Continued from "About" page...

I had long paid attention to butterflies, ever since my childhood days of collecting butterflies with my Dad.  When I was about 10 years old, Dad drove our family up the Steens Mountain Loop Road, and we stopped near the summit, at over 9,000 feet elevation.  In the windswept, grassy meadows near the summit, there were hundreds of Milbert's Tortoiseshells flying up in the wind. I was captivated!  That year, Dad bought me a butterfly net, a Golden Guide field identification guide, a killing jar, a pinning board, and a display case.  The next summer, we spent several weekends driving and walking Forest Service Roads near Portland looking for butterflies with our nets in hand.

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Decades later, in 2001, my friend Eric Wold told me of his childhood love of butterflies, and we decided to go on a hike to Iron Mountain in Linn County to find some butterflies.  On that hike I unsuccessfully attempted to photograph a bright green Sheridan's Hairstreak, and I got hooked! That first failure started me on a long and joyful journey of photographing butterflies.

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​ It was about 2014 when I realized that I had photographed around 100 species of native butterflies in Oregon. I thought to myself "I might actually be able to photograph all of them," meaning all of Oregon's regularly occurring 168 species (the exact number depends on whose taxonomic approach you follow, and how many species have been recently split or lumped).  I decided that year to go to work on those remaining 68 or so species, just for fun, and to see what kind of progress I could make. In 2014 - 2017, I had a great time tromping around the wild spots in Oregon, and added several more species.