ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE grew up and learned his butterflies in Colorado, where he fell in love with the Magdalena Alpine and its high-country habitat, the setting of his novel Magdalena Mountain. He took his Ph.D. in butterfly ecology at Yale University, and worked as a conservation biologist in Papua New Guinea, Oregon, and Cambridge, England. His twenty-five books include Chasing Monarchs, Wintergreen (which received a John Burroughs Medal), Where Bigfoot Walks, Sky Time in Gray’s River and The Tangled Bank, a collection of his columns from Orion. A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim Fellow, he still studies butterflies, is a full-time writer living in southwest Washington, and is one of Orion’s most frequent contributors.
Robert Michael Pyle
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Robert Michael Pyle Answers the Orion Questionnaire
In which we get to know our favorite environmental figures better by exploring the sacred and the mundane with them. There’s a spider in the room; what do you do? Watch Continue reading
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Magpie Song
AFTER THE FOREVER-FLIGHT from Portland to Perth via San Francisco and Sydney, I slept the sleep of the crypt. It would be weeks before my circadian rut and I settled in Continue reading
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Overseer of Butterflies
DURING A VISIT with my older brother’s family in Colorado, I asked Tom if he was still working at a computer-shop job that he’d held for some years to supplement his Continue reading
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Pulling the Plug
In the spring of 1969, my Goodwill TV bit the dust. I never got around to replacing it. My household today contains a television set, but it plays only movies. There’s Continue reading
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License to Kill
Editor’s Note: We are unlocking this archive piece to celebrate the release of The Book of Bugs, on sale now. ONLY EIGHTEEN wood ticks: not bad, after a long May day’s Continue reading
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Condo Picchu
A protected shoreline of mossy balds and maroon madronas stood before me. Sailboats waggled at anchor in the foreground, while white-capped buffleheads bobbed in the bow wake of an incoming ferry. Continue reading
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Book Tourist
When you take part in the archaic but still kicking enterprise of making and selling the original laptops (by which I mean books), you hear certain questions again and again. What Continue reading
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Evolving, Swiftly
THE FIRST RAIN IN WEEKS slickened I-5 as Thea and I drove south to see one of the great spectacles of northwestern natural history: the Chapman School swifts. Every September, as Continue reading
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The Territory of Tint
THE COLOR GRAY appeals to me, or perhaps I should say the full spectrum of grays, from pearly pigeon-breast gray to ashy or granite gray to weathered cedar-plank gray. And I Continue reading
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Las Monarcas
In the morning, the Mexican alpine sun hit hard and bright and the snow melted fast. We walked down into the center of the colony, where a foot or more of Continue reading