Liam O’Brien launches his book Butterflies of the Bay Area (And Slightly Beyond) at the SF Botanical Garden, presented by Green Apple Books on the Park and the Helen Crocker Russell Library.

Liam will be joined in conversation with Durrell Kapan, Senior Research Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences.

Liam O’Brien is a self-taught lepidopterist and illustrator. He used to be a professional actor, having appeared in Les Misérables on Broadway, but shifted his powers of observation towards nature several decades back. He’s fascinated not only by butterflies but also by our relationships to them. He surveyed the county of San Francisco, where he lives, for which butterfly species remained in 2007 and 2009. He is the creator of the Green Hairstreak Project for the organization Nature in the City, and he led efforts to restore Variable Checkerspots to the Presidio. Since 2015 he has helped monitor the endangered Mission Blue butterfly in the Marin Headlands. O’Brien was the recipient of Bay Nature magazine’s Local Hero Award for Environmental Education in 2014. He lives in San Francisco.

Durrell D. Kapan, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences. He cut his scientific teeth studying warningly colored butterflies in Ecuador. At the Academy, he leads the Xerces Blue project—sequencing the extinct butterfly’s genome, modeling its habitat, and translocating Silvery Blue butterflies to the Presidio of San Francisco to help re-create Xerces’ ecological role in the city’s dunes. A long-time naturalist who studies flighted things (butterflies, birds, even mosquitoes), Durrell now works across genomics, data science, and field surveys from Bay Area dunes to Sierra forests.