About Robert . . .

Robert Michael Pyle was born and raised in Colorado and has lived in the Pacific Northwest, California, New England, and Great Britain.  His undergraduate degree in Nature Perception and Protection and Master of Science in Nature Interpretation from the University of Washington were followed by a doctorate in Ecology and Environmental Studies from Yale University.  He has worked as a Ranger-Naturalist for Sequoia National Park, as Northwest Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy, and as co-manager of the Species Conservation Monitoring Center of the World Wildlife Fund and IUCN in Cambridge, U.K.  In 1971 he founded the international Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (http://www.xerces.org/), and later chaired its Monarch Project. For many years he chaired IUCN/WWF's Lepidoptera Specialist Group, and he has consulted in rare butterfly conservation matters for the Wildlife Department of Papua New Guinea, the U.S. National Park Service, and several other conservation agencies.

For thirty years, Pyle has been a full-time freelance writer, teacher, speaker, and biologist.  His fifteen books include Wintergreen, which won the John Burroughs Medal, a Governor's Writer's Award, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award; The Thunder Tree; Where Bigfoot Walks, subject of a Guggenheim Fellowship; Chasing Monarchs; and Walking the High Ridge, as well as The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterflies of Cascadia, Nabokov's Butterflies, and several other standard butterfly works.  His most recent book, Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature and was a finalist for the Orion and Washington Book Awards.  Mariposa Road: the First Butterfly Big Year is forthcoming in the fall of 2010 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Magdalena Mountain, a novel, is in progress along with collections of poems and essays.  Pyle's popular essay-column, “The Tangled Bank,” appeared in 52 consecutive issues of Orion Magazine. 

Bob Pyle has taught writing and natural history seminars for many conferences, institutes, and colleges around the world, and presented hundreds of invited lectures and keynote addresses. In recent years he has served as Visiting Professor of Environmental Writing at Utah State University, Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana, and leader of a course in place-based writing sponsored by the Aga Khan Trust for the Humanities in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. He has been named Distinguished Alumnus by the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and received a Distinguished Service Award from The Society for Conservation Biology.  For thirty years he has lived along Gray's River, a tributary of the Lower Columbia River in southwest Washington, with his wife, artist and botanist Thea Linnaea Pyle. Back --->