Dan Davison

Shepherdsville, KY USA

I am a retired programmer/analyst with a second career in education later in life. After teaching Middle School math for four years I went to work for the State of Kentucky Department of Education monitoring Federal programs in a variety of areas including Civil Rights, Title I & IX, Loan Forgiveness and as the state's Homeless coordinator.
Upon my retirement in 2015 I bought a Nikon D7100 with a Tamron Macro lens and my interest in Bugs took off from there. There are plenty of critters and a wide variety of trees, grasses and wildflowers just outside my door that I observe and photograph almost daily. We are blest to have over 200 wildflower species identified on our 10 acres and in photographing them I gradually came to notice that the pictures I took that included "bugs" were more interesting to me! I of course had to know what that bug was and found Bugguide to be very informative. Kentucky seemed to be a little underserved so I enjoyed posting pictures of species not previously shown in Bugguide for Kentucky. I have Zero or is it Zilch in formal training as an entomologist and have a ton of respect for those of you with such knowledge.
I really had no idea that I had been posting pictures to Bugguide for almost 12 years until Mr. Z (Zimlitch) pointed it out to me. Time flies when you are having fun and memory fades as you get older, all of which at least partially excuses my inclination to post pictures of somewhat common bugs that I think are new to me but the record shows I have posted about previously... I find it amusing that with some bugs or just critters in general the slightest variation or pattern is interpreted as an entirely different species while others it is written off as simply a wide variation for the same species. My interest in bugs tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep. (much like the Platte River in Nebraska where I grew up.) I like to take pictures of Silkworm Moths, scarab beetles and dragonflies. Oh, Jumping Spiders also. I think there are still some clubtail dragonflies that have not been identified but they possibly need to be examined under a microscope to ID.

Some rights reserved. Licensed under a Creative Commons License.

If you would like to use any of my 3200 and counting pictures I would like to know. Additionally I may have larger files and less tightly cropped images that would be useful as well.

3583 images submitted by this contributor