Mariposa Road - 9780618945399

"In Mariposa Road we're invited along as Bob Pyle crisscrosses the country on a yearlong hunt for butterflies. He writes of the land and the creatures in it with such extraordinary vividness and grace---describes his adventures and the unexpected challenges with such good humor---that we are borne aloft, we can see it all and love it, as he does. You'll never have so much fun armchair traveling!"---Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses

"Toss out any notion you might have had about butterfly watchers and meet Bob Pyle: scientist and daredevil, philosopher and magician, pioneer and rebel, and the finest of companions for a vagabond journey. Follow him down the rip-roaring Mariposa Road and you'll never look at a butterfly, or the world, in the same way again."---Kenn Kaufman, author of Kingbird Highway

"What Roger Peterson was for birds, Bob Pyle is for butterflies---their most impassioned advocate and ceaseless popularizer. From the dusty heat of Texas and the tropical lushness of Hawaii to the legendary Out-house of the Midnight Sun in the Alaskan Arctic, Pyle is a traveling companion who never grows dull."---Scott Weidensaul, author of Ofr a Feather and Return to Wild America

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 eight hundred species of American butterflies as he can find.

Like Pyle's classic Chasing Monarchs, Mariposa Road recounts his adventures, high and low, 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 Graceland to ranchland and Kauai to Key West, these intimate encounters with the land, its people, and its fading fauna are wholly original. Pyle is by turns whimsical and wry, witty and elegiac, always engaging and often surprising. An extraordinary journey of discovery. Mariposa Road leads the reader ever farther into butterfly country and deeper into the heart of the naturalist.