It wasn\u2019t long before we moved to southeast Arizona for good\u2014at last. Alison and I were coming down Miller Canyon after a quick pre-breakfast walk, and we ran into a group of binocular-wearing colleagues headed up. The usual greeting: \u201cSeen anything?\u201d The group\u2019s apparent leader responded with the disyllabic question: \u201cSulfurs?\u201d<\/p>\n
Alison hesitated, puzzled, then pointed to the Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher squeaking its loud matins from the tree right above our heads. \u201cSulfurs?\u201d was the bemused response.<\/p>\n
They weren\u2019t talking about birds.<\/p>\n
Birders and lepers have a lot in common. Indeed, most of the latter started out as the former before discovering the pleasures of late rising and warm climates; as a result, the culture of butterflying, in North America at least, has closely mimicked the development of birding, with the signal exception of the big year: though well established in birding circles, the attempt to record as many species in a single annual cycle had never been attempted by a lepidopterist.<\/p>\n
Until, that is, Robert Michael Pyle\u2019s scaly-winged run in 2008.<\/p>\n
Pyle\u2014not to be confused with Hawaii\u2019s ornithologist\u2014is a highly respected butterflyer, an eloquent and influential conservationist, and a fine writer, and I was prepared to love Mariposa Highway<\/em>, the account of his 2008 North American butterfly big year. Unexpectedly, however, the book (all 400+ pages of it!) never really catches fire, its gentle prose and unhurried rhythm descending\u2014I hate to say it\u2014into the monotonous after the first 100 pages or so.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Like most critics, I usually find it easier to identify the causes of failure than<\/p>\n the sources of success; that\u2019s what reviewers are for, right? It was harder this time, though, given Pyle\u2019s long record of wonderful publications. Soon enough I found myself concentrating more on the book\u2019s failure to excite than on the events it recounts. What happened?<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just the occasional editorial lapse, as when the well-known state park in southeast Arizona is called \u201cPacheco\u201d rather than \u201cPicacho Peak\u201d or when Tom Beatty of hummingbird fame is called \u201cBentley.\u201d Instead, I think Mariposa\u2019s <\/em>failure to excite lies in its single-mindedness, in the static nature of its subject, and in a certain narrative solipsism. Let me explain:<\/p>\n Peterson and Fisher\u2019s Wild America, <\/em>which Pyle takes as his express model here, was the account of a birders\u2019 big year\u2014and much, much more. There was little the two friends did not stop to think about, feathered or not, natural or cultural: they spent April 19 in Concord and Lexington, they made a pilgrimage to the abandoned cabin of a Sonora Desert hermit, they ended the book with an appendix on the history of the fur seal trade. Mariposa<\/em>, in contrast, gives the impression of being about butterfly twitching and very little else. I haven\u2019t counted, but my sense is that far more words and far more pages are filled with the lister\u2019s veni, vidi, vici <\/em>in Pyle\u2019s work than in its great predecessor; this means that a reader who is not quite as enthusiastic a lepidopterist as the author may succumb before finishing the book.<\/p>\n There\u2019s something about butterflies themselves, too, that makes it much harder to keep the non-specialist reader\u2019s attention. Put simply, they don\u2019t really give a listing writer much to say: they may be beautiful, they may be rare, but beyond hilltopping, sucking manure, and copulating, they just don\u2019t do much. This challenge is visible in its extreme in Pyle\u2019s accounts of finding (and listing) butterfly eggs <\/em>for his big year; I admire the author\u2019s observational skills, but it would take a finer writer even than Pyle to generate much narrative tension out of such a find.<\/p>\n Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Pyle\u2019s big year was conducted largely on his own. Not even when he is butterflying with others does the hopeful reader find much in the way of interpersonal interest. Pyle is as dutiful as he is obviously sincere in thanking those who helped him, but I can\u2019t say that at the end I had any sense at all of having got to know the secondary \u201ccharacters\u201d in his story. Not even Pyle\u2019s wife, whose illness is a moving theme running through the book, ever really takes narrative shape here. Contrast this with the complicated relationship so charmingly drawn by the authors of Wild America<\/em>, or with the priceless character sketches that punctuate the account of another solo big year, Kenn Kaufman\u2019s Kingbird Highway<\/em>. In Mariposa<\/em>, we learn nearly as little about the author as we do about his friends; Pyle resembles Kenny Rogers, he went to Yale, that seems to be enough.<\/p>\n Butterfly devotees will read this book differently and probably with greater pleasure. The rest of us may come away disappointed that Mariposa <\/em>doesn\u2019t do a better job of spinning a more interesting story around the author\u2019s year on the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It wasn\u2019t long before we moved to southeast Arizona for good\u2014at last. Alison and I were coming down Miller Canyon after a quick pre-breakfast walk, and we ran into a group of binocular-wearing colleagues headed up. The usual greeting: \u201cSeen anything?\u201d The group\u2019s apparent leader responded with the disyllabic question: \u201cSulfurs?\u201d Alison hesitated, puzzled, then … <\/p>\n