Member of Howard County Bird Club, Maryland. Since 2015, I've been participating in the Howard County butterfly survey run by members of the bird club.

I have had an interest in nature study since I was a kid; grew up in an Air Force family with US and British background. We lived in England (Ruislip and Bedfordshire); the Niagara Falls area; Indiana (Grissom AFB); Florida (Homestead AFB), where my biology interest surged in my teenage years in the 1970's; eastern North Carolina. Most of my adult life has been in Maryland, but I spent some time in Australia. I aspired to studies in biology in college but was distracted by Russian language and literature (including one semester in Moscow, 1981, with visits to Kiev and Leningrad), getting a BA in that major at Duke in 1982. (I maintain reading ability in the language but don't speak it fluently.) After a career with the federal government, I retired in Columbia, Maryland, in 2015.

A lot of my time now is spent listing birds (eBird), butterflies, other wildlife. I keep a small garden with focus on native plants and attracting pollinators, and I'm on my condominium's board.

Profile photo: That's my cat, Gracey, showing an interest in nature through the window. Gracey passed away on October 22, 2025. New window list helper, Pepper, was adopted in January 2026.