Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year

by Robert Michael Pyle

Part road-trip tale, part travelogue of lost and found landscapes, all good-natured natural history, Mariposa Road tracks Bob Pyle’s journey across the United States as he races against the calendar
in his search for as many of the 800 American butterflies as he can find. Like Pyle’s classic Chasing Monarchs, Mariposa Road recounts his adventures, high and low, in tracking down butterflies in his own low-tech, individual way. Accompanied by Marsha, his cottonwood-limb butterfly net; Powdermilk, his 1982 Honda Civic with 345,000 miles on the odometer; and the small Leitz binoculars he has carried for more than thirty years, Bob ventured out in a series of remarkable trips from his Northwest home. From the California coastline in company with overwintering monarchs to the Far Northern tundra in pursuit of mysterious sulphurs and arctics; from the zebras and daggerwings of the Everglades to the leafwings, bluewings, and border rarities of the lower Rio Grande; from Graceland to ranchland and Kauai to Key West, these intimate encounters with the land, its people, and its fading fauna are wholly original. At turns whimsical, witty, informative, and inspirational, Mariposa Road  is an extraordinary journey of discovery that leads the reader ever farther into butterfly country and deeper into the heart of the naturalist.

Genres: Travel, Nature, Nonfiction, Science, Natural History

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist and a professional writer who has published twelve books and hundreds of papers, essays, stories and poems. He has a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in 1974. His acclaimed 1987 book Wintergreen describing the devastation caused by unrestrained logging in Washington's Willapa Hills near his adopted home was the winner of the 1987 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. His 1995 book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide was the subject of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reviews

[H R Koelling · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can you say about the venerable Robert Michael Pyle that hasn't been said before? His dapper cherubic adventures, dallying with winged nymphs and quaffing localized microbrews sets my heart aflutter. Pardon the pun.

His constant references to some of the most memorable travel tomes only adds to the allure of his travels: William Least Heat Moon, Kerouac and Steinbeck. As a fellow-traveler who spent a year plying the backroads of America in 1995, I was constantly reminded of the freedom of the open road. It made me wish I could do it all over again.

But this isn't really a travel book, it's butterfly book. And what a butterfly book it is! His descriptions of the butterflies he sees, the locations he searches and the people he spends times with all make this an incredible book for the butterfly nerdom, of which I count myself a member. After reading this book, I started to think that Lepidopterists inhabit every nook and cranny of the country, sitting next to you in restaurants and working everyday jobs. I can't believe how many butterfly enthusiasts Bob stumbled across in his travels. I guess I'm traveling in the wrong circles.

But this book, unfortunately, may be a little too inaccessible to the average reader. It's not the author's fault, the world of butterflies is complicated, especially when there are so many butterflies in so many different habitats with really complicated esoteric Latin names. I didn't have the foggiest idea what kind of butterfly Bob was talking about roughly 50% of the time. But I still found it to be compelling reading.

I really liked that this Butterfly Big Year was done on the cheap, not as some rich man's passionate quest to outdo his rivals in the mysterious world of Butterfly Baggers. This man loves his wife dearly, and misses her at every turn; mentioning her often throughout the book. He also loves his ancient Honda Civic with 350,000 plus miles on it, which he has fondly named Powdermilk. And his collecting nets have names: Marsha and Akito. This guy lives and breathes butterflies, but not in a pretentious unapproachable way.

I had the great good fortune to hear Mr. Pyle speak at the Hawthorne Powell's several years ago in Portland, Oregon. He was a really approachable and friendly person, not some stodgy academic or scientist. He's really likeable, which is why this book is really likeable, too.

I wish the book could have been accompanied by vivid color pictures of the various butterflies he sees throughout his travels, but this would make the book prohibitively expensive. I suggest cozying up with a companion Butterfly Identification book, or an app, that let's you actually see the butterflies he tallies on his quest to identify 500 different butterfly species in 365 days.

I'm eager to get out there with my own net now to find new species and to admire the beautiful little insects that are fluttering all around. I'll have his book, The Butterflies of Cascadia: A Field Guide to All the Species of Washington, Oregon, and Surrounding Territories, close by my side.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first, things went well. Likeable author with a good sense of place. However, sad to say, unless one is true butterfly person, it became bogged down. A matter of skimming through the "inside baseball" to find the general-interest travel narrative material. Really 2.5 stars.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little disclaimer:
This review (and 3/5-stars rating) reflects my relatively narrow scope for appreciation of the topic. Although I have never taken much interest in butterflies, I do enjoy reading about wildlife, natural history and travel journals, and it was a review in Audubon Magazine which ultimately inspired me to pick up this book. While I'm sure this would have been a quicker and more enjoyable read for a butterfly enthusiast, I did find a lot to like about Mariposa Road, which I am pleased to describe for the benefit of prospective readers.

First of all, Robert Michael Pyle reveals himself a seductively likeable person. Demonstrating an admirable talent for connecting with folks all over the country, longtime friends and colleagues as well as strangers, the author paints a beautiful picture of humankind, in addition to the dazzling creatures he pursues and catalogs. His attitudes towards people, nature, and our respective places in the world are thought provoking and heartwarming in equal measure.

Another intriguing aspect of the book is the author’s seamless ability to intertwine expert butterfly observation with his own personal journey. Pyle shares the day-to-day account of his travels with the reader as he would with family or friends. Meanwhile, simultaneously-recounted personal, national and global trials and events (his wife’s illness, a presidential election, boarder patrol tensions, the weather, etc.) tether his wandering tale to the reader’s world.

If you’re thinking about reading this book, consider these practical tips to augment your enjoyment and appreciation:

* Tip #1 - Pace and Timing
At the rate of a page or two a day, it took me about a year to finish reading this year-long butterfly-seeking saga. That's probably about the right pace for tackling a book like this (especially for someone who is not exactly a butterfly person). It made good sense to follow the seasons concurrently with the author (whose journey commences and ends on January 1).

* Tip #2 - Format and References
I regret that I did not purchase the Kindle edition of this book. At 500+ pages, the hefty hard-cover volume is not commuter friendly. The ability to instantly consult additional references (especially illustrated field guides) would have served as a valuable benefit of an electronic reading format. I also wish I had been able to electronically underline and later reference the surprisingly numerous beer lovers’ oases which the author managed to find across this amazingly butterfly-filled country!

[Mark Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about butterflies in the USA – and about the people who like butterflies and the people met ‘on the road’ while looking for butterflies.

The road is quite a long one as Bob Pyle tried to see all the USA’s butterflies in a year – which meant criss-crossing the USA several times to try to be in the right place at the right time. How many miles – 88,000?!

How many butterfly species do you think there are in the USA? There are about the same number as there are USA birds – 800. Pyle’s aim was actually to see 500 and you’ll have to read the book to see how close he got to 500 or 800.

He did also see 344 species of birds though.

This is quite a long book, and I have decided to take it slowly. I have read bits and pieces – choosing the beginning, the end and places I know myself in between – and it is very enjoyable. At 558 pages it is too daunting to read from end to end – or maybe that’s just me – but taken a step at a time I am loving it.

The book doesn’t have an index so I can’t find where or when Pyle saw the species I know, or visited the places I know, without a lot of flicking through pages. I guess he wasn’t allowed more pages!

Being knocked out for kissing someone else’s girlfriend (at the age of 14, by a 23-year old cowboy), being mistaken for Santa Claus and his search for decent beer are the types of incidents and insights that maintain the pace of the book. This is also a good guide to what to eat, and what not to eat, on the road in the USA.

Travel with Pyle and you will see parnassians, swallowtails and hairstreaks, and California, Kentucky and Texas, and you will get a glimpse of the American people too.

Pyle is a story-teller – and a very good one. I have heard, from independent sources, that he is a brilliant and captivating speaker and that doesn’t surprise me given the way he writes. He will be at the Butterfly Conservation Symposium next year and I will hope to be there to hear him.



Mariposa Road : the first butterfly Big Year is published by Yale University Press and is available on Amazon as is Mark Avery’s book Fighting for Birds.

[David Rudin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished reading this tome, paperback 537 pages, mostly in the last 10 days so I’ve been living in the head of RMP for hours and hours. Finishing this book, left me, as the quest left the author, a little sad and lost at the end. Pyle is a great trip leader, taking the reader across the country, literally from Alaska to Key West and all points in between, multiple times in his 2008 year long adventure. His folksy style shares not only the butterflies he came across but also the people he spent time with, local IPA’s, the lay of the land as well as history and conservation topics.

As someone who is very interested in butterflies and conservation, I found the details of his quarry to be especially engaging. For those less interested in butterflies, I could imagine the book might be less engaging. In either case RMP tells a great story. He’s the type of person that I’d imagine sitting in a cozy bar with and listening to him regale the group with his many stories of biological field work and travel. By the time the book ended I was sad to see him go but fortunately he’s a prolific writer so there’s much more out there.

[Cindy Dyson Eitelman]

Giving up on this, a little more than halfway through. It's a 558 page book describing a day-by-day journal of the author's yearlong travels to see all the butterfly species in the United States. Well, no--not all the species. There are close to 800 identified species in the country, and he set himself a goal to see 500 of them.

He came close but I won't say how close for fear of spoiling it for you. It's a good book and I recommend it highly, but after nearly three hundred pages I began to find that I picked it up with increasing reluctance and put it down with immense relief. It was good, but just too much for me.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I didn't finish reading this book ... I've been reading it in fits and starts for about 6 months, yet I wasn't even halfway through. It was time to admit defeat.

(Compared to when I read his book Where Bigfoot Walks: I blitzed through that in a week. It was excellent!)

I wanted to like this book so much, and at times it was very beautiful. Amusing anecdotes, incredible natural areas, and impressive butterflies. But it was too dense. To me it needed editing. Yes, sometimes travel and wildlife spotting are long and drawn out experiences but ... this travelogue was not for me.

[Krista Schlyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think if you are a knowledgeable butterfly aficionado, and you like lists and a play-by-play of finding butterflies, this might be a great book. That is not what I was hoping for in this book, so I was somewhat disappointed. I was hoping for more natural history insight into the lives of the butterflies Pyle was finding. But it is a great listing of where to find certain butterflies around the United States.

[David Winston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tough read, lots of detail, Lots of good data. But the same type of descriptions for nearly 500 butterflies makes for a long book

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inspired by similar efforts by birders, lepidopterist Robert Pyle sets off on a set of journeys to try to see as many species of butterflies in the U.S. as he can in one calendar year, partly because it had never been done, and partly to raise money and awareness for butterfly conservation. The book was very interesting in many respects. First and foremost, I learned a lot about butterflies. Pyle is one of the America's foremost experts on them, and he knows and was often assisted by many other experts around the country. It was fun hearing about his efforts (often successful, often not) to find some highly localized rarity in some obscure corner of the country, or his unexpectedly stumbling across a prized species in a random location like a Texas cemetery. I had also been to many of the places he visited during his travels, usually as a birder, and it was interesting to see what his experiences were in these places and what butterflies had drawn him there. He also describes the more mundane aspects of his travels in great detail (e.g. where he stayed, what he ate, who he met), and while these stories certainly added a lot of interest and color to the narrative, they also were the root of the book's biggest flaw. Pyle is a very good descriptive writer (and apparently much in demand at writing workshops), but he desperately needed a more aggressive editor! At nearly 550 pages, the book is excruciatingly long, and there were pages and pages of material that could easily have been excised without losing much in the way of the important context of the story. The project was clearly very emotional for him and I understand him wanting to capture and record as much as he could, but I didn't need to know about things like what his son-in-law made for Christmas dinner, or his diarrhea attack in a Key West city park. That being said, I certainly enjoyed the book overall and think most natural history enthusiasts would find it of interest.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

If there is one quotation all physicists love more than any other it is Rutherford’s magnificent put down ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting.’ And frankly, when it comes to science, Mariposa Road sits firmly in the stamp collecting class. To be fair, Rutherford’s remark was not quite as negative as it seems – ‘stamp collecting’ in the sense of collecting and collating information as is typical of natural history is an essential part of science – but to make for something to get your teeth into it helps to have the other bits too.

The trouble, then with this book, which according to the subtitle is ‘the first butterfly big year’ (if that is as meaningless to you as it is to me, I think the idea is that it is the account of year spent trying to spot as many different butterflies as possible within the United States), is that unless you are deeply interested in butterflies (and I am afraid I only have a passing interest), the excitement palls after about the fifth species. Don’t get me wrong. There is really interesting science in butterflies – just read the excellent book Metamorphosis – but not in cataloguing butterflies someone else has seen.

You might wonder why I bothered at all. It’s because I love the right kind of personal travel narrative. Pretty well any of Bill Bryson’s travel books, for instance (all better than his popular science book, for all its sales), or even something more quirky like Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice. But sadly not the approach taken by Robert Pyle. It’s not bad, but it is simply too gentle, too much a personal journal than an entertaining narrative. I just wasn’t that interested, I’m afraid.

Not one for me then. If you love butterflies, you may find it makes all the difference… but otherwise a less than exciting read.

Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission

[Joel · Rating 2 out of 5]

In 2008, Robert Pyle traveled the U.S. in an attempt to see as many species of butterfly during one calendar year as he could manage. This book is a record of that year. As a resident of Wisconsin, I was pleased to read his descriptions of visiting several sites that I'm personally familiar with, such as Cedarburg Bog.

As a reading experience, the book suffers from Pyle's near-obsessive level of detail. He records the names of the restaurants he eats in on his journey, the craft beers he drinks, the people he meets; the places he sleeps, right down to the location of each Wal-Mart parking lot he stops at for the night; every little problem that pops up with his car, and the names of the mechanics who straighten them out; even the road kill he drags off to the side of the road so carrion-eaters won't get hit by cars. He seems to be an excellent networker, and has an extensive web of fellow biologists and butterfly-fanciers who help him on his journey, give him food and lodging, and accompany him on some of his hikes. And he seems to feel the need to give thorough shout outs to each of those people; at times, the book feels like its own "Acknowledgements" section.

The book shines whenever Pyle writes about nature. Not just about butterflies, but about the whole ecology around them; the plants they eat, the predators which eat them; how they're affected by weather. His knowledge of the subject is prodigious, and he writes engagingly about it, with many endearing turns of phrase. But it's all buried in such a mass of dull minutiae, only a truly dedicated lover of nature would have the patience to slog through the whole 500-plus pages. Seldom have I more dearly wished for a book to receive loving attention from a good editor. It could probably have been pared down to 300 without sacrificing any of its informational content.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very slow-going book, and more intended for a naturalist in general and specifically a lepidopterist (or leptist is a term they use in the book) audience. Information that could be helpful is often assumed to already be known, and there is sometimes a snobbery that comes through for other people with different interests. At the same time, some of the prose is really beautiful, and there is some fun to going on the hunt.

Sample paragraph:
"I climbed an observation tower. After a nice but noisy French family left, peace was restored - only frogs clicking and harrumphing, big, blue, yellow-fuzzed mud bees buzzing, and the breeze. Tall oaks witchy with Spanish moss reared out of the swamp, and the rust-red flowers and needle bundles were just unfurling from the bald cypress."

Now imagine over 500 pages like that, but the paragraphs are often longer and there are often scientific names. How that sounds to you will let you know if you want to read it.

There is enough to know about searching for and identifying butterflies that you will not get it from this book, but he often mentions the common references, which could lead you in the right direction. If this pursuit is already your interest, you should find this book fascinating.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. I didn't want the butterfly searching to end, so I was reading it slowly. Renewed twice from the library and then still had it a few days overdue! It was worth it. Pyle, a lifelong lepidopterist, decided to find and definitely identify as many United States butterfly species as possible. I'm not a butterfly collector, but I'm certainly taking a new interest in them now thanks to Pyle.

He writes beautifully, and that makes what could be an impenetrable book - lots of science - totally engrossing. He values nature, with its interlocking systems, and friendships, with their many intersections, equally highly. Both receive loving treatment in the book. Both repay him many times over.

If you'd like to read more about his "big year" search, the Xerces Society has a page dedicated to it. Worth the time, imo. http://www.xerces.org/butterflyathon/

I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing that the publisher had sprung for many many illustrations of these butterflies. A guidebook is definitely a plus to have by your side when you're reading!

[Jennifer Nightingale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't want this book to end. A road trip across the country with Bob Pile and even a trip to Hawaii learning about and from butterflies was an amazing experience. I liked his company. I am intrigued now about butterflies. It is stunning book. Even his Afterward satisfies -

"After any big undertaking, one inevitably asks oneself, So how'd I do? How do I feel about it? How might I have done better? What would I do differently? And what would I recommend for anyone coming after? Then too, one naturally asks What did I learn? How am I changed? And of much greater importance, in this case, how have the butterflies changed? The land itself? And their survival dance together?"

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing is personable and interesting. However, I think this book just screams out for maps and some nice line drawings of the butterflies. I really liked Pyle's breadth of knowledge and his laid back tone. I felt I was walking the trail with him at points. But I constantly had to refer to maps and butterfly guides to get a good sense of where he was and what he was seeing at certain points. I don't think this is the author's fault, but probably the publisher not wanting to put the money into the book. But it's fun reading despite the drawback.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Driving in a 1982 Honda called Powdermilk, RMP traveled over 40,000 miles and flew another to identify almost 500 species of butterfly. This is first big year for butterflies (2008). He mostly slept in his car, recording everything he saw and everyone he met. Over 500 pages of delightful detail of the flora and fauna through most of the U.S., Hawaii and Alaska.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging account of an attempt to see as many butterfly species as possible in one year. I have a more detailed review here.

[Clif Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite nature/life experience writers. Can't wait to get into it.