New Year, New Challenges for Crazy Craig

So, it's January 8 and the Washington DC suburbs are threatening to cool off to something like almost normal. Look at this photo! See what a few extra degrees over time can do to change the local landscape and its wildlife. Actually, this photo was taken last month near Tucson, AZ. Read more about that below.

Snow possibly in the forecast for tomorrow evening. The past weekend brought temps in the 70s and two monarch butterflies (these should have been hanging upside down in a Oyamel fir tree by now) were flitting around Maryland. And Crazy Craig stepped out NWF's back door last Thursday and ticked off his first blooming native wildflower of the year. Visit The Backyard Naturalist for more about that.

Tomorrow, NWF headquarters staff will be fortuneate enough to listen and respond to
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth grass roots presentation, brought to us by NWF staff and The Climate Project. By the end of this week, over 1000 volunteers will have been trained to offer this eye-opening lecture to their communities. I'm hoping to go through the training in the next few months myself. What's it like to go through the training? Read this!

Resting up from the Big Race/JFK 50 Miler never was very relaxing. It was not running much at all, licking my wounds-- almost none-- and planning for next year. It was reading Dean Karnaze's Ultramarathon Man and relishing the reality of not really being THAT crazy. I especially liked the "nutritional log" he provides for the 199 mile race he ran.

Early December was a time to celebrate mutual 60th birthdays with a birding buddy, to pitch tents, enjoy campfires under starry southwestern skies and observe our way through much of southern Arizona's bird life. I was able to find 156 species over the 7 days of on the ground birding including Bendire's thrasher, pictured above. Wayne's goal had been to pick up about 50 species during the trip to hit 400 species in the US for the year. A neotropic cormorant at the Gilbert AZ Water Ranch was #400. After dropping me off at the Phoenix airport the next morning, Wayne added both Harris sparrow and streak-backed oriole to his list before I ever got off the ground and headed back east.

This past weekend was spent visiting family in coastal New Jersy, picking up a number of birds like northern gannets and brant for my 2007 list, celebrating my aunt's 90th birthday and running. In the warmer than they should have been hours around dawn yesterday, I ran the boardwalk from Sea Girt to Bradley Beach and back. Shark River Inlet was one highlight of this run; my return trip was halted by a bridge opening as the Big Mohawk and a host of private sportfishing boats headed into the Atlantic to look for stripers, mackeral and tautog. This was my first real run since November 18's 50 Miler.

When I sat down at my brother's house, I got out my laptop, pulled up a wifi connection and signed up for another couple of races-- marathons. I'll let you know something about where and when I'm running in my next entry.