Papers of Ray E. Stanford

Ray Edmund Stanford was born in San Diego, California, on 4 December 1939. His interest in butterflies began by the age of eight. By the age of ten, he had started a checklist of species in his neighborhood. His parents recognized his interest in nature early on and enrolled him in a summer course at the San Diego Natural History Museum in 1948. Important teachers from this course and the next two summers included Tom Pagenhart, Paul Spade, Fred Thome, John Adams Comstock, Frauds X. Williams, and Charles F. "Harbie" Harbison.

Stanford became a member of the Lepidopterists' Society in 1955. The next year he took several short day-trips out of Miami, Florida, and saw butterflies and moths, with guidance from Mrs. Florence Grimshawe, a respected local lepidopterist. In 1957, as a high school senior in San Diego, Ray happened upon another collector in the Laguna Mountains of San Diego County, Paul Opler. This friendship and collaborative research continued for more than 35 years eventuating in the co-authored publication of "The Atlas of Western USA Butterflies, Including Adjacent Portions of Canada and Mexico."

Bill Tilden, Bob Langston, Don MacNeill and John Burns aided Ray's interest and ability in the study of Lepidoptera when he was a student at Stanford University. From 1961 to 1966, Ray moved back south, to attend and receive the M.D. degree from UCLA School of Medicine. After graduation, Ray moved to Denver, Colorado, where he completed a residency in Pathology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center by 1970. He was a member of the Pathology faculty there until retirement.

His involvement in the Lepidopterists' Society included a position on the Executive Council as Member-at-Large, Vice President, and Zone IV Season Summary Coordinator from 1979 to the 2000s. For decades, he served on numerous committees and was a de facto co-chairman of the Pacific Slope Section planning committee with Jerry Powell. They established the John Adams Comstock Award at the Pacific Slope Section meeting in 1979 honoring both students who present papers at the meetings and pioneer lepidopterists in the West. Ray was also a long-time member of the Xerces Society, having served as meeting chair and member of the Board of Directors, as well as the Zone III editor of the Fourth of July Butterfly Counts.

His interests include the biology and distribution of Lepidoptera in Western North America, taxonomy of North American skippers Hesperioidea, and conservation issues in general. He was a Research Associate at the Denver Museum of Natural History and the San Diego Natural History Museum. Publications include over a dozen scientific papers on Lepidoptera, notably the skipper section and range maps in "Butterflies of the Rocky Mountain States," edited by C. D. Ferris and F. Martin Brown. Much of his correspondence related to research was under the Western Lepidoptera Study Group.

Ray E. Stanford donated his personal butterfly collection of more than 100,000 insect specimens to Colorado State University's C. P. Gillette Museum of Arthropod Diversity within the Department of Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest management in the College of Agricultural Sciences.