Peter Pyle

Peter Pyle received a B.S. in Biology from Swarthmore College in 1979 and has spent his career as an ornithologist and marine biologist. Much of his research has been conducted on seabirds, pinnipeds, and white sharks at the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, and elsewhere in the Pacific. He has developed a special interest in bird molt and how it can be used to age birds, and has taught many workshops on this subject in North and Latin America. He is a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences and the B.P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. To date he has authored or co-authored more than 150 papers in scientific journals, four books, and an online monograph on the birds of Hawaii. In 2011 he discovered a new bird species based on a museum specimen, Bryan's Shearwater, and named it after his grandfather. Peter currently works for The Institute for Bird Populations in Point Reyes Station.
The Mammal Big Day, Story by Peter Pyle, Illustration by Rachel Diaz-Bastin

Pioneering The Mammal Big Day

March 12, 2015 •  by

The idea of recording as many mammals as you can see in 24 hours hasn’t caught on the way the birding big day has. But when a team of longtime biologists set out into the field, their efforts netted them some important new information about Northern California’s wild mammals — and a new North American record.