Thomas Andrew Roberts was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was an author and wildlife biologist. He served over ten years as a biologist, land manager and planner for the U.S. Forest Service in Southern California and the Sierra. He spent a year in Jordan to develop sheep grazing regimes before moving back to California in the early 1990s to work at BioSystems, Inc. From 1994 until his retirement in 2012, he was Environmental Science Associates' biological resources director in the Bay Area.