Chasing Monarchs: Migrating With the Butterflies of Passage - Hardcover

Pyle, Robert Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395828201 ISBN 13: 9780395828205

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

Tracing the travel route of the monarch butterfly, a lepidopterist and author of Wintergreen follows the annual mass migration of the colorful insects from their breeding grounds in British Columbia to their winter home in Mexico. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Michael Pyle is the author of fourteen books, including Chasing Monarchs, Where Bigfoot Walks, and Wintergreen, which won the John Burroughs Medal. A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is a full-time writer living in southwestern Washington.

Reviews

Scientists know that monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles each year between northern parts of the U.S. and Mexico or California, but no one has actually seen how they do it. So ecologist Pyle (Where Bigfoot Walks) decided to try. His method: to find individual butterflies at their northernmost habitat, follow them as far as possible, then repeat the process with other individual butterflies along the southward route. Amazingly, this haphazard approach worked. Pyle began near the Canadian border, at the Columbia River, and followed monarchs to the Mexican borderAcovering 9462 miles in 57 days and proving that western monarchs do not all migrate to California, as commonly believed. Though Pyle's account of his rambling trip suggests that much of it must have been more fun to live through than to read about, he enlivens uneventful sections with butterfly arcana, humorous reminiscences and rueful observations on the environmental impact of cattle ranching, pesticides, dams and jet skis. 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. Detailed sectional maps would have enhanced the book's appeal; endpaper map not seen by PW. (Aug.) FYI: Pyle is currently editing a collection of Vladimir Nabokov's butterfly writings.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pyle (Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Great Divide, 1995, etc.) takes a long, slow ramble with the wanderers, a.k.a. monarch butterflies, ostensibly looking for clues to their far-flung migratory behaviorbut really just having a good time mooching around outdoors. That the monarch engages in the longest, most spectacular mass movement of insects is well known. It journeys from its continent-wide summertime diaspora to its astonishing winter be-ins high in the cool forests of Mexico and the coastal California fog belt. But, Pyle hastily points out, the theory needs some fine-tuning concerning which butterfly populations go to which wintering venue, and he thinks he ought to go look into the question. Thus starts his two-month sabbatical with the monarchs, chronicled here with an enviably laid-back demeanor and an unflagging thrill in simply being outside, walking attentively through the landscape. Monarchs may be his quarry, but seeing that there are precious few of them at the journey's start, up in British Columbia, Pyle is just as happy with the Mormon metalmarks and Arizona sisters and hackberry emperors, with yellowbelly ponderosa, partridges flushed from fields of peppermint, ``a brilliant picture-wing fly with a gemmed thorax.'' As he does his easy shuffle to Mexico, he stops to have a good look around and sip a beer, serving as a natural and political historian; he keeps an eye peeled for monarchs on the move while delivering crisp, thoughtful lectures on protective coloration (for monarchs that means not camouflage, but a horn-blast of chromatic orange, reminding predators of their bitterness), orienteering with sun compasses and magnetic fields, or American Indian petroglyphs that have been copyrighted as trademarks by upscale white resorts ``in a stilling act of cultural appropriation.'' 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. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Victorian-era butterfly hunters are often portrayed as genteel aristocrats, but today's breed, like the author of this book, are gritty, adventurous, and far-wandering. Over two months and across 9000 miles, Pyle tracked and tagged monarch butterflies along their migratory route from northern British Columbia to Mexico. Because he is an ecologist, Pyle gives a solid general account of the state of scientific knowledge of the monarchs and their remarkable travels. Because he is also an award-winning natural history writer, he vividly conveys the lure of the butterflies, the quirky passions of those who study them, and the beauty and diversity of Western landscapes. Not only is this an entertaining work for general readers, but professional entomologists could also mine its observations for clues into the biology and behaviors of monarchs. For all libraries.
-AGregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib., Coral Gables, FL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395828201
• ISBN 13: 9780395828205
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256