Robert Michael Pyle (born 19 July 1947)[1] is an American lepidopterist, writer, teacher, and founder of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

[1] A Fulbright Scholarship in 1971-72 enabled Pyle to study butterfly conservation at the Monks Wood Experimental Station[1] in Abbot's Ripton, England, with John Heath[1] and other mentors, which led to his founding of the Xerces Society in 1971.

Pyle has taught writing, conservation biology, and natural history seminars for many colleges and institutes around the world, and presented hundreds of invited lectures and keynote addresses.

He has served on the faculty of the Sitka Institute, Fishtrap, Haystack, Art of the Wild, Breadloaf, and many other writers' conferences and events and has led natural history tours for the National Audubon Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the Wilderness Society, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, and The Nature Conservancy, and Green & Pleasant Tours ("Birds and Beers of Britain") among others.

Pyle's seminal work, Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land describes the devastation caused by unrestrained logging as well as the remaining beauties of his adopted home in the Willapa Hills.

His second book of poems, Chinook and Chanterelle, features cover art by his wife, the late artist and naturalist Thea Linnaea Pyle.

Pyle's third longer collection, The Tidewater Reach: Field Guide to the Lower Columbia River in Poems and Pictures, is a collaboration with photographer Judy VanderMaten.

The book seeks to blend methods of narrative natural history writing with pure fiction by alternating chapters on Magdalena's life in the high rocks with those of the human characters.

Butterfly Launches from Spar Pole, a collaboration of Pyle with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and Ray Prestegard, is an eleven-track audio album of acoustic song-poems inspired by the natural world.