WBA butterfliers now have two fine new field guides to use in the field as we try to identify our butterflies. In addition to the recently-published Butterflies Through Binoculars: The West, we now have Bob Pyle’s The Butterflies of Cascadia. The Cascadia book has several unique advantages over any other guide.

First, it treats only the butterflies of our own area, essentially Washington, Oregon and the peripheries. So that means that there are fewer species to thumb through as we try to figure out which one we’ve found in the field. Second, this is a book to STUDY. I have spent hours with it already even though as of this writing I have not yet had a chance to use it in the field. I have already got more than my money’s worth in learning from it. For a field guide it has an enormous amount of information about each species, including the kind of information one wants the minute one has identified a butterfly. (“It’s MINE! Now, let’s see what makes it so SPECIAL.”) It is a book to study before and after butterfly searches.

That brings us to the third and related feature that’s special about this guide: we get so much of Bob Pyle. For each species there is a “Remarks” section, printed in blue so we can’t miss it. Here we have Bob’s engaging ruminations about this butterfly: history, geography, ecology, humorous metaphor, personal anecdote, whatever he wants to share with us. Remarking on the fleet-flying Western Pine Elfin, which in some places in Cascadia is seen with the slower-flying Brown Elfin, he says: “When Browns and Pines fly together, it is a case of a prop job and a jet with vertical takeoff.” Now, wouldn’t you love to see that?

In addition to Bob, who is an Advisory Member of WBA, a number of WBA stalwarts have played roles in the making of the Cascadia book, as Bob with typical generosity acknowledges at length. They run from Jon Pelham, Bob’s earliest Washington butterflying buddy and WBA’s Science Advisor, to Richard Youel, who saw the book through its final stages. Much credit goes to both our founding president, Idie Ulsh, and our Vice President, David Nunnallee, who between them produced something like half of all the splendid butterfly photographs. Idie is also responsible for the gracefully-written Foreword and, from WBA’s perspective, has been the spirit behind the book as it was being created.

The book is a gem and WBA can be proud.

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