Peter Haggard holds a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management and has worked as an agricultural inspector in California for more than 30 years. During that time he has collected, photographed, and identified thousands of insects of the Pacific Northwest and maintained a database of hundreds of insect species.

Judy Haggard holds bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from Humboldt State University. After working for state and federal natural resource agencies, she now serves as a consulting wildlife biologist.

Introduction
Insects have intrigued me since my childhood days. Over the years, my interest in them grew, and, in 1990, I started photographing them. Since then, I have amassed a large collection of insect photographs along with an extensive database of information about their life histories, constructed from the many field notes I have taken. During this time I have also raised hundreds of insect species and thousands of individuals in order to confirm their identification and photograph their different life stages. In researching the literature on insects, I found that there are very few insect field guides that cover the various geographical regions within the United States despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of insect species in the United States (millions worldwide). Thus was born the idea for this field guide.
    
This book is intended as an introductory guide and natural history of insects of the Pacific Northwest, with its primary focus the identification of insects. It has been written with the non-scientist in mind. For those readers who are unfamiliar with entomology, that is, the study of insects, I have included sections on scientific nomenclature and classification, insect anatomy, and insect growth and development. Although very brief, these sections, along with the section describing the layout of this field guide and the glossary, should provide the reader with enough basic background information to deal with the individual insect accounts herein. If the reader wishes to obtain more general information regarding insects, there are many good textbooks available that discuss these and other topics in greater detail (see the bibliography).