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...

It was wicked-hot, dry, desolate, and extraordinarily beautiful in the desert near the Owyhee River in Malheur County, where I spent a...

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,...

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...

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,...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

The Nevada Skipper flies very fast and low in treeless habitats on windswept ridges. When the wind is gusting they can just disappear...

Earlier this spring, I learned in an unexpected way about an obscure disease called 4H Leukodystrophy. It is an inherited genetic...

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...

The Oregon Silverspot (Argynnis zerene hippolyta) is a subspecies of the Zerene Fritillary (Argynnis zerene), found along the Oregon...

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...

I was packing for a trip to the southern Blue Mountains to (hopefully) photograph Garita Skipperlings for the first time, when I got the...

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...

As a second generation native Oregonian, I have always felt some kind of civic duty to photograph the Oregon Swallowtail, our state insect..

Isn't it curious how sometimes when we are looking for one thing, we often find something else that is equally satisfying?