Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist and a professional writer who has published twelve books and hundreds of papers, essays, stories and poems. His acclaimed 1987 book Wintergreen describing the devastation caused by unrestrained logging in Washington’s Willapa Hills near his adopted home was the winner of the 1987 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. His recent books include Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, and Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place. He won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award. In 2011, he won the Washington State Book Award in the biography/memoir category for his most recent work The Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year.
Robert Michael Pyle
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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