An active field naturalist since childhood, presently a natural history author and photographer, Rick Cech has led nature trips since the early 1980’s and makes regular presentations to birding and butterfly clubs and natural history and botanical organizations. He is a curatorial affiliate in entomology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the principal author and photographer of The Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer’s Guide (Princeton, 2005). His recent work includes editing and photography for the iPhone app Audubon Butterflies — A Field Guide to North American Butterflies and development of the FieldGuides regional butterfly series. He is a past president of the Linnaean Society and played a formative role in originating the Sibley Guide series and the National Audubon Society Interactive CD-ROM Guide to North American Birds. With Peter Alden, he was co-author of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Florida, covering over a thousand species of the flora and fauna of that state. He writes of his talk, “Older than science! More powerful than scholastic allegory! Able to span arcane systematics in a single bound! It’s natural history, a folk tradition dating from the early Renaissance, whose durable guiding principles have descended through the ages by word of mouth. Often considered a benign personal distraction — or an effete pastime of aristocrats — nature study is in fact a rigorous avocation that has played a significant role in shaping our modern view of the world. In this talk I will reflect on my participation in this long tradition. Come celebrate our membership in this noble pursuit, which must rank among humanity’s more unlikely — and yet most splendid and enjoyable — master-strokes.”
