I am a retired English teacher, freelance writer, and self-taught/self-teaching naturalist who lives on an old hill farm in a small Vermont town called Huntington. I’m a native Vermonter, but I didn’t grow up here. I spent most of my childhood in various American suburbs outside the cities where my father worked. It took me thirty years to find my way back to Vermont, but once I got here I knew I was home.

My first year back — 1975 — I decided I needed to make up for lost time. I began exploring the natural world with all the mid-life energy and enthusiasm that had motivated my return to Vermont. Around the edges of my job at the University of Vermont, where I taught English off and on for 20 years, I began my self-education as a naturalist. I started by volunteering at a local nature center.

To enforce my learning — and to demonstrate to my University of Vermont students that writing had its uses in the real world — I started writing a weekly natural history column for several Vermont newspapers. These columns led to four books:

THE BEGINNING NATURALIST Shelburne, VT: New England Press, 1979

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE FAMILIAR Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998

A NATURALIST INDOORS Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.com, 2000

THE VERMONT LIFE GUIDE TO FALL FOLIAGE Montpelier, VT: Vermont Life, 2001