A childhood interest in nature blossomed into an obsession with birds and birdwatching by my teen years. While doing floral surveys and earning a Master's degree, I was drawn to other winged creatures like butterflies and dragonflies which landed on the plants I was collecting. Eventually my interest in such smaller fauna drew me to the world of spiders where I discovered a gaping hole in the knowledge of Minnesota's spiders. I am now working to fill that hole (while looking at birds, plants, butterflies, etc.).

A Preliminary Checklist to the Spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) of Minnesota (U.S.A.) with Annotations is available at http://mnspiders.blc.edu/.

My expertise is largely with Minnesota's spiders and I try to limit my identification work to that taxon and region on iNaturalist. That enables me to balance all my commitments better.