Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

CHASING MONARCHS

Robert Michael Pyle

Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage

The monarch butterfly is our best-known and best-loved insect, and its annual migration over thousands of miles is an extraordinary natural phenomenon. Robert Michael Pyle set out late one summer to follow the monarchs south from their northernmost breeding ground in British Columbia. CHASING MONARCHS tells the engrossing story of his adventurous journey with these graceful wanderers - down the Columbia, Snake, Bear, and Colorado rivers, across the Bonneville Salt Flats, and through the Chiricahua Mountains to Mexico, returning north along the California coast. Part travelogue, part scientific study, CHASING MONARCHS is one of the most fascinating books ever written about butterflies.

Robert Michael Pyle has a Ph.D. in ecology from Yale and is the author of twelve books.

Available products
Book Published 1999-08-01 by Mariner Books / HMH

Comments

The best science book of the year.

As for the monarchs, there do appear to be some transmontane migrants, a fact that runs counter to established thinking, although that will require further research. And say, isn't that a microbrewery over there? Natural history never went down easier.

Pyle's laid-back humor is appealing, his descriptive talents are often poetic (he remembers monarchs pouring into a Mexican valley "like a heavy orange vapor" in which individuals resembled "flecks of foam and water as they top a waterfall and plunge down into the foaming mass"). His memoir serves both as tribute to this majestic insect and as a thoughtful tour of the contemporary American West.