One pleasureful way to catch up with all those more experienced butterfliers we meet is to read and read and then read some more. Fortunately there is lots of good reading material available to us beginners, free of technical jargon or insiders’ argot. There are two professionals whose writing I especially recommend: Bob Pyle and Jeffrey Glassberg.

Glassberg is the president of the North American Butterfly Association and editor of the magazine “American Butterflies,” which all WBA members receive quarterly. He writes much of the material in that excellent publication. See for example his column – always interesting – at the front of each issue. There’s also his peachy little pamphlet, “Enjoying Butterflies More”, available through NABA. Finally, Glassberg is writing a series of first-rate field guides under the general title Butterflies Through Binoculars. I have his Eastern and Boston-New York-Washington Region volumes and can attest to their usefulness in the field (even I can usually identify what I see in the field with those guides in hand.) Shortly his Western North America volume will be out.

Bob Pyle is at least as good as Jeffrey Glassberg-he may even be the best nature writer of all. As you may know, he’s a resident of Gray’s River, Washington and an honorary member of WBA, so we claim him as our own. He’s written a number of books that are particularly helpful to us beginners. Best of all is his Handbook For Butterfly Watchers. I read it right after I took Idie Ulsh’s wonderful butterfly course. It was a perfect next step. Way back in 1974 he wrote Watching Washington Butterflies, also very good but a bit dated and hard to find now. With the aid of Idie, Dave Nunnallee and another WBA board member, Jonathan Pelham (the star of so many of our WBA meetings), Bob Pyle will soon have out another field guide which will greatly help you and me to figure out which butterfly species we’re looking at. It will be a guide to our Northwest region, referred to by him as “Cascadia.”

Keep on reading and keep your eye out for those two new field guides! When I was a beginning bird watcher thirty years ago, my mentor said to me, “Tom, if you want to be a good birder you should spend time studying a field guide or reading about birds every single day.”

G’num2001Vol2No3