You can always bore yourself silly by downloading and reading my bio, but here are a few highlights. I spent my early childhood in the American southwest, but when I was 13, my parents got transferred to Madrid, Spain, where we lived under Generalísimo Francisco Franco’s regime. Hmmm… from west Texas to a dictatorship—not much culture shock there. Anyway, as a result of that incredible experience, I fell in love with languages, and culture, and travel, so when I graduated high school I went to the University of California at Berkeley, where I majored in Romance Languages with a specialization in Spanish, and minored in Marine Biology.

When I graduated, fully armed to teach fish how to speak Spanish, I became a commercial diver, and did that for five years before taking the obvious next step, which was working for Pacific Telephone as a network analyst in the San Francisco Bay Area. I did that for 11 years, and somewhere along the way I earned my master’s in international business from St. Mary’s College.

Not long after, I accepted a position with a telecom consultancy in Vermont, which is identical to California, but different. So, my wife Sabine and I moved our two kids across the country to join the new firm, Hill Associates, where I worked as an educator and writer for ten years, traveling constantly.

After ten years with Hill, I left to start my own company. I wanted to do more writing because I had published my first telecom book a few years earlier, and it had become a legitimate bestseller; and I wanted to do more international work. So, in 2000, I started the Shepard Communications Group, and from 2000 until early 2020, when the zombie apocalypse struck, I pretty much lived on airplanes, racking up more than three million airline miles and working in more than 100 countries. Somewhere along the way I earned my PhD from a university in South Africa where I was teaching and consulting on a regular basis.

A few years ago, clients began asking me if I could create audio programs to help them tell their stories. They knew that I’d written more than 40 industry films, so I began to do audio work, which turned into voice-overs and Podcasts, and which, in combination with my biology background and my ferocious love of the natural world, got me interested in recording the sounds of our non-human neighbors, the world they inhabit, and things I could do to help protect it and raise awareness of our impact on it. I’ll post links to sounds occasionally on the Critter Chorus page as well as links to my Podcast, The Natural Curiosity Project..

Sabine and I married in 1981, a few weeks before I started at the phone company in California. As I write this, it’s early 2023, meaning that she has put up with me for more than 41 years, which doesn’t include the five years that we dated. With the pandemic mostly behind us, I’ve decided that it’s time to make a professional pivot once again. I’m largely (not completely, but mostly) leaving my technology consulting career behind to focus on five things: producing The Natural Curiosity Project; writing, with a strong focus on conservation and the role that technology can play to help protect the natural world; recording the sounds of nature; being a grandfather to our five little grandkids; and trying not to get in Sabine’s way so that she’ll keep me around a while longer.