INDIANAPOLIS

Update January 2024: I am no longer 'recently' retired I guess and am now entering my third year as contributing editor here at BugGuide. The main reason for posting this update is because I have moved literally thousands of your photos over the past couple of years and many of you have left thank you comments. Please do not feel slighted that I do not reply to your thank you comments, but doing so would take a lot of time away from my review of your submittals. Thank you comments, while greatly appreciated, are certainly not necessary. I get a lot of self-satisfaction from being able to identify your submittals. I also want to leave a word of thanks to those of you work really hard to try and identify an insect before submitting. And I want to give a special thanks to those of you who go even further and attempt to identify images that other people post. This work at your end often saves the contributing editors a bunch of research time at our end. To me, this is the true spirit of BugGuide, a group of people helping each other to get better at identifying and documenting insects from across the country!

I am somewhat recently (2017) retired from Indiana Department of Natural Resources where I held the position of Director of Division of Outdoor Recreation. Early on in college I took a course titled "Terrestrial Habitats" that started me on the road to plant, bird, and insect identification. While I am curious of all things I come across in nature, I have become especially intrigued with moths. Species found in Indiana kept me busy for a while, but since retiring I have started to travel all over the United States in search of moths I have yet to see.

The learning curve on this venture has been awfully steep and I am no where near the crest, but I have come a long way thanks to the contributors and experts at BugGuide and Moth Photographers Group. The Lepidoptera groups that I am most experienced with include Geometridae, Noctuoidea and Pyraloidea. I am pretty passionate about the mission of BugGuide and hope my contributions will further this mission.

Steven P Morris