Category: WWB With Bob Pyle
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Eastern Tailed Blue Discovered in the Willapa Hills
By Robert Michael Pyle Butterfly survey in the Willapa Hills of Southwest Washington has largely been shut down because they are almost all privately owned forest land, and the timber companies have gated nearly all their roads in recent years. The companies used to invite the public onto their lands and even published a recreation…
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Metamorphosis
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle Number Fifty* Everyone knows that one of the most compelling features of the Lepidoptera is the order’s possession of a profound metamorphosis from egg through caterpillar and on into pupa and adult. We are (or should be) constantly aware of the fact that every one of our beloved butterflies…
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Sunset of a Collection
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Fifty Last week, I shipped off the last of my butterfly collection, after 65 years. We each have different, and sometimes mutually antagonistic, feelings about butterfly collecting. I’m not going to go into all that here. How every animal (including every human) takes life in order to…
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Of Pygmies & Dwarves: Documenting Our Immigrants
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Nine While many people know about novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s love for butterflies, few are aware of his lasting work on the orange-bordered blues, and fewer yet his other contributions to lepidopterology. Nabokov knew his adopted North American butterflies overall, and at one point contemplated an omnibus work…
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The Women of Washington Butterflies: Part Two
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Eight Now we get to the tricky part of this brief history of the women who have played a part in the study and understanding of the butterflies of Washington State. In Part One, I brought us from Lucia Edson and Louisa Pennell all the way up…
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The Women of Washington Butterflies
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Seven One given during my earlier years as a lepidopterist was that butterfly study was a country of men and boys. The great majority of members of the Lepidopterists’ Society were male, with women appearing at the annual meetings chiefly as wives and camp followers. Among the…
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The Last Hurrah: Journey to Outermost Asotin
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Six The time comes each fall when we must accept that the opportunities for any more butterfly outings have grown thin … when the leaves are coloring up, the temperatures dropping, and the autumn rains not far behind. I’d been holding out for an autumn excursion to…
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Butterflies in Bigfoot Country
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Five On July 19, for my 74th birthday, I took to the field in the Dark Divide, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington. This is the area described in my book, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide , and in the feature film based on it, The…
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Put Another Dime in the Record Machine Part 2
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Four In Part 1 of this essay, we looked at the history and importance of occurrence records for butterflies and other elements of natural history, and the importance of keeping them. This time I will go into a little more detail, in hopes it will prove helpful…
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Put Another Dime in the Record Machine
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty-three, Part 1 WopWop, wop, wop wop, adada dada) (Wop Wop, wop, wop wop, adada dada) (Wop Wop, wop-, wop wop, adada dada) (Wop Wop, wop-, wop wop, adada dada) (ShoutShout, knock, yourself out) (Come On yell, yell, loud, and swell) (YouGotta scream, scream, you, know what I…
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The Making of WWB: Fifty Years and Counting
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Two Growing up in Colorado as a young lepidopterist, I had the benefit of not only Holland’s classic Butterfly Book and Klotz’s excellent Peterson Field Guide to Butterflies East of the Great Plains, but also to a superb state book: The Butterflies of Colorado, by F. Martin…
