Tom (T.A.) Roberts entered the adult world as a Harvard graduate in cultural anthropology and near eastern languages, in which pursuit he lived in North African villages and on the coast of Arabia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drafted into the Vietnam-era Army, he served as an Arabic linguist in the military intelligence establishment.

In the mid-seventies he’d had enough of the human condition and earned a Master’s degree in Wildlife Biology at the University of Massachusetts. Leaving his farm in the Berkshires to join the U.S. Forest Service in 1978, he spent the next ten years fighting wildfires, counting deer and leading the life of a ranger, on horseback, and pounding down logging roads in a battered federal pickup truck. His current day job as a consulting ecologist has taken him far and wide in California, with projects ranging from salmon recovery in the Klamath region, to the high Sierra meadows and to desert tortoise burrows in the Southland. He is also an avid wooden boat sailor who lives in the Bay Area.