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My interest in the Himalaya began with the region's pheasant species, beautiful birds I kept in a walk-in aviary during my youth, and with accounts written by the first western naturalists to explore the area. For my Senior and Master's Theses, I studied Himalayan Snowcocks introduced to Nevada. The early work earned me an invitation and funding to attend a scientific conference on pheasants in the Indian Himalaya. I stayed on after the conference to study the distribution limits of Himalayan pheasants along six Himalayan treks, located between Ladakh in the west and Darjeeling in the east. In 1991, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct doctoral research in Nepal on indigenous forest use as an agent of ecological change. In 1998, the Zoological Society of San Diego funded field work at the eastern limit of the Himalaya in southwest China, in the Yunnan-Tibet-Burma border region. Most recently, I have reconnoitered Sikkim and the Meili Snow Mountains in Yunnan as potential research sites.