Eric H. Metzler first saw butterflies at his grandmother’s rock garden. Tolerant parents allowed Eric to collect butterflies, and other natural history objects. Except for the fiddler crabs, Eric’s dad insisted that all specimens be dead. Profits from a paper route enabled the purchase of Holland’s The Butterfly Book, which cost $31.00 in 1955!
At Michigan State University, Eric took every entomology class that he could fit into his schedule. His first date with his wife-to-be, Pat, was a trip black lighting for moths. At his retirement from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources in 1996, Ohio’s Governor George Voinovich appointed Eric as Ambassador of Natural Resources. In 2005, Eric was inducted in the Ohio Natural Resources Hall of Fame.
In 1979 he co-founded two organizations – The Ohio Lepidopterists http://ohiolepidopterists.org and the Columbus Natural History Society. In 1997 he co-founded Ohio’s state-wide butterfly monitoring program http://butterflymonitoring.org and the Midwest Biodiversity Institute, Inc.
Eric is active in The Lepidopterists’ Society http://www.lepsoc.org He chaired the committee on collecting http://www.lepsoc.org and he was President in 1996-97.
Eric published 52 scientific papers on Lepidoptera, and he described 15 species of moths new to science. His most recent book in 2005 is a study of butterflies and moths of the northern tall grass prairies – the first ever study of insects in the tall grass prairies.
Eric holds an Adjunct appointment in the Department of Entomology at Michigan State University. He is a research associate of The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico, and The Florida State Collection of Arthropods. He is listed in Who’s Who.
Eric Metzler publishes regularly. His current research interests include Cochylini (Tortricidae) and Lepidoptera which occur in the northern Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. He is conducting started long term studies of the moths at Carlsbad Caverns National Park and White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.
He and his wife, Patricia, have one son, Meredith. Eric lives in Alamogordo, New Mexico.