Corey Wood, Aleta Karstad, Frederick W. Schueler, and Jennifer Schueler, in the summer of 2002, as we moved into the Bishops Mills General Store building, and began to call it the Bishops Mills Natural History Centre. We're situated on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain in Bishops Mills, Grenville County, Ontario, Canada.

We work at learning, writing about and illustrating the landscape and the natural communities that we live among and have studied, both locally and all across the glaciated part of North America.

Thirty-five years of quotes and sayings from the Pinicola commonplace book

How to live in Eastern Ontario: a guide for Human People -- the beta or honeymoon edition of 25 August 2007

Home at Pinicola.ca

Bishops Mills Natural History Centre

Weirs House

Aleta Karstad

Karstad books

illustrated nature journals

The Thirty Years Later Expedition

Marigold the Dog, Fred, and Aleta, Christmas 2008.

About Us

Our work is natural history exploration (by collecting specimens and data that document the distribution and abundance of species), interpretation (through popular books and workshops in methods of illustrated journal keeping), illustration (primarily in ink and watercolour), & analysis (of distribution, abundance, and geographic variation of organisms).

In the past, the species we focused on were predominantly Amphibians and reptiles, but recently we have begun to concentrate on Mollusks: the many species of land snails which are an under-appreciated aspect of Canada's biodiversity, and the subtly lovely Unionid mussels which are our largest invertebrate animals, threatened by siltation, pollution, and invasive alien species.

After a couple of decades when our "work" focused on exploration across Canada in the preparation of popular books, and collecting for the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in 1993 we began to call ourselves the Biological Checklist of the Kemptville Creek Drainage Basin, hoping to create a database that would contain records of all organisms in the drainage basin, based on information computerized by governments, museums, & other inventory-compilers, naturalists' field notes, and the scientific literature. In 1997 we initiated the founding of the Eastern Ontario Biodiversity Museum to provide a home for the orphaned natural history collections of Carleton University, and in August 2002, opened the Bishops Mills Natural History Centre to further accommodate natural history collections and provide space for all of our endeavours in research, curation, art, and education.

In 2009-2010, in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Nature, we began the programme of revisits to the places we explored in the 1970s and 1980s across Canada, from sea to sea to sea, that we call the Thirty Years Later Expedition, testing the hypotheses we formed then about the course of possible ecological change.