As a person who has spent a great deal of his life camping in the woods all over the western states, even going camping when my daughter was an infant, I have always been fascinated by the flora and fauna of the outdoors, as fascinated by a California poppy as by a Golden Eagle. Birds, of course, are special and I became fascinated by them in the 1990’s but did not become a birder until 1995 when I started writing them down in notebooks and generated a computer program to keep track of them. This has led me to 20 different states and a list approaching 500 birds plus a few more in Italy. It has been an absolute pleasure to bring this love of birds to many students over the past few years.

My educational and working background have pretty much nothing to do with my love of birds. I studied wine making at UC Davis, got a BS from SJ State in Business and spent much of my working life in high tech. Perhaps the systems analysis work and software management tasks gave me the patience and ability to study birds. Their complexity still amazes me.