On January 1, our own award-winning author and lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle, Bob to most of us, began a grand adventure–to find, experience, and identify as many of the 800 species of butterflies in the United States and Canada as he can in one calendar year. Houghton Mifflin will publish his encounters with butterflies, people, and landscape as a book to be entitled Swallowtail Seasons: The First Butterfly Big Year.

In wishing him godspeed, WBA bought the first tank of gas for the 1982 Honda Civic in which Bob expects to travel approximately 75,000 miles during the year. You can track his progress Xerces.org

Support butterfly conservation by pledging to the 2008 Butterfly-A-Thon. All proceeds will go to the Xerces Society’s projects in rare butterfly conservation.

In addition to founding The Xerces Society in 1971, Bob has published fifteen books, including the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Handbook for Butterfly Watchers, and The Butterflies of Cascadia, as well as award-winning literary works such as Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, Where Bigfoot Walks, Walking the High Ridge, and Sky Time in Gray’s River which just won the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.

Bob sees the butterfly big year as a chance to aid butterfly conservation while gaining a broad perspective on the state of butterfly habitats across the continent and their response to climate change. Above all, it should be a grand, extended field trip, and he looks forward to sharing it with WBA as well as all friends of butterflies and the natural world.

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