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 Wintergreen, Where Bigfoot Walks, and Sky Time in Gray’s River. He lives in rural southwest Washington and still studies butterflies.
Robert Michael Pyle

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Twelve Poetry Recommendations for Black History Month
Camille Dungy and poet friends are back with another list of stellar recommended reading. From new titles to seminal classics, you’ll want to check out these environmentally-engaged poetry collections by 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
ONLY EIGHTEEN wood ticks: not bad, after a long May day’s birding in West Virginian woods. The first, adorning my sleeve during beers in the conference center lounge, and the last, 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