Stephen Lyn Bales is the former senior naturalist at Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville and the author of Ephemeral by Nature: Exploring the Exceptional with a Tennessee Naturalist, Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley, and Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, each published by UT Press. A native of Gatlinburg, he is the great-grandson of Jim Bales whose home site is preserved on Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail.

Bales has written for Smokies Life magazine, including a story on the winter wren, which appeared in one of our missing issues, Volume 9, #1. These missing issues are no longer in print but are available to view online at SmokiesInformation.org/MissingIssues. Stephen Lyn Bales also writes an online blog titled Nature Calling. We spoke with him on an online video chat while he was sitting outside in his Knoxville neighborhood, appropriately surrounded by the sounds of birds.