I grew up in Pemberton, NJ. My visits to my grandparents place in NW Lousiana got me ingrained in nature. I spent the entire day, often with cousins, chasing herps (lizards, snakes, frogs, and salamanders). There was not much chasing snakes, a fear programmed into me by the adults because of Massauguas on the wooded property. It would take years to overcome this fear created by adults. Not having the ability to travel far from home, I rarely encountered a reptile in NJ. Yet, I lived right at the edge of the Pine Barrens. My one encounter with a Black Racer snake on a railroad track was one of fear and going the opposite direction. I did see what were likely numerous species of frogs along this same railroad track. I also enjoyed the excitement when I caught snapping turtles at our local fishing hole along Rancocas Creek. My latent interest in 'herps' was there.

When I entered college at Jacksonville University in Florida, I only wanted to stay out of going to Vietnam. This did give me some motivation for my studies. However, my first biology class was almost a failure. The teacher was not very motivating nor was I a very motivated student. I would have failed if I had not been rescued by Professor Ted Allen taking over. He had an understanding of this class situation for me and many of the other struggling students and gave me a kind 'D'. Dr. Ted Allen became a long time friend and was a positive influence on me as I moved up the ranks in biology. My second mandatory biology class went much better and piqued my interest enough to send me on to the advanced courses. The education environment was perfect for me where close interactions outside the classroom gave me the encouragement to pursue a major in Biology. In 1973, I received a Bachelors in Biology. I also gained another long-time Herping friend, Bruce Jones, an enthusiastic young man that I enjoyed going road-riding with in central Florida looking for herps. We trained each other in learning about herps.

I worked for several months at Ionac Chemical Company before leaving to start my career at Lousiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. My undergraduate grades were not strong enough to get me a teaching assistant job when I first arrived so I took one course: herpetology under Dr. Rossman. I also worked two jobs to pay for housing and food. Through my great enthusiam for herps, I impressed Dr. Rossman and received a teaching assistant job for the spring of 1975. I stayed in Kilgore, Texas, worked various construction jobs socking away money to make living at LSU easier when I returned.

LSU was the next level of challenge to my education. While Jacksonville University was a wonderful place to go to school, it was a small college and could not offer many specialty courses (Herpetology, Ornithology, Mammalogy, etc) and this put me behind most of the other grad students that had already taken these courses as undergrads. I did learn how to teach, study, and do research. I received my Masters in Zoology in 1977.

My next moves were all valuable. I taught at Sam Houston HS in Houston, Texas for one year, then moved back to Jacksonville to teach 3 years at Ribault HS, the later, the best move of my life as I met Elaine, my future wife, at the apartment complex where I stayed. We married in 1981. Despite stepping on snakes and having them crawl across her face in the middle of the night, she is still with me after 40 years of marriage-amazing!

In 1982, we moved to Tempe, AZ so I could pursue a doctorate at Arizona State University (ASU). This pursuit was financially much easier than at LSU. My wife had a great job, I had a teaching assistantship, so surviving on peanut butter and crackers for breakfast and lunches was a thing of the past. I was surrounded by great professors and lucked out with a roommate, Brian Sullivan, that became a life long friend. My major professor, Dr. Fouquette, and several other professors along with several other graduate students were important in shaping my view and skills in biology.

My son, Matt, came in summer 1983 and first daughter, Megan, in the fall 1986. By the spring of 1986, I had only to complete my dissertation, but we could see money was going to be a problem when Megan arrived. I began exploring high school teaching positions, but out of the blue got called in for an interview at Glendale Community College. I later found out that the call was not 'out of the blue' as much as I thought. Several presentations of my research on Alligator Lizard behavior at the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science meetings caught their attention. I finished my dissertation while working and graduated in 1988. The teaching relationship lasted the next 30 years after I was hired full time. Two of the faculty had strong backgrounds in herpetology and one, Steve Williams, became my mentor and life-long friend.

My life for the next 20 years was teaching at the college, raising my 3 children, and coaching them in sports. Mixed in with these activities were doing many surveys for desert frogs and chuckwalla lizards through grants acquired by Brian Sullivan. I was still very much a herpetologist during these surveys. In 2003, I purchase my first digital camera, a Canon Rebel and everything changed. Before digital, I could get film pictures, but had to watch the number of shots I took because of high film and developing prices. Post digital, the expensives were initally high, but once invested I could take 1000's of images and develop them right on my computer. Yes, the quality was not as good as film, but it only took another 10 years to get so close the quality difference did not matter. I now had an easy way to document nature observations.

My early digital photography was mostly on insects, especially dragonflies. Birds shots were only taken in passing. My bird interest began during my first visits at the Tres Rios Hayfield site (now closed) in search of dragonflies. Sometime during these early visits, my focus began to shift from odonates (dragonflies and damselflies) to birds. I started trying to get an image of every bird at Tres Rios. When the Hayfield site closed, I shifted over to the Tres Rios Wetlands west of 91st Ave. While I took Ornithology at LSU, it was at Tres Rios that I really started to learn to identify birds. Over the next 10 years, I logged almost 700 field hours at Tres Rios and thousands of bird images. (See Tres Rios site for more information.) After about 3 years almost exclusively going to Tres Rios, I started branching out to other Hotspots in Maricopa County, Arizona and other states.

Birders that are highly skilled have several attributes: 1) Excellent vision, 2) superman (superwoman) hearing, 3) almost photographic memories for anatomical details, and 4) a relentless pursuit to find birds. I only have 2 of these 4 attributes with the 4th one fading as I grow older. It is ashamed that I did not get into birds decades ago. The bottom line is that I will never reach the highly skilled category because I have poor hearing and a very poor auditory memory. However, as poor as I am in these two areas, birding has helped them improve.

Ever since I was a kid, I was a 'lister' or collector. I collected baseball cards. (Dang! I wish I had those Mickle Mantles and Hank Aarons now.) Birding is not much different since I list species and try to get as many species as I can whether those species are in my life, a year, or just an eBird hotspot during a single outing. One of the frustrating aspects of this lister behavior is how often I miss bird species mainly because of my poor hearing or just being a 'day late and a dollar short'. This disappointment was mostly absent during my early years of birding where I often came away with something different almost every time out and sometimes 20 to 30 life species in other states on single trips. As my number of species increased, these type of successes quickly came to a grinding halt. I had to change something if I wanted to continue this hobby, not feel more disappointment than elation, and start making significant contributions to birding knowledge. I should of learned the later early on when Dave Pearson often invited me to bird at his sites in the Pinal Mountains and more recently on the Gila Indian Reservation. Dave did birding with a purpose, to gain knowledge of bird species distribution and abundance in rarely or never birded sites. About 3 years ago, my skill level reached the point where I felt making contributions was within my skill set. For some reason, it took a talk by Chris McCreedy's at an Audubon meeting to make me see the importance of birding those rarely or never birded sites in the state. This is somewhat what this web site is about especially with 3 rarely birded sites as focal points: Vekol Wash, Cave Buttes, and Venue at the Groves. I now go birding regularly with a purpose and this approach so rarely disappoints that it is easy to keep at it. This type of birding contributes significantly to scientific knowledge. I just hope I stay active enough, long enough, to add other unbirded sites around our great state.