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

Feature

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. Robert Michael Pyle has been a friend and contributor to Orion Continue reading
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature

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
Feature
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