I am trained as a biologist but not in anything that is much use on iNaturalist! My background is in museum collections, mammalogy, and biogeography. In real life I work at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, so iNat users and Southern California naturalists who work with the museum on community science or other projects might encounter me there as well.

I started identifying in 2020 as a way to do my share for iNat, and finally learn some western North American taxa. Now I spend more time than I should identifying flies (mostly Syrphidae, flower flies or hover flies). Note that my syrphid knowledge has been entirely gained by identifying; I did not come into this as any kind of expert! I highly recommend trying your hand at identifying if there's any group you want to learn to know better.

Tagging: By all means tag me if you think you've found a particularly fun North American syrphid, have a question other than "what is it?", have tried your best to come up with an ID and want to know if I agree, or think it's taking an unreasonable amount of time for a good photo to get any IDs. Please try to be patient and don't tag me immediately if you just want a regular ID in the normal course of things. (OK fine, tag me now and then just because you're extra curious, but maybe not every time!) This is a family of flies with a lot of observations and identifiers are trying to look at as many as we can.

If you're trying your hand at identifying and have questions please do tag me! We need more identifiers -- welcome aboard.

If you have questions about one of my IDs, also do tag me! I do a lot of them; that doesn't mean they're all right, and either way I welcome the discussion. I try to guess which ones explanatory comments will be most useful for, but sometimes there's no way to know.

Outside the United States and Canada my knowledge is still very limited. If your observation looks intriguing I will do what I can, but you may be better off trying to find someone who has more knowledge in your region.

Happy observing!