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The Book is Done!
After a very long gap in posts to this blog, some readers have wondered what happened? Did Neil finally fall off a cliff while chasing...

Neil Björklund
Apr 262 min read
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The Lone Wanderer
It was wicked-hot, dry, desolate, and extraordinarily beautiful in the desert near the Owyhee River in Malheur County, where I spent a...

Neil Björklund
Nov 16, 20239 min read
262 views
2 comments


A Very Little Big Deal
Last summer, I wrote about a visit I made to the pumice desert east of Crater Lake, to check up on our population of Leona's Little Blue,...

Neil Björklund
Sep 22, 20237 min read
288 views
1 comment


The Great Butterfly Scrounge
Maybe I could blame it on iNaturalist. Well, maybe a little on my friend John, too. Although John and I are probably about even, since I...

Neil Björklund
Aug 17, 202312 min read
300 views
2 comments


The iNat Revolution
Welcome to my first Blog post of the year! I can't wait to share some updates from this new butterfly season with you. In the meantime,...

Neil Björklund
Apr 4, 20232 min read
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Yes, We have Volcanos!
I've been known to describe my avocation of chasing butterflies in Oregon as a game played on the huge game board of the state of...

Neil Björklund
Sep 21, 20226 min read
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1 comment


Wave the Checkered Flag!
I first started looking for the enigmatic Checkered White (Pontia protodice) back in 2004, at Picture Rock Pass, in Lake County. It was,...

Neil Björklund
Sep 15, 20227 min read
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Let's Go Dutch!
Nope, I'm not talking about coffee--I'm talking about the peak in southern Oregon. You know, Dutchman Peak, in the Siskiyous. It was...

Neil Björklund
Sep 9, 20227 min read
145 views
2 comments


Loving Leona
Leona's Blue (Philotiella leona) is Oregon's only known endemic butterfly. It has been found only in the pumice flats created by the...

Neil Björklund
Aug 28, 20225 min read
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The Bigfoot of Butterflies
We humans tend to love stories about mysterious critters that may or may not exist or persist out in the wild places. The Northwest's...

Neil Björklund
Aug 18, 20228 min read
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A Double Scoop of Rocky Road
Back in May I visited a few of the sites where Andy Warren had studied azure blues back in the early 2000's. At several sites, mostly in...

Neil Björklund
Aug 12, 20227 min read
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The Art of Waiting
The Nevada Skipper flies very fast and low in treeless habitats on windswept ridges. When the wind is gusting they can just disappear...

Neil Björklund
Aug 3, 20228 min read
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A Boy and His Butterfly
Earlier this spring, I learned in an unexpected way about an obscure disease called 4H Leukodystrophy. It is an inherited genetic...

Neil Björklund
Jun 7, 202211 min read
442 views
5 comments


Searching for Spring
This year, just when we seemed to be heading for the most severe drought in Oregon history, winter seemed to wake up and say "oh, wait...

Neil Björklund
Apr 29, 20229 min read
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Silverspotting
The Oregon Silverspot (Argynnis zerene hippolyta) is a subspecies of the Zerene Fritillary (Argynnis zerene), found along the Oregon...

Neil Björklund
Aug 15, 20215 min read
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Puttin' on the Frits
Here in Oregon, as summer pushes on into July and early August, we get into smoke season, but we also get into the season of nymphalids...

Neil Björklund
Aug 8, 202112 min read
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The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Checkerspot
I was packing for a trip to the southern Blue Mountains to (hopefully) photograph Garita Skipperlings for the first time, when I got the...

Neil Björklund
Jul 14, 202110 min read
275 views
2 comments


The Tao of Skipperlings
The Taoist Masters of old speak of the principle of Wu wei, or non-doing, as being central to their way of understanding how the world is...

Neil Björklund
Jul 10, 20219 min read
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Heat Zombie and the Bakeoven Butterflies
As a second generation native Oregonian, I have always felt some kind of civic duty to photograph the Oregon Swallowtail, our state insect..

Neil Björklund
Jun 27, 202113 min read
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Hunting for the Gold
Isn't it curious how sometimes when we are looking for one thing, we often find something else that is equally satisfying?

Neil Björklund
Jun 6, 20216 min read
201 views
2 comments
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