“Pointillist Portrait of Canada”

Misty Niskonlith Morning  by Peter Stuhlmann, 23 September 2016, 35.5 x 28 cm, acrylic

 Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. This technique relies on the ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to blend the colour spots into a fuller range of tones. Some maps of the ranges of species have areas of tone, but those that have a dot for each location where the species has been found are more useful. Imagine a huge map of Canada, with a coloured dot where we’ve collected, noted, photographed, or painted something. This, as an ongoing project, is a pointillist portrait of Canada, containing a depth of information that when analyzed, or when the dots are connected, makes possible an understanding of not just individual species, but ecological communities, in both history and real time. 

In our youth, Fred began keeping field notes as a teenager – alas for the loss of the Red Book of West Haven! - and learned the Grinnell system of field notes as an undergraduate, while Aleta was taught prose-&-sketching natural history journaling by Frank Ross. As biological illustrator and Research Associate, we spent several years at the National Museum of Canada/National Museum of Natural Sciences with Francis Cook and Don McAllister, focused on collecting, keeping records and doing paintings of what was found and seen across Canada, to be studied for an understanding of current conditions and for comparison with what would happen in the future.

 

What we've already done includes:

• Book text and illustrations for Canadian Nature Notebook, Wild Seasons Daybook, A Place to Walk, Fragile Inheritance, Art & Science in the South Nation Watershed, Island of Biodiversity, and Landscape: Progress towards a philosophy of sustainable occupancy.
   
• Student apprentices/interns on many projects
  
  
• focusing on observations & specimens that can be used to document ecological change.

• laying down series of specimens & observations until support is garnered for the time required for writing up or testing our hypotheses
  
  
• keeping data in lieu of specimens (as the museum stopped accepting collections in the early 1990s)
  
  
• keeping mostly shell & herbarium specimens that don't require much curation 
   
• the Canadian Library of Drifted Material as a physical record of what has been washed up on particular shores at particular times 
   
• individually exportable data records as the dots in a pointillist portrait, to be used by those interested in a taxon or subject, even without support to compile the whole portrait.

We’ve long been concerned about the loss of naturalists’ field notes (Anonymous [F.W. Schueler]. 1993. Historic Records on archival paper. Ontario Herpetofaunal Summary Newsletter, April 1993:4). This concern has been increased by the modern fragmentation of more complete records into public databases that focus only on particular taxa or species or communities at risk. Now that we’re elders ourselves, we’re very concerned to get all the material we’ve gathered (through our freedom from institutional constraints) into a coherent body of work, available for use by others.

 

A map of our 141.852 databbase records in which red=herps (Amphibians & ‘reptiles’), orange=Molluscs, yellow=Crayfish, blue=birds, green=plants, purple=fish or Mammal, white=event or inorganic. The map is mostly red because they are layered in the above order, see Table 1 for relative numbers of different kinds of records. Thanks to Dave Seburn for making the map.

 The framework of this portrait (and the project that consumes Fred’s time and documents all our other work) is the biographical table of the Foxpro database – as described at - http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/database/database.htm - now (13 Jan 2020) 141,852 records, and summarized in Table 1. 

As far as we know, no-one else maintains a database that is, in the tradition of Grinellian field notes, structured to export individual records of species and events, as well as being readable as a prose narrative of travels, landscapes, and events (poems are in individual records).

One major goal is to get specimens into museums. This will flesh out the portrait with accurate identifications of the species we have encountered. Another goal is to update the format of the database so the portrait can include Aleta’s images. The older images remain unphotographed (though we now have a scanner that can do this at high precision). Generous thousands of records remain to be entered from previous years’ notes and from the waypoints of the 2014 & 2015 trips across Canada. Loose leaf field note pages from 2002-2018 also require binding.

This is more than we can handle ourselves, so we need institutional commitments to the Portrait, or substantial financial backing which will enable the project to become an institution.

Possible Projects:

• find direct institutional acknowledgement and support for the Portrait as a whole
  
  
• reach volunteers/interns/assistants who would be interested in helping with aspects of the Portrait, while understanding the whole.
  
• get http://pinicola.ca back on line and arrange http://fragileinheritance.org so it can be modified.
  
• get specimens into museums to be identified – sorting, curation, checking, databasing: mostly plants, Molluscs, and vertebrates for skeletons
  
• get specimen records back from all museums that hold our specimens
  
• update the format of the database and translate input & output programmes to 1) include images, 2) match iNaturalist’s format, and 3) match the Darwin Core format.
  
• Photograph/scan older images and illustrated journal pages
  
• input and georeference the generous thousands of records from the hand-written notes of the 1970s & early 1980s, non-specimen records in the text files from the 1980s, local herp records which will be valuable for analysis of population trends, but which weren’t digitized for the Ontario Herpetofaunal Summary atlas in the mid-1990s. unentered notes from subsequent years, and expansion of unprocessed waypoints into proper records. 
   
• update the names of species which have changed with recent DNA-based taxonomic revisions and correct the co-ordinates of some frequently visited sites where the present co-ords are based on topo maps rather than GPS or online maps.
  
  
• inventory, scan, & bind field note pages from 2002-2019 and pre-1990 years
  
• find students to continue and analyse data from our long-term monitoring projects
  
• put out collections of writing & illustrations on particular subjects as books: Poetry, Chorus Frogs, Ecological monitoring; How to paint fish en plein air; Carbon sequestration, etc.
  
  Possible methods:
  
  • publicity locally and nationally
    
  • book launch events
    
  • public “find out” trips to solve natural history problems – either by us or by parties working with us
    
    
  • repeated applications for funding from foundations
    
  • cleaning up the premises to look respectable
    
  • online sales that produce net income
    
  • escalate the ‘weekly’ newsletters into a quarterly magazine of progress on and accounts & images from the Portrait as a perk for crowd-funding contributions or subscriptions.
    
  • Fragile Inheritance as a membership organization publishes the magazine and works on other art, science, and loving-the-land projects.
    
    
  • adequately publicized, unrushed transCanada painting-a-day trips, revisiting places we’ve studied in the past.
  
  
  So this is what we see as the rest of our 'careers:' making what we've done publicly accessible by getting records, text, & images into a modern database, getting specimens into museums,  retrieving records of already identified specimens from museums, and publishing summaries & analysis of the material, while engaging students & volunteers in the experience of understanding deglaciated north America, its flora & fauna, and how it has changed & may change in the future. If you'd like to help or collabborate in any way, or if there's a class of our data that you think you might be able to use, don't hesitate to let us know.
  
  

Frederick W. Schueler <bckcdb@istar.ca> & Aleta Karstad <karstad@pinicola.ca> - Fragile Inheritance Natural History - 4 & 6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0 - on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W (613) 299-3107

Table 1: Classes of records in the biographical table of the database

Overall

Database evaluation of records from all years on 2020Jan13/1459:33: 141,852 FWSOBS records, including 1822 unprocessed waypoint records, 870 records needing more editing, and 33,269 records from Bishops Mills, 10,149 departure records, and 54,613 observational (not departure) records from the North Grenville area. These include 44,492 herpetological records, 14,260 auditory monitoring records, 13,076 malacological records, 2473 Unionid records flipped for DFO, 1151 Unionid records not flipped for DFO, 510 NO:Unionidae records, 1510 other invertebrate records, 2684 piscine records, 11,617 avian records, 7015 mammal records, 24,868 botanical records, 16,120 on-road creature records, 17,048 other driveby records, and 7075 'doing the streets' records from Bishops Mills. Newfoundland records: 149, Nova Scotia records: 692, New Brunswick records: 4246, Quebec records: 4850, Ontario records: 115,588, Manitoba records: 1258, Saskatchewan records: 944, Alberta records: 149, British Columbia records: 5169, records from the territories: 149 -- 4543 records from the USA, 12 from Mexico. Top fifteen names: departure (10,149), Pseudacris crucifer (Spring Peeper, 8015), visit (7961), Rana pipiens (Leopard Frog, 6327), Phragmites australis (Reed, 5285), Bufo americanus (American Toad, 4423), Rana clamitans (Green Frog, 4135), no observation (3918), Rana sylvatica (Wood Frog, 3423), Hyla versicolor (Tetraploid Gray Treefrog, 3199), reference (cartigraphic reference, 2620), Rana catesbeiana (Bull Frog, 2203), Thamnophis sirtalis (Common Garter Snake, 1802), Cepaea nemoralis (‘Grove Snail,’ 1570), arrival (1518).

2019

Database evaluation of records from 2019 on 2020Jan13/1453:46: 5461 FWSOBS records, including 0 unprocessed waypoint records, 17 records needing more editing, and 2160 records from Bishops Mills, 435 departure records, and 3475 observational (not departure) records from the North Grenville area. These include 999 herpetological records, 555 auditory monitoring records, 317 malacological records, 41 Unionid records not flipped for DFO, 19 NO:Unionidae records, 88 other invertebrate records, 30 piscine records, 504 avian records, 391 mammal records, 1111 botanical records, 884 on-road creature records, 859 other driveby records, and 646 'doing the streets' records. New Brunswick records: 266, Quebec records: 114, Ontario records: 5068. Top fifteen names: departure (435), visit (426), no observation (350), Pseudacris crucifer (Spring Peeper, 220), Bufo americanus (American Toad, 173), Cepaea nemoralis (‘Grove Snail,’ 117), Hyla versicolor (Tetraploid Gray Treefrog, 109), Hemerocallis fulva (Orange Daylily, 98), Rana pipiens (Leopard Frog, 97), Sciurus carolinensis (Grey Squirrel, 96), Branta canadensis (Canada Goose, 81), Rana sylvatica (Wood Frog, 77), weather (climate observation, 65), Rana clamitans (Green Frog, 64), Pseudacris 'brown-maculata' (Great Lakes-St Lawrence Chorus Frog, 52).

nonfibre values – lessons learned in the double helix

I wrote this essay [for my now-discontinued column in the S&W Report] at the Westboro Medical Clinic in the Loblaws Superstore, on Richmond Road, in Ottawa, as we waited for physicians to be available to renew prescriptions as we set out on the Maritime leg of our 30-years-later expedition. The last time we were there (45.393N 75.749W), on the 2^nd of March 2010, we were delighted to see a Dryocopus pileatus (Pileated Woodpecker) steadily working halfway up a big streetside Ash tree, high above passing Dogs and pedestrians. It had given a trumpet-like flicker call when it flew in, and then was silent until it left, half an hour later.

These Crow-sized Woodpeckers used to be a shy species of the deep woods, but they're not surprising anywhere anymore, as hundreds of cellphone photos attest. One feature of eastern Ontario is that the trees in settlements are larger than those in the countryside, because urban lawn trees were valued as amenities, and urban woodlot trees were neglected, in the decades when the rural trees were only valued as fuel and lumber. This means that there's plenty of habitat for Pileateds in the city, once they'd gotten over their fear of being shot by anyone who noticed them.

The vernacular English name for Dryocopus pileatus was “Logcock,” which reflected the 18^th and 19^th Century practice of shooting and eating them at every opportunity. I've never tasted Dryocopus, but during my graduate student days as a bird collector, I did sample the related and also ant-eating Flicker (Colaptes), and can affirm that there was plenty of culinary motive for shooting at Woodpeckers – and Dryocopus was the only species that would provide a meal for an entire family.

One of the theories about why surviving Ivory-bill Woodpeckers, the other big North American Woodpecker species, are so hard to discover is that they're descended from those that were excessively wary of People, and preserve an inherited skittishness. The same selection for wariness would have applied to Pileateds in the decades when they were culinary trophies.

Among big Birds and Mammals, wariness is a combination of culture and genetic heritage, and over the past 30 years it seems to me that it has noticeably decreased in many species, though of course it's very hard to find any quantitative evidence to test this idea, or to disentangle the genetic and cultural components of the supposed change. We first woke up to this on our 1994 survey of the Toronto Waterfront, when Woodchucks, in a camp in a fenced parkinglot in an industrial harbour where they'd never been offered handouts, were, to our rural minds, recklessly bold.

This set us to thinking about our observation, on our honeymoon trip to British Columbia in 1973, that west coast Great Blue Herons were strikingly less wary than their Ontario relatives. We attributed this to the BC birds having been shot at for only a fraction of the time (1860-1940?) that the Ontario populations had been subject to (1780-1960?). But by 1994, and even more strikingly now, Ontario Herons are as bold as the western birds used to be: in a recent visit to the Lynde Shores estuary in Whitby the Herons got out of our way very reluctantly, and below the Oxford Mills Dam on Kemptville Creek they even seem sulky when an artist displaces them from their fishing spot on the shallow bedrock flats below the dam.

Once People stop shooting at big Birds, those that aren't skittish save energy by not fleeing every time they see a Person. As the conservation lesson has been learned by the human population, there are not only increased populations of big Birds, but also much better opportunities to see them. Ravens fly over the Westboro Medical Clinic, Turkeys peck at the very verge of Highway 416, Turkey Vultures rock along over the highways looking for the slain, local broods of Canada Geese loiter in the Ottawa River between the Champlain Bridge Islands under the hovering wings of Ospreys – and these are just the big birds I've seen in the past few days which wouldn't have been here thirty years ago. Even the Ring-bill Gulls that cruise the Ottawa River were brought back by the protection of the Migratory Bird Convention – the egg & feather trades had made Gulls rare in late 19^th Century North America

Of course, there are other contributing causes in many of these cases: cessation of DDT and nesting platforms for the Ospreys, dumps and by-catch for the Gulls, roadkill for the Vultures, and intentional releases of the Turkeys and Geese – but in each case the Birds today seem far less wary than they were in the past, and it's hard not to think that both culturally-transmitted learning and selection for genes for boldness have contributed to the increased populations.

Not shooting at a spectacular Bird when it's illegal to do so is a relatively easy lesson to learn: the observer himself would prefer not to be shot, so it's easy to infer that the Bird is similarly appreciative (though it's important to remember what a boost to status bringing back an unusual or edible trophy used to be).

Overall biodiversity and ecosystem integrity are larger problems that require more complex understanding from the human population, but perhaps not an impossible level of understanding. [When I wrote this] we were just back from Whitby where we found that the streams to be perplexingly barren, but with banks thronged by alien plants, and we were stunned by the extent to which the Pink Jewelweed, Impatiens glandulifera, Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), Bishops- or Gout-weed (Aegopodium podagraria), the amazing Dog-strangling Vine, Vincetoxicum, and Colts-foot (Tussalago farfara) have taken over the valleys of streams that drain into Lake Ontario. ...but that's another story.

Quiet Curatorial Time

The story is told that C. S. Lewis once compared ordinary moral standards to those in a caricaturedly brutal English boys boarding school. He speculated that the boys who were scorned in the school for hewing to the moral standards which they'd be expected to exhibit as adult English gentlemen were analogous to the few saints in the wider community who hewed, much more closely than the general population, to the Golden Rule, and that when we learned how it would have been appropriate to behave, we'd find that the saints were just ordinary folks, doing what ordinary folks should have ordinarily done.

Of course, for Lewis, this revelation would have come in post-mortem conversations with God in Heaven, but calculations of the ecological footprint of humanity demonstrate that humanity is currently boarding on the planet Earth, but not really planning to live here, and that a wide range of our conventional ways of acting are barbarically inappropriate if we or various other species are to hope to persist, and that many of our attempts to slow the growth of our footprint are caricatures of what would be necessary to actually reduce it.

One of the signs of residency is knowing who the neighbours are, and this makes regional, provincial, or national natural history museums, where the identity and lifestyles of our non-human neighbours are worked out, the primary instruments of political sovereignty, and the place where humanity learns what's going on (by "museum" we mean mostly the collections and studies accessed by the back door of the institution, not the displays, administration, and programmes accessed by the front door).

The immediate duty of the natural history museum is collecting and curation: finding, preserving, labelling, and cataloging samples of populations of the neighbours so that it can be known who, where, and when they were. In my experience the most prominent feature of attempts at curation is interruption, so uninterrupted quiet curatorial time becomes an idealistic goal, where, like Buddha under the Bo tree, one loses oneself in the repetitive little details of work that is cumulatively critical for understanding the world. There's also a similar timelessness to this work, since specimens, and natural history data, are meant to last for as long as anything humanity can foresee, so that a mistake made today has the potential to propagate error centuries into the future.

I guess that Aleta and I were launched on this idealistic experiment when we resolved, around 1977, to work for the National Museum Canada required, regardless of the administrative incarnation the actual institution was subject to. Our duties in this position have included transCanada collecting trips through the 1980s, the attempt to found a local all-taxon biotic inventory project in the 1990s, and a regional natural history museum in 1999-2005.

We like to think that each of these ventures has taught us a little something about the interface between idealism and its ambient society, so perhaps the present venture of heading back, Thirty Years Later, to places we've visited before, documenting this with a-painting-a-day, and trolling for support for a national organization dedicated to long-term natural history monitoring, will be more effective than the other ventures have been, and will result in freedom to take at least a modicum of quiet curatorial time to deal with specimens, data, and writing-up of our results.