued on Francis Cook’s archives.

July: On Canada Day we visited the Grape-swathed bushy island in the paved commercial lot of the Smiths Falls Canadian Tire, 44.89121° N 76.02964° W, where Cepaea hortensis snails swarm up the stems of 2 metre tall Asclepias syriaca (Common Milkweed), and where the 'best poutine in Smiths Falls' is available. The Volvo finally having emulated the Wonderful One Horse Shay, Corey found a nearly-as-good-as-new 12-year-old Prius for us in Montreal. Parsnips beside the Pipers House slab had their umbels of flowers destroyed by Depressaria pastinacella (Parsnip Webworm), though these under-appreciated biocontrol agents were almost absent from all roadside stands this year.  Since Fragile Inheritance is now a non-profit organization, we were eligible for an intern through the “Sustainable Capacity Foundation,” and kindred spirit Rachel Everett-Fry began a six-month placement. Then late-summer intern Ulyses Escandon began transcribing the labels in ours & Carleton University’s desiccated specimens. Due to Aleta’s COVID-shyness, we restricted ourselves to only one “in-person” day at our 4 day annual church camp in Almonte, and listened to the rest via conference call.  Fred presented his poem “Mud Season” to Her Honour, Elizabeth Dowdeswell, the Ontario Lieutenant Governor, at a North Grenville roundtable at the Municipal Centre. We spent only one day at the week-long Dumoine Art Camp, and held an invertebrate identification  workshop for the Ottawa Field Naturalist Club at High Falls of the South Nation River in Casselman, finding a living Lampsilis Lamp Mussel, and seeing no living Zebra Mussels at the foot of the wide limestone sweep of the falls. 

After a nearly frogless spring on the 'doing the streets' transect, juvenile Green Frogs showed up on 22 July, and on 24 July we had a juvenile Leopard Frog, the earliest date (by one day) that we have recorded. This presaged a modest recovery in Leopard Frog numbers, which had been very low since 2014.

October: On 5 October Fred picked Aleta up from her overnight flight from BC, and then to Shanly to attend a thanksgiving ceremony at The Healing Place with South Nation Conservation and their First Nations partners. We brought home some dried Pinto Beans and a boxful of Potatoes from the “Three Sisters” Garden. The site is planted with significant trees, including two of the rare native Swamp White Oak, which Clay Shearer had discovered this summer at Oak Valley; we promised to look into Parsnips & Webworms there in 2023. We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner with Joyce and Tom Cook, learning that there’s been a moderate number of Leopard Frogs around their house this summer. We memorialize the roadkill on the night that Leopard Frogs go from their summer fields toward their aquatic hibernation sites as Burn Henry Ford in Effigy Night, and on 13 October the somewhat recovered populations suffered a fairly serious event between Oxford Mills and Bishops Mills. After an election with a certain amount of name-calling and blaming-council-for-not-stopping-the-province-from-planning-a-jail, the all-new council of four years ago was re-elected, though without any promises for a municipal natural history museum. On 16 October we zoomed up the Gatineau valley to Cheryl Doran’s cottage, and on 18 October went with Rachel to sample snails and plants in the Burnt Lands alvar, Breezy Heights, and the Shaw Woods. Our family physician prescribed both of us full 10-day courses of Doxycycline, to be kept as a supply of prophylactic 2-pill doses for tick-borne diseases whenever we find an embedded tick, and we were soon able to share a dose with Clay. Fragile Inheritance began planning for partnership with the Canadian Museum of Nature, and Fred gave our talk at the  St Lawrence River Institute “Ways of Knowing' symposium: Pleasures and perils of life as unemployable nomadic peasant scholars: the Energy East Pipeline.” On 29 October Aleta, Jennifer, and 5 month old Sebastian departed for Osoyoos, upon hearing that their mother/grandmother was admitted to Long Term Care with a diagnosis of “palliative.”

November:  Fred collected bunches of tall Phragmites reeds, alien and native, for display in the  History Hub of the North Grenville Historical Society, drove to Ingleside with Rachel to take his document about mussels to the Friends of Hoople Creek AGM, and promised to do surveys of the creek and Bay in 2023. He went with Tom Graham to a protest of the "More Habitat Destroyed Faster" Bill 23 https://thenarwhal.ca/topics/bill-23-ontario-housing/ at the Brockville office of our MPP, who has the misfortune to be the Minister Responsible for Habitat Destruction. Fred presented “Mudpuppies, Slugs and Pipelines” via Zoom to Prince Edward County Field Naturalists. Meanwhile, Aleta spent November in Osoyoos, BC, where she cared for her mother in her last week of life, accompanied by Jennifer and 5 month old Sebastian.

Aleta came down with COVID the day after her mother Martha died, and was nursed back to health by Jennifer. After Jenn and babe returned, she stayed for another couple of weeks to rest and then with stepson Corey Wood’s help, packed up her mother’s belongings for shipping home to Ontario, said goodbye to her father, and Mark & his wife Donna, and flew back to Ottawa on 30 November.

December: Within a few days of being home, Aleta heard from her brother Mark that Dad was in hospital and failing rapidly. He passed away 72 hours later, one month and a day after his wife. The family will gather in June for a small graveside ceremony as their ashes are interred.   

Links to their obituaries and photo albums are:

Martha’s obituary: https://nunes-pottinger.com/obituary/martha-karstad/

Celebration of Life album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/9dRKu98VHGucUDHK9

Lars’s obituary: https://nunes-pottinger.com/obituary/lars-karstad/

Celebration of Life album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/9QZcUaQcqDVRjzHh7

Fred and Rachel drove to the River Institute in Cornwall for another of Fred’s presentations - on Unionid mussels, and despite exhaustion, Aleta was ready for her two-week long art show at the History Hub in Kemptville on 10 December. The show was a success, thanks to planning, organizing, and assistance by Jennifer. On 17 December the first shipment of Karstad boxes from Osoyoos arrived at Jennifer & Rory’s house. A heavy snowstorm caused an 11 hour  Hydro outage that killed our water pump and internet, and Aleta decided to purchase a gas-powered generator.  As ever, we celebrated the onset of the solar year with a fire which allows the year's non-recyclable waste to go out in a blaze of glory, with steamed pudding and 'special sauce' served afterwards. Then the ecclesiastical new year as Christmas dinner with Joyce & Tom Cook, and the calendar New Year, with light rain, a Robin on the wires across the street, and warmth, snow, and rain that brought the creek up to 7 times its average flow within a week.

28 December: FreeStyle Libre 2

Even Julius Caesar

Didn’t have a little device

That sang a little song

to tell him when to stab himself –

He had to rely on his friends.

 

Fred, extolling the convenience of his new glucose monitor https://www.freestyle.abbott/ca-en/freestyle-libre-2.html

So we hope everyone can have as tranquil & hopeful a year ahead as possible. In 2023 we plan to continue Mudpuppy Nights, begin row cropping of small-seeded vegetables, to encourage via partnerships, a "green & growing" municipal transition, surveying Unionid mussels & other biota along the St Lawrence River, trips to British Columbia and New Brunswick, lots of paintings & publications, interns and grandkids, and eager chainsaws ripping up multiple cords of invasive firewood in time to be dry for the coming winter.