Robert Michael Pyle

Robert Michael Pyle trekked into the Dark Divide, where he discovered a giant fossil footprint; searched out Indians who told him of an outcast tribe that had not fully evolved into humans; and attended the convocation in British Columbia called Sasquatch Daze, where he realized that "these guys don't want to find Bigfoot-they want to be Bigfoot." Ultimately Pyle discovers a few things about Bigfoot - and a lot about the human need for something to believe in and the need for wilderness in our lives.

Crossing the Dark Divide

Where Bigfoot Walks

New and Selected Essays

Nature Matrix

In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitants—animal, plant, and human—with the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even–handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, 'My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard. In his vivid portrayal of the land, plants, people and animals of the Willapa Hills of Washington State, Bob Pyle makes the modest patch of land he writes about a metaphor for the world.

Rambles in a Ravaged Land

Wintergreen

Caitlin C. LaBar

Winner of the 2018 National Outdoor Book Award, Nature Guide Books Category Easy to use and beautifully illustrated with more than 600 color photographs and nearly 200 maps, Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest is a must-have for nature lovers in Washington, Oregon, western Idaho, northern California, and British Columbia. The profiles include preferred common name for both genus and species, type locality, conservation status, the look and distinguishing traits of each butterfly, the preferred foodplants and nectar plants, habitat and range, and much more. Additional information includes a brief introduction to how butterflies work and details on ecology and conservation.

Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest

Nature Matrix is a gathering of some of Robert Michael Pyle’s most significant, original, and timely expressions of a life immersed in the natural world, in all its splendor, power, and peril Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays contains sixteen pieces that encompass the philosophy, ethic, and aesthetic of Robert Michael Pyle. The essays range from Pyle’s experience as a young national park ranger in the Sierra Nevada to the streets of Manhattan; from the suburban jungle to the tangles of the written word; and from the phenomenon of Bigfoot to that of the Big Year—a personal exercise in extreme birding and butterflying. They include deep profiles of John Jacob Astor I and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as excursions into wild places with teachers, children, and writers. The nature of real wilderness in modern times comes under Pyle’s lens, as does reconsideration of his trademark concept, “the extinction of experience”—maybe the greatest threat of alienation from the living world that we face today. Nature Matrix shows a way back toward possible integration with the world, as it plumbs the range and depth of experience in one lucky life lived in close connection to the physical earth and its denizens. This collection brings together the thoughts and hopes of one of our most widely read and respected natural philosophers as he seeks to summarize a life devoted to conservation.

DIVAlthough no one had ever followed North American monarch butterflies on their annual southward journey to Mexico and California, in the 1990s there were well-accepted assumptions about the nature and form of the migration. But to Robert Michael Pyle, a naturalist with long experience in monarch conservation, the received wisdom about the butterflies’ long journey just didn’t make sense. In the autumn of 1996 he set out to uncover the facts, to pursue the tide of “cinnamon sailors” on their long, mysterious flight. Chasing Monarchs chronicles Pyle’s 9,000-mile journey to discover firsthand the secrets of the monarchs’ annual migration. Part road trip, part outdoor adventure, and part natural history study, Pyle’s book overturns old theories and provides insights both large and small regarding monarch butterflies, their biology, and their spectacular migratory travels. Since the book’s first publication, its controversial conclusions have been fully confirmed, and monarchs are better understood than ever before. The Afterword for this volume includes not only updated information on the myriad threats to monarch butterflies, but also various efforts under way to ensure the future of the world’s most amazing butterfly migration./div

Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage

Chasing Monarchs

Roger Tory Peterson Institute

Sarah Anne Hughes

This essential handbook covers where to find butterflies; how to observe and photograph them; their behavior, biology, ecology, and life histories; butterfly gardening; butterfly rearing; identification; and conservation.

Handbook for Butterfly Watchers

An ecologist reflects on the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest as he describes the lives of plants, animals, and humans through every season of the year during his thirty years in the village of Gray's River, near the mouth of the Columbia River--long out of print, this classic of nature writing is being given a new life in trade paperback with a new afterword by the author. Sky Time in Gray's River is an elegant meditation on life in the rural Northwest. Although Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist, and southwestern Washington is notable for its lack of butterflies, something about the Gray's River Valley spoke to him when he visited more than forty years ago. Since then he has lived near the village of Gray's River, one of the first to be established near the mouth of the Columbia River and only tenuously connected to the world of the twenty-first century. Pyle brings Gray's River to life by compressing those forty years into twelve chapters, following the lives of the people, plants, and animals that make this valley their home, month by month through the seasons. Through his loving portrait of one riverside village, Pyle illustrates how a special place can transform anyone lucky enough to find it. He shows that you don't have to travel far to see something new every day--if you know how to look.

Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place

Sky Time in Gray's River

Tracing the travel route of the monarch butterfly, a lepidopterist and author of Wintergreen follows the annual mass migration of the colorful insects from their breeding grounds in British Columbia to their winter home in Mexico. Reprint.

An account of a cross-country adventure chasing butterflies: “Armchair travelers who love a good yarn will find Pyle’s exuberance catching.” —Seattle Times Part road-trip tale, part travelogue of lost and found landscapes, all good-natured natural history, Mariposa Road tracks Bob Pyle’s journey across the United States as he races against the calendar in his search for as many of the eight hundred American butterflies as he can find. Like Pyle’s classic Chasing Monarchs, Mariposa Road recounts his adventures, high and low, in tracking down butterflies in his own low-tech, individual way. Accompanied by Marsha, his cottonwood-limb butterfly net; Powdermilk, his 1982 Honda Civic with 345,000 miles on the odometer; and the small Leitz binoculars he has carried for more than thirty years, Bob ventured out in a series of remarkable trips from his Northwest home. From the California coastline in company with overwintering monarchs to the Far Northern tundra in pursuit of mysterious sulphurs and arctics; from the zebras and daggerwings of the Everglades to the leafwings, bluewings, and border rarities of the lower Rio Grande; from Graceland to ranchland and Kauai to Key West, these intimate encounters with the land, its people, and its fading fauna are wholly original. At turns whimsical, witty, informative, and inspirational, Mariposa Road is an extraordinary journey of discovery that leads the reader ever farther into butterfly country and deeper into the heart of the naturalist. “What Roger Tory Peterson was for birds, Bob Pyle is for butterflies . . . From the dusty heat of Texas and the tropical lushness of Hawaii to the legendary outhouse of the Midnight Sun in the Alaskan Arctic, Pyle is a traveling companion who never grows dull.” —Scott Weidensaul, author of Of a Feather

The First Butterfly Big Year

Mariposa Road

"An elegant, eccentric novel of love, loneliness, and lepidoptera . . . Worthy company for work by other naturalist/novelists: Nabokov, Matthiessen, Kingsolver." âe*Kirkus Reviews InMagdalena Mountain, Robert Michael Pyle's first and long-awaited novel, the award-winning naturalist proves he is as at home in an imagined landscape as he is in the natural one. At the center of this story of majesty and high mountain magic are three Magdalenas--Mary, a woman whose uncertain journey opens the book; Magdalena Mountain, shrouded in mystery and menace; and the all-black Magdalena alpine butterfly, the most elusive of several rare and beautiful species found on the mountain. And high in the Colorado Rocky Mountain wilderness, sharing the remote territory of theErebia magdalena butterfly, lives the enigmatic Oberon, a reluctant de facto leader of the Grove, a diverse community of monks who share a devotion to nature. Converging in the same wilderness are October Carson, a beachcomber-wanderer in pursuit of the alpine butterflies he collects for museums; James Mead, a young graduate student intent upon learning the ecology of this seductive creature; and Mary Glanville, who also seeks the butterfly but can't remember why. While the mystery surrounding Mary takes a menacing turn, their shared quest pulls them deeper into the high mountain wilderness, culminating in a harrowing encounter on the stony slopes of Magdalena Mountain.

Robert Michael Pyle

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