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[00:00:05] Michael Hawk: ​[00:00:00] Nearly every great story involves a transformation. In the butterfly world, we call it metamorphosis. It’s the mysterious process where a caterpillar seemingly dissolves itself and is miraculously rebuilt into a creature that takes to the sky. Our guest today is living a parallel to that transformation.

Liam O’Brien started his career far from the wild, under the bright lights of the stage as a professional actor. Yet a shift was coming. At a pivotal time in his life, he traded the scripts in the spotlight for the quiet, meticulous study of Winged Beauty stepping into the world of lepidoptery. This pivot wasn’t just a career change, it was a profound reawakening,

and in the precision and fragile beauty of the Bay area’s butterflies. Liam not only found a new scientific passion, but he also rediscovered his dormant talent for art. He began documenting the area butterflies with exquisite original paintings, blending [00:01:00] science and creativity in the way only he could.

The final form of this incredible journey is his beautifully illustrated Butterflies of the Bay Area and slightly beyond that was just released. Today liam discusses what makes butterflies so amazing. We also discuss how no matter where you live, there are discoveries to be made. And this interview is so much more than just butterflies.

You’ll have to listen to hear the raw jaw dropping story of what led Liam to this life change.

And as you’d expect from a stage actor, Liam is full of charismatic and entertaining stories. And while we get into the details of some specific butterflies and places around the Bay Area, rest assured there are parallels no matter where you live. You can find Liam online at Robert Fly on Instagram and check out the show notes for links to Heyday Press and his book.

So join me in welcoming author, artist, and Liam, so great to see you again today.

[00:01:58] Liam O’Brien: Yeah. Nice to meet you, Michael. [00:02:00] At least for the second time.

[00:02:01] Michael Hawk: Yeah, yeah. The first time we were in the field I think, looking for the Sonoran blue butterfly at a little park here in the Bay Area.

[00:02:09] Liam O’Brien: Yeah, at uh, Alum Rock Park, which is one of the five great butterfly walks in my book, so that, that worked out great.

[00:02:17] Michael Hawk: Yeah, for sure. And I, and I didn’t realize how great of a place that was at the time until our mutual friend Cat told us about the, told me anyway about the Sonoran Blue. And that just opened up a whole new world of that park for me.

[00:02:31] Liam O’Brien: Did we see it that day? I think we

[00:02:33] Michael Hawk: I think we did. Yeah.

[00:02:34] Liam O’Brien: It’s a stunning, no other butterfly flies like a Sonoran blue. It flies like a, a little piece of shimmering blue tinfoil. It’s just really an amazing little creature.

[00:02:44] Michael Hawk: And they seem to populate these very specific habitats

[00:02:50] Liam O’Brien: Right? Right. Dudleya cymosa is it’s host, so it needs like a rocky outcrop. It really likes the rocky outcrop.

[00:02:56] Michael Hawk: I, I just love that story. I know I’m already like, jumping in with both feet [00:03:00] here to, butterflies. So, we’ll back up in a moment. But I think it’s such a great example though of ecology because you need the rocky outcrop with the right aspect to get the plant that the butterfly depends on.

[00:03:15] Liam O’Brien: Yeah. I’m fascinated like where all these places connected and then through tectonics , all these populations got split up but, like, we have the San Bruno Elfin, which is an endangered butterfly on San Bruno, but now they’ve discovered just one rock throwaway on Sweeney Ridge that Moss Elfins AKA San Bruno Elfins fly there.

So do we call those San Bruno? I’m just fascinated as we find more populations like the Sonoran Blue just how divergent they are.

[00:03:45] Michael Hawk: Yeah, you use the word fascinated. I’m fascinated by how many of my guests have These moments where things just seem to fall into place at the right time.

[00:03:57] Liam O’Brien: Right,

[00:03:58] Michael Hawk: For you, it seems that in [00:04:00] reading, the introduction of your book, that butterflies arrived at a really critical and pivotal time for you.

So I’m wondering if you would be so kind, if you could kind walk me through how you got connected to butterflies and how it really just took off in your life like

this.

[00:04:15] Liam O’Brien: Yeah. So, for the first 35 years of my life I was a professional stage actor. I got in the union when I was 20 and finished doing Le Miserable on Broadway for three years and moved back to San Francisco for a part actually. I was playing Prior in Angels in America at the Marines Memorial.

And I was living off the Duboce Triangle in San Francisco, pretty little section of the city. And one day a western tiger Swallowtail, our largest butterfly in San Francisco, floated over

and I noticed this butterfly, and for some reason I got up and walked down to the backyard and I watched it. I watched it on this cosmos. I remember the flower even. And then I, for some reason ran upstairs and I got some paper and pen, which is something I hadn’t [00:05:00] done. I really hadn’t done a lot of painting since college.

And let me tell you within 20 minutes, my life had turned 360 degrees. But at the same time, just right after that I was diagnosed with HIV and that brought my life to a full and complete stop. And I talk about in the book that after the diagnosis, I came home and I picked up the Audubon Field Guide to butterflies.

And I, I had just barely dabbled in them at the time, but I found it fascinating in retrospect that I, found Solace in a, in a field guide so on some deeper level I wanted to go on a journey with them. And I joined the Lepidoptera Society, which is a little more academic than like the North American Butterfly Association, which is more

Open to the public. So I was lucky that this new growing passion in me was housed in, in science. And yeah, my life, I started painting in journals and one thing led to another, but one part of my life came to [00:06:00] an end and this other section of it has just opened up incredibly wide now, especially with the book to come.

[00:06:07] Michael Hawk: . can you tell me what year approximately this

was?

[00:06:10] Liam O’Brien: Yeah, well I was diagnosed in 2000 and back then it was just changing from a death sentence to a chronic illness. And I just, I, I feel like I was handed my mortality at 35 and just a scary time. A scary time, but I got on the meds right away and I’ve been asymptomatic for 25 years, which is just a miracle.

And this whole other part of my life, I, I consider all this quite bonus, to be honest with you. Yeah.

[00:06:38] Michael Hawk: So tell me a little bit more about how and why you left your stage acting career.

[00:06:44] Liam O’Brien: So, I had a really wonderful career. Olivier said that an actor only has six moments in their career. And I feel like I had 20 by the time I was 35. I. I’d done a play at the magic saw called Sharon and Billy which [00:07:00] exploded. I, it was very successful.

I got offered contracts at ACT at Berkeley Rep, Berkeley Shakes, and I really had a quite just like what you dream of. I got the job on Broadway six days after landing on that island, which is just utterly unheard of. I’ve just, had a lot of luck, but what I didn’t have, Michael, is I didn’t really ever have drive.

And I learned living in New York City that if you don’t have drive, what are you doing there? It’s just such a dog eat dog business. And so, I humbly came back and yeah, that was in the late nineties before the butterflies took off. But one of the stranger moments for me is that a guy named Larry in the cast in New York.

I gave notice and I was leaving. I couldn’t do that turntable one more minute. I did 1,050 performances of Les Mis. I just, it’s too much for any being. And Larry gave me, as a going away gift, I opened the present and was a book on [00:08:00] Jamaican butterflies, which is surreal ’cause I didn’t really get going in my life for a another decade.

[00:08:06] Michael Hawk: So he had no, no concept that you had this connection?

Yeah.

[00:08:09] Liam O’Brien: No. I must have talked about nature being a nature nerd or something like that. No, he just it’s, it’s an ironic moment when I look back.

[00:08:17] Michael Hawk: Yeah, that’s pretty incredible. So you were into nature more generally, like as a kid

[00:08:22] Liam O’Brien: I would say I was into nature as a kid. I remember having a zoo on the side of the house before kindergarten in little bottles, catching bees, . but not much more than that. I mean, There wasn’t a whole lot going on. My brother Colin and I had a real sort of Tom Sawyer existence in the creek,

and we just ran to the creek. And we played in the creek all the time. And I’m really glad that the internet never really was part of my childhood. I’m really lucky for that. But yeah, aside from frogs, we were really into frogs. Nature really has not been part of my life I think the opposite of nature would be a theater.

had an acting [00:09:00] teacher once in college that saw my paintings and he said that that worried him. And I thought, that’s a weird thing to say. And he said, because it’s the opposite of theater. Theater is utterly collaborative and.

Painting a drawing is completely isolated. So I thought that was interesting that both of them exist in me.

[00:09:20] Michael Hawk: why don’t you first give the elevator pitch of, of what your book is and what it’s about.

[00:09:25] Liam O’Brien: Sure. When they asked me I had done the cover of Bay Nature Magazine and got approached by Martina here at the Bay Nature Gala. And they said they were looking for someone to do a butterfly book. And I thought to myself, really the world needs another butterfly field guide. But conservation has become a huge part of my life and

they let me put a lot of my conservation, in there. I’ve got essays in there.

I’ve, they let me go where I wanted to go with the introduction, which will probably jar people a little in a book on butterflies. But, I don’t quite know what that book is about, which is great. It’s ended up being, it’s [00:10:00] obviously there’s all the 133 species of butterflies in the Bay Area and slightly beyond.

It might have, Should have called it butterflies of two bay areas. ’cause I go all the way down to Monterey and and San Benito counties as well.

[00:10:13] Michael Hawk: there’s so many things that stand out in the book, but related to what you were just talking about is it’s all your artwork in the book. And I didn’t count how many prints there are, but you probably know.

[00:10:24] Liam O’Brien: , I don’t, now that I have the book in front of me, I really will go through for each one, but I think there’s around 700.

[00:10:30] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Which is in incredible. And, and that’s back to your interest in drawing and painting. And, and here I am, I don’t have that background and I, I just was thinking, well, I wonder if people in theater have the same kind of like artistic crossover that you have, but it sounds like that’s not common at

all.

[00:10:49] Liam O’Brien: No, it’s not, I know Henry Fondo was a, a pretty great illustrator and stuff, but you don’t really hear a lot and a lot of famous celebrities are painters. But , what can I say? The parallel paths [00:11:00] are something I have no problem being on. But to answer that other question is that I had all this real good success when I was young up to about 35.

And I thought to myself, well, just one more play is just another play. I just wanted something different in my life. . I wanted, I wanted a whole different chapter in my life. And Lord, did I get it.

[00:11:18] Michael Hawk: I am still fascinated by this because I’ve been on my own personal journey, departing my tech career to make a go at conservation through Jumpstart Nature and and that change really felt like I, I would, I would waffle back and forth as to whether it was a permanent forever thing or whether I could ever actually go back.

And I’m curious how it felt for you leaving theater. Did you feel like you could always just go back if you had to at some point?

[00:11:47] Liam O’Brien: There has not been one nanosecond of regret. I miss the collaborative nature of theater. I love coming together as an a group of people, and especially working on a new play [00:12:00] that really was the most fulfilling aspect, but performing? No, I don’t miss it at all. So I had a real disconnect being in theater.

I learned really young to have a real thick skin about it, to not take a lot of it personally. I acquired enough skills to be dispassionately objective about what I was doing, and I’m glad I had that ’cause I saw so many people crash and burn ’cause their ego was so invested in it.

But this was a different experience writing the book because I am, I’m all ego there. I mean, I have no frame of reference writing a book but I had some great teachers here and folks at Heyday and some great editors and held my hand when I was having nervous breakdowns and things like that.

[00:12:41] Michael Hawk: That sounds, it sounds like an important support structure,

[00:12:45] Liam O’Brien: You got it. You got it.

[00:12:47] Michael Hawk: So you, you discovered through this Western Tiger Swallowtail Muse your next chapter

[00:12:54] Liam O’Brien: And it wasn’t, it wasn’t a conscious thing at all. It just of cumulatively I started to be known for the [00:13:00] butterfly work.

[00:13:00] Michael Hawk: And tell me a little bit about that work. So you joined the Lepidoptera Society and, it seems like you jumped in with both feet.

[00:13:06] Liam O’Brien: I did. I did. My little brother says, Liam never does anything half-assed. And I really, I, I went for it. I got a field guide within a few days and I joined the Lep Society and one of the greatest things about the Lep Society was a guy named Jerry Powell that he was the past president of it, and the book is dedicated to Jerry and, In his address to the membership in the seventies. He said something really interesting that he says, the Lepidoptera Society makes no distinction between the academic and the amateur. We know one needs the other to move this along. And that’s always stuck in my head. That I really did throw myself into it.

But what really took me to another level is that no one had surveyed the butterflies of San Francisco. And it’s because Jerry, said, learn where you live. Learn where you live. That’s all his whole thing was. So I thought to myself, God, I live in San Francisco.

What a [00:14:00] crud hole for butterflies. And so I thought, okay, well let’s just see exactly what’s going on. And so I trespassed, I did everything I could to get into any of our open spaces to see what butterflies were left in this highly urbanized city. I did it 2007 and, I repeated it at 2009.

I came up with about 34 breeding species. Mostly my whole goal was to see females, ’cause they sort of connote breeding boys will pass through, but the girls, you want to find the girls. I started to have an idea for a conservation project, something I had never had any background in, in my life as I went through that year in 2007 and that took off as well.

So, that I’ve gone now into conservation is really something I could have never foreseen even when I was painting and drawing my first butterfly.

[00:14:49] Michael Hawk: When you were beginning this survey in San Francisco, were you limiting yourself to city limits or, or allowing yourself to

Okay. The county

[00:14:58] Liam O’Brien: I mean, We have one of the [00:15:00] greatest butterfly spots in the nation, just across the county line in San Bruno. So I, I almost feel like that was a different island of specifics.

[00:15:09] Michael Hawk: Now you would still allow yourself to go explore there, right?

[00:15:12] Liam O’Brien: of course. Yeah. My god. Yeah.

We’ve got incredible butterfly diversity but a city is really a different creature. approximately 18 of the 34 species, the females use weeds in the sidewalk to lay their eggs on. So I think that’s kind of a fascinating little factoid that half of them are using weeds in the sidewalk

[00:15:33] Michael Hawk: yeah, that leads to lots of questions. Like, is that a, a selection bias? If, obviously if there were more native plants there, you would have more species,

[00:15:40] Liam O’Brien: yeah, butterflies of break down into specialists versus generalists and we have a lot more generalists in the city. A female that will lay her egg on many host plants, and it is the ones that are on native plants that probably have the most tenuous existence because the disappearance of host plants is a real, a real thing that’s going on with [00:16:00] butterflies across the nation and the world.

They’re losing their ecosystems, but in the Darwinian sense, is it smarter that a cabbage white will lay her eggs on many things and a green hairstreak will only lay her eggs on one thing. I’m not only

Enthralled by butterflies, but I’m equally enthralled in our relation ship to them as well. So, It’s that actor. I used to make a living by observing human behavior and now I make a pretty good living of just observing. I just shifted to bugs. That’s how I kind of just say it.

[00:16:31] Michael Hawk: Your comment extracted some deep memory years ago now, probably, 15, 20 years ago. I, I read a book. called something like the Dangerous World of Butterflies.

[00:16:42] Liam O’Brien: yeah, I read that book.

[00:16:44] Michael Hawk: And it really got into the sort of the cultural element of, of how people relate to butterflies.

I’ll have to pull that one back out.

[00:16:50] Michael Hawk: You mentioned the diversity and the number you said what, 133

[00:16:56] Liam O’Brien: 133 species in all the counties that touched the Bay, and [00:17:00] then a couple from Mendocino to Monterey.

[00:17:02] Michael Hawk: and what percentage of butterfly species in the United States does that represent.

[00:17:07] Liam O’Brien: Well, I’m probably gonna slaughter the real numbers here, but I think There’s about 750 known in the continental United States and, islands and things, but I think there’s 225 in the state of California. So we’ve, we’re doing pretty good at 1 33 in Central California.

[00:17:26] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it’s a pretty good percentage and right, those numbers are always changing with new genetic evidence and, splitting and lumping and, everything that happens there.

[00:17:35] Liam O’Brien: Yeah.

[00:17:36] Michael Hawk: And without getting into the whole, what is a species anyway, discussion.

[00:17:40] Liam O’Brien: Thank you.

[00:17:42] Michael Hawk: as you were getting started, so it sounds like you, you found some mentorship too

in the, in the Lep Society

[00:17:48] Liam O’Brien: I sure did. Yeah. And it’s interesting we mentioned Paul Johnson earlier, but Paul was one of the first people I met at a butterfly count. His passion was equal to my passion. And we’ve kind of grown up together with [00:18:00] butterflies. A lot of similar folks that can’t really put their finger on why, what is it about butterflies that rock our world?

But I like that I found the Lep society first because my passion got grounded in good science, and I found that really enthralling. I mean, Everyone likes a butterfly, it’s a beautiful thing. Makes us feel good to see them. But Vladimir Nabokov, the famous Russian author, and probably the most famous Lepidopterist who ever lived said in 1947, he said, quote it’s astonishing to me how few people notice butterflies.

And I thought that was so interesting in 1947, but a lot more appreciation Societies have grown since 1947 and yeah, Lep Society has just been wonderful. I I got to hang out with grad students early on. A lot of them were into moths, so if you don’t step up to your moths, they’re not gonna really take you serious.

So, yeah, I was blessed. I really was blessed in my journeyman years.

[00:18:57] Michael Hawk: And yeah, my pause, I am, I’m realizing [00:19:00] I’ve been a little bit all over the map

[00:19:02] Liam O’Brien: Oh, no, I,

I am, if you gotta keep me reigned in, buddy, I will tap dance all over this building.

[00:19:07] Michael Hawk: So in those early years, with the grad students and, and so forth, I, I’m imagining they helped clue you into some of the hotspots , and maybe some of the endangered species and other things that maybe someone starting out on their own wouldn’t be aware of. Were there any standout moments, things that really surprised you?

either in your personal survey of San Francisco or these sort of early engagements with the Lep Society?

[00:19:34] Liam O’Brien: Well, like I said because I’m equally enthralled in our relationship to butterflies and Moths, all of Lepidoptera there are those moments. I was with a guy named Jim Cruz who was a grad student and he was really into Hemileuca moths . So we would jump in his car and we’d drive all night to where Utah.

Arizona and California all come to a corner. And I remember we were waiting for two moths to come in and we were at a gas station and we’re just sitting [00:20:00] against the wall waiting, looking up into this light. And the moths finally came, but during it, I was bored, so I started painting the gas station.

And I’m so glad I still have that piece because the woman came out from the little 7- 11 and she said, can I get you guys anything else? And we have these two giant nets that we’re like trying to catch a moth. I bring that up because it really is the human moments that I think moved me along.

I don’t get a lot of jollies looking at a drawer full of dead pin specimens, but if I can connect a human story behind each one I don’t know. I think that’s where I’ve continued along. It is just a weird little niche.

[00:20:38] Michael Hawk: Yeah, interesting. And quite a scene to,

paint in my brain anyway of two folks with giant nets in the middle of the desert

by a gas station.

[00:20:49] Liam O’Brien: Look at Juno. It was the Juno sheep moth. It was a beautiful moth.

those collecting gigs were really wonderful. I I, began as a collector because I lived in my own spin zone that well I’m painting a drawing [00:21:00] and I only want one male and one female, and they’ll be dead in 10 days

anyway, so that was the spin zone that I lived in, but I don’t collect anymore. And I’m not against collecting at all. It just lemme tell you, when I iNaturalist entered my life, I was much more interested in the photograph

than the specimen.

[00:21:16] Michael Hawk: And, the, the other thing, I know we’re talking about moths here, but you know, it’s a fine line between butterflies and moths in the world of Lepidoptera. So you’re talking about this special location that you went to for the silk moths. And, and just thinking about the Bay Area with its 133 species and a handful of endangered ones is, is that relatively typical if you were to pick a random spot, you know, in the

United States

[00:21:42] Liam O’Brien: No., What, what happened, why we have so many endangered butterflies in the Bay Area is because of one person. His name was Paul Opler He’s passed away since, but when the Endangered Species Act in 76, 2 years after the act came out, they decided to add invertebrates. [00:22:00] Paul was the guy who was selected to add endangered butterflies, and he grew up in Alameda, so it’s kind of a known thing that he went with what he knew.

We have Mission Blue, we have Lange’s Metal Mark. We have San Bruno Elfin, callippe silverspot . We have a handful, maybe six Myrtle silverspot out at Point Reyes. So if you push just a little behind each of the listings, you see this human story. It makes for a really rich place being a lepidopterist that, I, I have many options when butterfly season comes around and I love learning new things.

My friend Cat Chang, she showed me this subspecies of , a San Bruno Elfin called the Marin Elfin. And we went looking for it. We didn’t see it, but again, it was the, it’s the journey that I just so enjoy

[00:22:45] Michael Hawk: So even if not endangered, you were talking a little bit about the, the number of, specialist butterflies out there. I’m also wondering, if we eliminate this layer of endangered which we can thank Paul Opler for if you were to pick random spots in [00:23:00] the United States, would you find similar diversity of, specialists say, that you could only find in the Ozarks, that you may not find outside of that range?

Similar to some of the specialists that we only find in California.

[00:23:13] Liam O’Brien: I think what’s interesting is these little isolated pockets of specialists that are still hanging on by their fingertips. To backtrack a little, I had had this idea for this Emerald green little butterfly that lives in the Sunset District of San Francisco. Still called the green hairstreak Callophrys viridis and it only lives in a very small part in the upper sunset of the neighborhood of San Francisco.

And someone told me to go looking for it and I found it. Nobody had really looked for it for a long time. And built a conservation project around it. We flooded the neighborhood with her host plant coastal buckwheat. And people have really taken to it. Now, granted, it’s a stunningly beautiful little butterfly and as Robert Michael Pyle says, it’s not just the creature going extinct, it’s the extinction of the [00:24:00] experience of seeing the creature that goes extinct too.

So seeing a green hair streak used to be something that all San Franciscans had because it went from Sunset Beach out to the Bay And it also flew, ironically enough with Xerces Blue, probably the first butterfly that went missing from the planet Earth because of human encroachment.

So here’s a creature that was still hanging on by its fingertips. And we flooded the neighborhood with her host connecting two separated populations. And we had breeding within a year on a side street of a little vacant lot that we shifted into Upland Dune. So that was a real sort of really great moment.

And the people in the sunset have taken to it. God, a little emerald, green butterfly, it’s like having a panda walking around in a neighborhood. I mean, It’s a stunning little creature. And I’m as enthralled by that as well. I know I’m all over the place, but like, would it have been as successful if we were talking about a little muddy brown skipper?

[00:25:00] Probably not. I mean I’m fascinated that we like pretty so much as humans and we move pretty along. It’s these isolated things that are hanging on that need most of our attention. The generalists are who lays her eggs in a city in vacant lots and all over. They’re gonna be fine.

Orange sulfur Acmon Blues, , they will use non-native plants but probably any city throughout the nation. These isolated things someone needs to ring the bell and many people are, my god, conservation is a glorious thing in our country.

[00:25:34] Michael Hawk: Our uh. volunteer and, and host of our other podcast, Griff Griffith. He’s always brainstorming, how can we connect people to these things more? And one of the ideas that he’s told me about is like, if we could somehow get neighborhoods to adopt like a local species of interest build a motto around it or make it sort of like a mascot or, or something like that for the neighborhood.

And it sounds like that’s kind of what happened with the green hair streak.

[00:25:59] Liam O’Brien: [00:26:00] absolutely. Uh, Peter Brastow, who founded Nature in the City said something really cool once, and he said the first moment in conservation is learning the name of the thing in front of you. That’s the first moment, the Green hairstreaks They also fly in a place called Rocky Outcrop along 14th Avenue. And, this woman opened her back door and she came out to throw the garbage out. And I’m sitting in this open space that’s city property, and the Green hairstreaks are just flying all over. And I said, ma’am, do you, do you realize you have a little emerald green butterfly in your backyard?

And she came over and looked at it, and then she took my arm and she goes, oh my Lord, I’ve lived here 30 years. I’ve never seen that. And that was a real come to Jesus moment for me. The connecting people to something that they just didn’t know about.

[00:26:42] Michael Hawk: And these butterflies, the green hair streaks, they’re, they’re what, like, two centimeters

[00:26:46] Liam O’Brien: About the size of a nickel. Maybe a little bigger. Sometimes the females are a little bigger.

[00:26:51] Michael Hawk: And, and you mentioned earlier in the conversation that, , a lot of people just don’t notice butterflies. It’s hard to miss the megafauna of [00:27:00] the butterflies, like the monarchs and the swallowtails, but so many of them are small like this, right.

[00:27:06] Liam O’Brien: Right, right. Yeah. I have an interview in the book with Mia Monroe who’s the local authority on monarchs and stuff. you know, I have a little bit of a love hate with monarchs, to be quite honest with you. ’cause they, they’re so frigging celebrated that I thought, , like, my God, what more can I bring to a monarch?

And I wondered what my aversion to these poor creatures are that I find them gaudy. I find them garish, just of this big leviathan. But yeah, it’s interesting how yeah, bigger can catch our eye. But the small stuff, definitely. If you take the time to find out about it, it can be right there in front of you.

Yeah.

[00:27:41] Michael Hawk: And absolutely one of my favorite butterflies is the western pygmy blue,

which is what? One of the smallest.

[00:27:48] Liam O’Brien: I think it’s in a constant competition with dotted blues as being the smallest, but I believe it holds the moniker of being the smallest butterfly in the us. Yes,

[00:27:57] Michael Hawk: Yeah, talk about easy to overlook.[00:28:00]

[00:28:00] Liam O’Brien: absolutely. Like the boy is like half the size of a dime. , And then there’s a place when I’ve run the San Francisco Butterfly account for 25 years, and we have a place out at Pier 94, which is sort of a, a wonderful piece of land that people are taking care of.

And uh, there’s an endangered plant out there called Suaeda or California Sea blight and the Pygmy blues are all over this plant. And quite a thrill to watch them fly and flutter. So tiny, crazy, tiny. Can’t believe it’s a butterfly.

[00:28:29] Michael Hawk: So in your years of observing, getting out, looking for some of these rare butterflies and the common butterflies are there any encounters that really stand out to you? Any, any fun encounters? It could be with, as you said before, with the people or with the butterfly themselves, surprises a bear that sneaks up on you while you’re looking

at a butterfly. I don’t know.

[00:28:50] Liam O’Brien: I was once in Yosemite at Saddlebag Lake, which is the type locality for Colias behrii, Behr’s sulfur. And I was going up an embankment, trying to follow this butterfly, [00:29:00] going really fast. And I put my fingers up over the lip and I pulled myself up and there was a sleeping mountain lion right in front of me, just asleep.

And I slowly lowered myself back down off this thing. But yeah, there’s definitely stories. When you’re carrying a butterfly net, people are just enthralled. They’re enthralled. I, I love carrying the net ’cause I also do conservation on Mission Blues every year I’m in the headlands for the national park and I love getting on the underground when everyone’s going to work at 8:00 AM and stuff, and there’s a butterfly net sticking outta my backpack.

And it just, it brings such a smile to people’s face. Like they can’t, they can’t believe what they’re seeing. They’re like, is that a butterfly net? You’re like, yeah, I’m going to work too. But it can also call people over. One of my favorite stories is when I was serving the San Francisco in 2 0 7, 1 of my spots was Candlestick Park.

And because we’re at the county line there, some interesting things can come over the county. Well, [00:30:00] I turned the corner right along the water there and there was this school of kids, I would say like maybe fourth graders or third graders, really young kids. And this white butterfly lands on some mustard.

Now, most people would dismiss that as a cabbage white, but this is such a weird party trick. But the longer you stick with butterflies, you can actually learn to distinguish your whites and something can be so white, there’s almost a blue tint to it, So I knew it wasn’t a cabbage white.

And I go over and it’s a checkered white Pontia protodice, And I know the historic record well enough, and I know the drawers at Cal Academy, that that was an important butterfly to collect and to bring into Cal Academy. So I take one swoop, and before I know it Michael, I have 30 small third graders surrounding me just pushing up against me.

What do you got Mr? What do you got? What do you got? What do you got? is that a butterfly? Kids just love butterfly nets and so I have this [00:31:00] butterfly, I’m holding it slightly by the thorax, and all these little faces are just looking up at me and all I can think of is pink eye.

But this kid was like totally coming and out of nowhere, just like, that famous baseball moment where say, it ain’t so, Joe. This little boy like, looks at me and he goes, you’re not gonna kill it, are you, mister? And I’m just like and just these little faces with giant eyes are staring up at me and.

I let it go. I couldn’t do it in front of the kids.

[00:31:30] Michael Hawk: I probably

would’ve done the same

[00:31:32] Liam O’Brien: I know, I know. But that really needed to be in the drawer at Cal Academy that I knew.

[00:31:37] Michael Hawk: Did you ever find one again

[00:31:39] Liam O’Brien: No, I’ve seen them on San Bruno. So this one just got close enough to the county line, but it’s not known to breed in San Francisco. Uh, Yeah. I’m full of crazy stories like that.

[00:31:49] Michael Hawk: I look forward to hopefully in the future running into you in the field again

and,

and, and, Making some stories of our own

[00:31:56] Liam O’Brien: There you go.

[00:31:57] Michael Hawk: Yeah.

[00:31:57] Liam O’Brien: That’d be great.

[00:31:58] Michael Hawk: For people that. [00:32:00] Maybe are sitting here listening, thinking, I didn’t really realize there was such diversity, or maybe I haven’t seen some of these small butterflies.

What suggestions might you have for them to start to get into this world

[00:32:13] Liam O’Brien: Well, obviously they need to go on a hike. I list five different places in the book that I think are fantastic. Mount Diablo is just a great one that everybody can go to. It’s open to everybody and it’s just full of butterflies. And other places I list in the book, obviously people need to go out.

I would get yourself a field guide so you can kinda learn the things in front of you, get a camera and you can figure it out later what they are. But, let your imagination and let your curiosity lead you more than anything. That’s the only way you acquire the wisdom and stuff. There was a film retrospective, I know I’m going off book here, but there was a film retrospective of a silent screen star named Lillian Gish.

And it was in the seventies and she was 80 years old and she was hunched over and arthritic, and it [00:33:00] was a giant film festival and very famous film actress. And this reporter stuck his microphone in her face and said, Ms. Gish, what is the key to life? What is the key to life? And this little woman lifts her head up and right into the microphone, she says, one word.

What do you think she said?

[00:33:16] Michael Hawk: I feel like I should know this one. I don’t know.

[00:33:18] Liam O’Brien: Curiosity.

[00:33:19] Michael Hawk: Ah.

[00:33:20] Liam O’Brien: It’s just such a good word. And I think that really is driven my passion from the novice days. I’m just enthralled. I find them enthralling. You learn something and you think you know it, and then all of a sudden it’s the female and not the male. And you think it’s a different species.

So all the little baby steps in acquiring wisdom about butterflies, i’ve had some great, great experiences and, and like I try to say in the book be wrong. Allow yourself to be wrong. Really big. I once called something a fritillary and someone said, no, it’s fritillary And then this British guy lead in and he goes, actually it’s both.

So, don’t be intimidated by the Latin. It’s important to [00:34:00] learn and yeah, allow yourself to be wrong. Really big. I like that one.

[00:34:04] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I like, I like that one as well. And, and when we were having an aside a little bit ago. You said something, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it, it made me think about this idea of a search image, like when you’re, when you go out looking for a butterfly, already knowing the size, shape, coloration, plant that you might find it on and, and visualizing it, for me anyway, that’s, that’s always been very helpful because things just start showing up.

[00:34:31] Liam O’Brien: I’m sure birders, birders do the same thing as lepidopterists in the sense that like if you walk into a new ecosystem, the Rolodex, and I know that’s an old word that you need to explain, but it, the card catalog starts shifting in my head of what I possibly will see in this dappled sunlight ecosystem as opposed to full sun or full shade.

So the card catalog just keeps shifting as I walk into different ecosystems of what I might have in front of me. And it’s butterflies are quite faithful to [00:35:00] their ecosystems, which is a great way to learn them. You can really just go to different places.

[00:35:05] Michael Hawk: And when you really get good just like with birds, you can start to identify them by their flight pattern as well.

[00:35:12] Liam O’Brien: Correct. probably the best field guide, although now I have one, I have to start recommending my own. But Kenn Kaufman, the god of birding and, and also his butterfly field guide is really the one that most Lepidopterists carry. It’s so good. But he says right there in the beginning, and I didn’t think this was really possible, but now that I’ve got three decades under my arm here you can identify and sex a butterfly on the wing.

You don’t even need it to land, which is that, that blew my mind. But I actually can do that now. but we don’t get that cool extra thing that you birders have where you get to have songs and things. ’cause not a lot of butterfly, we can’t make a list of what we heard today.

[00:35:51] Michael Hawk: You can’t carry Merlin around and, and record

the vocalization, which is a huge advantage I have to say.

[00:35:59] Liam O’Brien: Yeah. There’s only [00:36:00] one butterfly that’s known to make a noise. It’s actually called a cracker and they fly in Texas and the south. But when it lands, the hind wings have a little bit of a hook. And when they, get alert or scared, you hear a click, you hear a click when they take off and they think it’s to give the predator sort of a a scare,

[00:36:19] Michael Hawk: Hmm.

a distraction.

[00:36:22] Liam O’Brien: in California.

[00:36:23] Michael Hawk: Yeah. I had no idea.

[00:36:24] Liam O’Brien: Yeah.

[00:36:25] Michael Hawk: So one thing I really, this is so foreign to me, I wanted to learn a little bit about from you is your process for painting. I am not an artist. I think the, the best artwork I can create is replicating a map.

I like to draw maps and that’s, that’s the extent of what I can do. So can you walk me from, you know, A to Z, how you conceptualize and paint, and then it gets into your book.

[00:36:52] Liam O’Brien: So I knew early on that I wanted the book to be in the vein of of Audubon, these great illustrators that [00:37:00] painted in the scientific tradition. Butterflies don’t fly around in spread wing, but I wanted to have them painted scientifically, but also how they look in real life.

I was incredibly fortunate that right about the time that Heyday gave me three years to go away and paint. this gentleman contacted me out of nowhere. His name was Tom Washman, He had collected two of everything in the counties of Napa and Sonoma, and they were flawless.

I still have them the most flawlessly pinned specimens I’ve ever seen in my life. So that was just from there. you have to paint very large for a book. The butterflies came out huge, but I was painting from small specimens with magnifying glasses, trying to get the colors right a lot of getting it wrong and then ripping them up and trying again. But, I had all the species, all the needed illustrations on the back of my door, and I just slowly chipped away at it. I couldn’t believe when I finally got to the skippers, I, I’d been through so much. It’s surreal. It reminds me a [00:38:00] little bit of like that, 10,000 leagues under the sea, like I was on a micro journey over every one of these butterfly wings, trying to find what scales, different colored scales and refraction and all of that.

So, I use watercolor pencil, which is you draw it all out with the colors and everything, and then you hit it with water and it turns into a watercolor painting right before your eyes.

[00:38:22] Michael Hawk: How do you hit it with water? A spray bottle or

[00:38:25] Liam O’Brien: no, no, no. no. Just slowly with a wet brush. It’s specific where you hit it.

[00:38:30] Michael Hawk: Yeah. As you can tell, I have no experience with this,

[00:38:32] Liam O’Brien: A a little side gig in my life is then I’ve been painting trail signs for the city of San Francisco Rec and Park for the last 20 years. I have like 15 trail signs, so I paint a lot of wildlife. And the thing is, is that if you stick, you know, 700 paintings of butterflies. I started to just get in a zone.

I can of do one every one and a half days. And then I’d bring in a family of butterfly. There’s five Family six now, sorry, the metal marks have their own family [00:39:00] again. And I would bring them in to Heyday and then they would scan them and then I would get the originals back and they’re all in a box under my bed.

So, it’s just a huge part of my life.

[00:39:10] Michael Hawk: You mentioned that the paintings need to be much larger,

[00:39:14] Liam O’Brien: Yeah. They shrink, they shrink it down for a book, and then the detail really gets a condensed.

[00:39:20] Michael Hawk: I see, I see. That makes sense. It’s the opposite of like if you’re, if you’re editing a photo and you zoom in too much, you lose the detail here. They’re doing the opposite.

[00:39:28] Liam O’Brien: yeah,

[00:39:29] Michael Hawk: yeah,

[00:39:29] Liam O’Brien: absolutely.

[00:39:30] Michael Hawk: very interesting. And, why that medium?

[00:39:33] Liam O’Brien: you know, with all the great advances in photography, and I love to photograph. There’s just something about the romance of painting our wildlife. Why did I use that? My aunt had she’s passed away now, but she had given me a box of faber castell uh, watercolor pencils, and I’d never used it for a while and I got it wrong a lot.

But I had this wonderful access to watercolor pencils in an array of colors. So that, that’s kind of why I [00:40:00] went with that medium. Once in a while, some gouache would get in there, sometimes some acrylic would get in there. So there’s other types of medium in

there.

[00:40:08] Michael Hawk: , So your book Butterflies at the Bay Area and Slightly Beyond last I knew was gonna be released on September 30th. Is that still the case?

[00:40:15] Liam O’Brien: That’s right. it’s quite something to edit, something so big But I believe that the goal was to get it out before Christmas. So that’s a big thing for the publisher and for myself as well. It’s nice.

[00:40:26] Michael Hawk: So September 30th. Yeah, plenty of time before Christmas. I think you met your goal there. And it, from what you just showed me holding it up, it’s a nice large format hardcover book.

[00:40:36] Liam O’Brien: Something that you would probably use in reference when you get home with your pictures and things like that, and not really as something to take in the field, you know, rock on if you want to do that too.

[00:40:45] Michael Hawk: , Your drawings, they don’t just include the butterflies themselves in different poses, but very often you have the caterpillar too.

[00:40:54] Liam O’Brien: Right, right. I primarily worked from pictures on that. I tried to go to the [00:41:00] Steinhardt and get into their caterpillars and stuff. And the problem with caterpillars, like the blue butterflies, they don’t retain their color. So, I was, they pretty much could have all been earthworms that I was staring at with all the species.

So, I got shape and stuff like that from that. But definitely worked from pictures on caterpillars.

[00:41:20] Michael Hawk: It will definitely be an invaluable reference for me here in the Bay Area. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface

[00:41:26] Liam O’Brien: Yeah, and it’s only the mature larva that I painted. It’s the last one before they pupate. And there are four other phases in molts they’re called, But I just, I always never understood why caterpillars aren’t a separate book and butterflies are in one book.

[00:41:40] Michael Hawk: It seems obvious now, doesn’t it? Thank you for that. That’s, that’s what the breakthroughs usually are, the obvious things that we’re hiding in plain sight.

[00:41:48] Liam O’Brien: Yeah. The other thing that was really important to me, and this is a slight sidebar, but it’s about the book, is that I was raised by a feminist and I always was a little irked that most of these. White [00:42:00] old guy field guides that we’ve all grown up with. They always have the picture of the, the boy prominently displayed and then the girl is this tiny little insert to the bottom right.

And I just, I flipped it. I flipped it in my book. The girl is much more prominent displayed. Girls are far more important than the boys in the butterfly world. she mixes the genetics up. She has multiple partners. So, boys are kind of a dime of a dozen with butterflies. But I wanted a little girl to open my book and not even think twice about that.

Like, it’s time, it’s just time that women see, and I really wanted to watch how I used words. I know this is huge in the birding world, that they’re now finding, you know, stay away from words like drab and dull, the female is dull. We’re missing a lot of behavior because of given them a secondary status and the boys always resplendent and beautiful in the butterfly world.

So I was, it was important for me to of neutralize all of that.

[00:42:56] Michael Hawk: And a, aside from, your deeper reasons for [00:43:00] doing that, like you said, it’s also very practical in

in the butterfly world, so

[00:43:03] Liam O’Brien: absolutely.

[00:43:04] Michael Hawk: all counts.

[00:43:05] Liam O’Brien: Yeah.

[00:43:06] Michael Hawk: Alright, so one thing I I like to do with my guests is before we wrap up ask a couple kind of open-ended questions and I would love to hear your answer.

So if you could magically impart one ecological concept to help the general public see the world as you see it, whether it be butterflies or more generally, what would that be?

[00:43:28] Liam O’Brien: I think I’m gonna go back to Peter Brastow’s statement. Learn the name of the thing in front of you, even if it’s a plant or a bird or something that stops you in your tracks. For whatever reason, give it a little more gravitas and learn the name of the thing and then that’ll open the door into other things.

And like the green hairstreak corridor, maybe it’ll be something that gets your imagination going and tomorrow you have got a conservation project going for something that other people aren’t noticing. So, that’s a big one for me.

[00:43:59] Michael Hawk: Yeah, [00:44:00] I love it. If you learn the name, you can’t help but learn a little bit more about

it

[00:44:04] Liam O’Brien: And it sounds so simplistic, but most of us just walk past things, not knowing the names of things,

right? Yeah.

[00:44:09] Michael Hawk: What have you found to be most effective in helping people kind of move up a rung in their own personal environmental awareness? I guess learning the names of things is a, is a

[00:44:18] Liam O’Brien: Sure.

Maybe my sass, maybe my irreverence. Maybe my humor. I think humor gets of sidebar in nature too. And I, I try not to take it too seriously in the field ’cause people are kind of intimidated that they don’t know things. But I always say this on a butterfly walk, everyone’s sets of eyes play into the moment.

You may not know your butterflies, but if you’re looking that way and you see one and you can say, there’s one, and then I or another person can identify it. But I’m sort of enthralled by like a plant walker, dare I say, a bird walk, where sometimes novice is not really embraced, that there’s a little aloof nature going on um, of helping somebody.

[00:44:58] Michael Hawk: Well, [00:45:00] this has been really fascinating and before I let you go do you have any other projects that you’d like to highlight? Are you doing any in-person events or, anything like that you’d like to call out?

[00:45:11] Liam O’Brien: I’m not near my planner right now, but I know I’ll be at Mrs. Dalloway’s, which is a bookstore in Berkeley I think that’s in October. I’m gonna be at a place called Paxton Gate, which is sort of a really cool, sort of oddity store on Valencia. If people are interested and they can contact Heyday and you can get some dates on that.

And then the Botanical Society of San Francisco. I’m gonna be giving a lecture there and they’ll have copies of the book. So it’s interesting, it’s just a whole new aspect. I’m sort of still in the editing mode. I can’t believe it’s done. And I’m enjoying this new part, this where we talk about it.

[00:45:45] Michael Hawk: for your in-person appearances are those gonna be published on a website somewhere

or,

okay. Okay. Okay. What I’ll do then so as you, as you proceed with your book tour, I’ll link in the show notes to the schedule so that [00:46:00] people in the Bay Area can find you and hopefully come out and, and and meet you.

And if people want to follow your work more generally, are you active on social media,

[00:46:10] Liam O’Brien: Yeah, I’m on Instagram. They can follow me at Robberfly, I picked something that eats butterflies just to butch up the whole butterfly thing. So I’m Robberfly there and it’s R-O-B-B-E-R. Lower lower slash fly robber fly.

[00:46:25] Michael Hawk: Okay.

[00:46:26] Liam O’Brien: But I like my asilidaes, they’re really cool bugs.

[00:46:29] Michael Hawk: They are, I actually have been back burnering an episode about robberflies

So, um, Hopefully I can make that happen sometime soon.

[00:46:36] Liam O’Brien: Yeah, absolutely. I love that they can, they’re just like little wolves and they like, they can catch a butterfly midair. They float over to the nearest branch, they turn the creature around and they shove a sucking device straight into their faces, and then they suck it out like a shake. They pull it off, they toss it to the side, and then they just float off.

I just find them kind of [00:47:00] ballsy.

[00:47:00] Michael Hawk: the world of insects, it’s a whole other world.

[00:47:04] Liam O’Brien: absolutely.

[00:47:05] Michael Hawk: All right, Liam, is there anything else like that we missed or that you really wanna get off your chest before we call it a day?

[00:47:13] Liam O’Brien: just that for the last 13 years I’ve monitored the Mission Blue Butterfly and the Marin Headlands, and there’s a lot of people involved in that. And I’m very grateful to all the people that have helped me along the way too. So, shout out to you. I tried to put all your names in a book, so we’ll see, um, if we run into each other how grateful I am for even five minutes with a an A learned person.

[00:47:36] Michael Hawk: it was clear that you took a lot of care in en listing all the folks in there. I actually enjoyed reading through it. Just seeing like, oh, I know

that person. I know that person.

[00:47:44] Liam O’Brien: Oh, good. Good. Yeah, Bob Pyle taught me a little tricky. He says, yeah, always load your book with names. He goes, you know, those people will buy the book. I’m like, oh my God.

[00:47:53] Michael Hawk: All right. Well, Liam, it’s been a lot of fun here today. I really appreciate you taking the time and telling [00:48:00] the, the audience about this wonderful creation of yours, and I

can’t wait for people to see

[00:48:04] Liam O’Brien: I’ve been such a big fan of your work that, uh, it was just a complete honor for you to gimme a call. Thank

you very much.

[00:48:10] Michael Hawk: awesome. Thank you so much.

[00:48:11] Liam O’Brien: You bet.

[00:48:12] Michael Hawk: And before we go, thanks to Amelia Heintz-Botz, one of Jumpstart Nature’s volunteers for editing help this week