The Best Gift You Can Give Your Children....

Here's a great holiday opportunity from National Wildlife Federation's President and CEO. Another NWF supporter has established a matching fund to help us implement some innovative efforts to help restore grizzly bears in the lower 48 states.

Crazy Craig

During the holidays, we encounter wildlife in all “the old familiar places” as the popular song would have it…in department store displays…greeting cards…decorated homes and even a few rooftops. There are polar bears and Santa’s reindeers…penguins…songbirds and so many animals and birds that bring a smile to faces of young and old alike.

But there are many wildlife species that aren’t up-front on the holiday stage, but would benefit from some caring year-end giving by National Wildlife Federation supporters. I’m thinking particularly of grizzly bears and a few other species that need our help right now. If you are looking to add one more gift to your holiday list, then you couldn’t do any better than to add a grizzly to your list. You can be sure that it’s a gift that will pay big dividends for this monarch of the wilderness for many, many holidays to come.

Right now National Wildlife Federation’s wildlife biologist, Sterling Miller, and his colleagues in our Montana field office are working to restore the grizzly bear to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana – a land of mountains, forests and meadows ideally suited for the grizzly bear. The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is a huge, remote chunk of land – probably the largest unbroken expanse of wilderness left in the Lower 48. It’s a breath-taking landscape of snow-capped mountains, dense forests, clear-running streams and lush meadows, totaling almost four million acres in all. Studies show that the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness can sustain a population of more than 600 grizzly bears – about the same number found today in the entire Yellowstone ecosystem.

I have just received a special matching grant from a generous donor who wants to support the innovative plan that Sterling and his associates have developed for the grizzly’s recovery. Basically, it will allow National Wildlife Federation to install safeguards so the grizzlies will not becoming accustomed to foraging out of dumpsters…leading to their ultimate removal and death. Happily they’ll be forced to make their way to the wilderness where they will live and survive.

We have a deadline on this matching grant, so I urge you to “add a grizzly to your holiday giving list” so we can do the right thing for this magnificent species. Think how good you’ll feel knowing that you’ve done your part to protect this magnificent creature so they’ll be there in our children’s future. You might even say adding a grizzly to your list gets a double reward…the grizzly and our children! Please click on the secure link below to make your donation.

Donate Now to Save Grizzlies

Wildlife are an important part of our lives today and a critical element in our children’s future. By protecting wildlife and their habitat today, we will be securing our children’s future by stopping global warming, maintaining ecological integrity of our wild places and by reconnecting people to nature.

The greatest gift you can give to your children is a healthy planet. Thank you for your support and commitment to the nature of tomorrow. Thanks for caring and have a happy and safe holiday.

Multi-tasking the JFK 50 Miler

As a runner, I find I have a higher level of satisfaction if I set some goals for myself. My weekly mileage goals keep me motivated and in shape for upcoming races. I also set goals for individual races. My goals for the JFK 50 Miler were two: cross the finish line and in doing so, set a PR or personal best time, for the distance.

Shouldn’t be too hard! If I finish, I have my PR because I’d never come close to running this far before. I had another running goal; to try to finish in nine and half hours. I didn’t meet that one. But I was very happy in crossing the finish line in ten hours and nineteen minutes. I’d finished in front of more than 500 other runners. I was in the top half of my "freshman" class in the JFK.
As a naturalist and runner, I also might set goals that are odd for a runner but fine for a naturalist. Trying to keep track of all bird species positively identified along the fifty mile route on November 18 was the "naturalist" goal I’d set.

To best achieve that goal, I had to remember every kind of bird I saw OR I could write down, with pencil and paper, each one. I decided my memory might begin to fail or fuzz after 30 or so miles. And I lose pencils or their points snap off. Paper in a runner’s pocket invariably becomes wet pulp due to sweat or gets gummed up with GU gel residue.

To circumvent these possible problems, I chose to master, minimally, a very small digital recorder I’d purchased. The little wonder weighs almost nothing and records, so say the instructions, up to 16 hours of babbling. Like all of my other electronics that I can’t quite figure out how to use-- my Palm Pilot, GPS, and cell phone, it offers a lot more than I had figured out how to use.

So here was the scenario. Scamper up and down 14 miles of Appalachian Trail, plod along 26 miles of canal towpath and then dodge cars and traffic cones over the final 8 miles of rural roads, all while watching for birds and movement in the foliage nearby and listening for the sounds of anything that was likely a bird-- not groaning fellow runners, my own grunts and gasps and other extraneous noises. Then, while conversing with other runners and crew and well-wishers, remove the recorder from shorts’ pocket, activate the recorder by releasing the hold button, press the record toggle and when finished with the entry, remember to again place the little machine back on hold and store in pocket (the GU free pocket) until I next needed to log in an observation.

By about mile 20, I’d earned the nickname "Bird Man" from a couple of running buddies. The list included at that point, I thought, about 14 kinds of birds. My major observation was that the river’s frantic mood-we’d gotten 3 inches or more just two days before the run-and the disturbance caused by over a thousand runners along the course had sent many of the birds that would normally occur here to quieter, cleaner habitats.

Periodically, I’d hear something that was bird-like but not instantly identifiable. This would cause me to plunge off the race route into the riverside forest or tangle of vines and dead wildflowers to seek my quarry. There, I would make explosive pishing sounds trying to attract the supposed bird closer for positive identification. It was during one of these pishing episodes at around mile 25 that fellow NWF team member Andrew Pinger caught up with me and reminded me that we should attempt to finish the race before darkness. I stayed with Andrew for the duration. Or better, he stayed back with me as I pished, huffed and groaned my way to the finish.

So what did I find? I ended up with 33 species. There were many birds that never showed and that I had very sure expectations of seeing-mallard ducks, cormorants, vultures and juncos for instance. On the other hand, I didn’t expect to find so many woodpeckers-I found 6 of the possible 7 species in our area. My birding highlight occurred along the Potomac River, while running alone, except for the two winter wrens serenading me, one on either side of the
tow path. Here’s my complete list:

Canada goose
Mourning dove
Rock pigeon
Barred owl
Red-bellied woodpecker
Yellow-bellied sapsucker
Downy woodpecker
Hairy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Pileated woodpecker
Blue jay
American crow
Tufted titmouse
Carolina chickadee
Brown creeper
Carolina wren
Winter wren
Golden-crowned kinglet
Ruby-crowned kinglet
American robin
Northern mockingbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Yellow-rumped warbler
Northern cardinal
White-throated sparrow
Song sparrow
Swamp sparrow
Red-winged blackbird
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow