Frederick W. Schueler, Aleta Karstad, and
their daughter Jennifer, live on the
Smiths Falls Limestone Plain in Bishops Mills, Grenville County, Ontario, Canada.

We devote our lives to 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.

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In the past, the species we focused on were predominantly Amphibians and reptiles, but recently we have begun to pay more attention to Mollusks: the many species of land snails which are an underappreciated 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.

We began the BCKCDB 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. This announcement did not produce the widespead screams of enthusiastic public and institutional endorsement and assistance we had anticipated. Some People didn't understand how we could be a checklist, while the rest assumed we were commercial consultants rather than a public institution. It became obvious that those who did value this idea were spread so thinly that the appropriate extent of such a database would be all of eastern Ontario (a project we carry on at the EOBM, with the support of the Eastern Ontario Model Forest), rather than just the Kemptville Creek drainge basin. We retain the name 'BCKCDB' as a metaphorical rather than a literal description of our activities, and we caution visitors to this site that the BCKCDB does not maintain a comprehensive all-taxon biotic database. Also, our use of the toponomically official name "Kemptville Creek" is not meant as a repudiation of the locally-traditional "South Branch of the Rideau River" for this stream.