The Longest Run

Grosbeak 2008 Grosbeak 2007 Last weekend I took a picture of a bird that I don't see very often - a rose-breasted grosbeak; I'd only seen one once before, When I went to look through old photos to figure out when I'd seen the last one - it turns out it was almost exactly one year ago. I suppose the grosbeaks may just pass through our area on the way to somewhere.....

We're up in Connecticut for the first time in 5 weeks; it's absolutely GREAT to be back. Funny weather this weekend: yesterday was over 70 with clear blue skies and today it's back in the 40's with drizzle off and on all day. I had the chance to get out and take some pictures of stuff starting to bloom. Pictured above is a blossom from the cherry tree we have; it's just starting to bloom and should be at peak when we are back next week. The birds are getting active again too. Strangely enough there's been a huge flock of chickadees around all day long. Chickadees are fun to photograph as they will let you get quite close to them.

I've taken advantage of Adobe's new Photoshop Express to make a slideshow of some of my bird photos from Galveston. So far I've identified over 30 different birds, which is pretty incredible over just four days of photography. All of the pictures were taken with a Nikon D300 and mostly with an 80-400mm telephoto lens. Since I wanted to get the slideshow up before I start a busy travel period for work, I've not labeled all of the photographs with bird identifications. I'd be happy to offer a cool prize to the person who identifies the most birds; post your answers in the comments. You don't have to identify every picture as some kinds of birds are included more than once. Some of the pictures aren't great but have been included to show the full range of what we saw. Birds of Galveston Please let me know if you have any technical difficulties and I'll try to help you out.

I've got tons of editing to do on the pictures I took in Texas, but in the meantime I wanted to share with you one of my favorites. Last Thursday, Katherine and I went to San Luis Pass at the west end of Galveston Island. We were there around low tide, which is the ideal time for seeing a wide variety of birds. I captured this shot of a tern (a Common Tern, I believe) fishing for breakfast. A friend of mine here in New York - Steve Wilner - was kind enough to lend me his 80-400mm lens for my trip; that's what I used for this picture.

Great Blue Heron - San Luis Pass Originally uploaded by aweber9 Light posting this week as I'm now down in Galveston with limited web access. I've had the chance to do some bird photography down here. I took this picture of a Great Blue Heron earlier today.

Since today is an off day from training, I thought it would be appropriate to write about something which has nothing to do with running. Earlier today I read this article ( link ) from New York Magazine; it's a review of a book recently published by Random House that is a print anthology of blog writing. I also checked out a blog written by another blogging colleague (perhaps there are a lot of those....) named Kempton Mooney. The article and Kempton's blog reinforced some things I've been thinking about lately as an avid consumer of media products (books, music, movies, blogs, web sites, etc.), as an employee of a media company who thinks a lot about the future of our business, and as a person with a lot of hobbies. The first thing is that I'm constantly amazed by the incredible depth of content and information we all now have access to - typically from the comfort of our home or office. In just the past two days I've seen several examples of this: someone watch...

Nice article in today's New York Times about nature and birding in New York City: Lemon Zest . Photo courtesy of Cal Vornberger/New York Times.