Robert Michael Pyle

Pyle's book Wintergreen describes the devastation caused by unrestrained logging as well as the remaining beauties of his adopted home. His book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide grew out of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from An Urban Wildland chronicles the intersection of his Aurora, Colorado, boyhood nature explorations and Colorado's long tradition of water rights battles. Both Wintergreen and The Thunder Tree exemplify Pyle's love of damaged lands.

His travel narrative Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage traces his discovery of previously unnoticed monarch migration patterns. Pyle co-edited and annotated Nabokov’s Butterflies, which collects the novelist’s butterfly writings from throughout his literary and scientific opus.

Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip reflects on Pyle’s development as a writer and on his sources, influences, and beliefs. Sky Time in Gray's River follows the lives of the creatures populating his adopted village month by month through the seasons.

Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year chronicles Pyle's coast-to-coast adventures and misadventures while documenting as many butterflies as possible (similar to a birder's big year).

A chapbook of poems and stories, Letting the Flies Out, preceded Pyle's first full-length book of poems, Evolution of the Genus Iris. His second book of poems, Chinook and Chanterelle, features cover art by the late artist and naturalist Thea Linnaea Pyle.

Other books include The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterfly Watcher's Handbook, and The Butterflies of Cascadia.

Magdalena Mountain: A Novel is Pyle's first published book of fiction, and weaves a converging tale of disparate personalities brought into the high country of Colorado mountain wilderness by their various quests for the all-black alpine Magdalena butterfly.

Butterfly Launches from Spar Pole, a collaboration of Pyle with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and Ray Prestegard, is an eleven-track audio album of acoustic song-poems inspired by the natural world.

Pyle's essays from fifty-two consecutive issues of Orion and Orion Afield magazines are published in The Tangled Bank. A novel, collections of stories and essays, and peer-reviewed scientific papers on butterflies are forthcoming.

Pyle has taught writing and natural history seminars for many colleges and institutes around the world, and presented hundreds of invited lectures and keynote addresses. He has served as Visiting Professor of Environmental Writing at Utah State University; as Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana; and as place-based writing instructor for the Aga Khan Humanities Project in Tajikistan and the Writers' Centre of Tasmania.

On twenty-five occasions from 1976 to 2013, he was a presenter and field trip leader at the annual week-long National Wildlife Federation Conservation Summits. He has also led natural history seminars for Cloud Ridge Naturalists and at the North Cascades, Olympic Park, and Glacier Park Institutes.

He has served on the faculty of the Sitka Institute, Fishtrap, Haystack, Art of the Wild, and many other writers' events and has led natural history tours for the National Audubon Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the Wilderness Society, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, and The Nature Conservancy, among others.