Category: WWB With Bob Pyle
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More A Blast From the Past
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty One John Hopfinger’s Lepidoptera of North Central Washington, 1956. Part 2 AUTHOR’S NOTE: John Hopfinger was one of our great pioneer Washington lepidopterists. He lived in Brewster, Douglas County, where he was an orchardist. He often hunted butter- flies with his friend Andy Anderson from Pateros, across…
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A Blast from the Past
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty John Hopfinger’s Lepidoptera of North Central Washington, 1956. Part 1 AUTHOR’S NOTE: John Hopfinger was one of our great pioneer Washington lepidopterists. He lived in Brewster, Douglas County, where he was an orchardist. He often hunted butterflies with his friend Andy Anderson from Pateros, across the Columbia…
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Magdalena Mountain: An Excerpt
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Nine Author’s Note: My novel Magdalena Mountain was published in 2018 by Counterpoint Press. In it, the developing human story alternates with chapters from the life history of one Magdalena Alpine butterfly (Erebia magdalena) that I have named Erebia. The butterfly strongly influences the action and the…
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The Old Pro-Am Scam
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Nine We often overhear butterfliers discussing their fellow adherents in terms of their presumed status or stature, and the terms frequently employed include “professional” and “amateur.” Sometimes a simple distinction is intended between those who spend a lot of time on their butterfly work, and really know…
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Those Crazy Disjuncts
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Eight The field of biogeography treats of the whereabouts of plants and animals across the landscape-not only where organisms occur, but why they occur here, and not over there. This means that biogeography is extremely important to the conservation of butterflies and other creatures, because-as the motto…
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The Birth of Xerces
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Seven I am just about to wing my way to England for an Easter vacation. As always, returning to the UK puts me in mind of another such journey, long ago, that had big consequences for my life to come. By way of sharing these memories with…
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Where Are the Backpacking Butterfliers?
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Six In the late 1960s, when the Ecology Action club was going strong at the UW, we members had to come up with a program every month. When we couldn’t find anything else, we fell back on the films made by David Brower, president of the Sierra…
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Reflections on the Washington Butterfly Big Year
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Five Having conducted the first U. S. Butterfly Big Year in 2008 (Mariposa Road), and feeling like I’d like to do it again (but not THAT big!) I decided to do a Washington Big Year in 2017/2018. I have reported the results in the past three columns.…
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Washington Butterfly Big Year: Conclusion
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Four It’s not an easy thing to summarize a brimmingly full field season in one short column, but I’ll give it a try. Where I left off, I’d just had my first good Gorge trip of the year, meeting Indra, Propertius, Julia, and pow-wowing Klickitats and Yakamas…
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Washington Butterfly Big Year: Third Report
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Three Well, it’s been a decidedly slow start for the second half of the first Washington Butterfly Big Year. Some years, Echo Azures appear as early as the third week in February here in southwesternmost Washington. Two years ago, in spring of 2016, there were six species…
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What Does A Butterflier Do in Winter?
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Two It has ever been a problem for lovers of Lepidoptera resident in cold climes, come wintertime: how to pass those months between the asters of autumn with their anglewings, and the first painted ladies on the dandelions of April? (Or whatever the hangers-on and harbingers are…
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Washington Butterfly Big Year: Second Report
Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty One I concluded my previous column, “Bob’s Big Birthday Butterfly Bash,” like this: “Having found well over a third of the Washington butterflies in our single week in northeast Washington, David Branch and I (over a glass or two of The Macallan) rashly decided to undertake the…
