About

Northwest Butterflies began as a personal blog in 2011 by Pacific Northwest native, Caitlin LaBar. It grew into a popular resource for people interested in butterflies, with an average of over 1,000 hits per month. Even before starting the blog, Caitlin began to outline an idea for an "atlas" of the butterflies recorded at the Sinlahekin Wildlife Area in Okanogan County, Washington. Originally, the atlas was intended to simply be a compilation of maps illustrating all the butterfly records, but as her imagination and excitement grew, so did the book concept! Nearly eight years later, Butterflies of the Sinlahekin Wildlife Area was self-published. Several small side-projects stemmed from that endeavor, such as the Pocket Guide to the Butterflies of Washington. The need for an online storefront became evident as the interest in these books grew to a larger audience than anticipated. Because the Northwest Butterflies blog name was well-known at this point, Caitlin chose to register it as an official business. Speyeria Press is the self-publishing press name under the business of Northwest Butterflies. Speyeria (pronounced spay-area) is the genus name of greater fritillaries, represented by a Coronis Fritillary (Speyeria coronis, edited photo by Caitlin) as the logo. The Northwest Butterflies logo is a hand-drawn Vidler's Alpine (Erebia vidleri), a Pacific Northwest endemic species, by local artist Marianne Schecklman of On The Wing Art.