Sy Montgomery is a writer and a naturalist, best known for her award-winning books on animals and the natural world. She is the author of nearly 40 books for children and adults, including National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the World of Consciousness. Montgomery lives in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Howard Mansfield, and their border collie, Thurber.
I was born in Germany, but we moved to Virginia when I was around 2. My mother told me that as soon as I could speak, I told my parents that I was not a little girl but a horse. My mom was very worried and took me to the pediatrician who assured her that I would get over it, and I did when I discovered I was a dog. When my parents took me to the Frankfurt Zoo in Germany before we moved, I broke free and toddled off, and when they found me, so says my mother, I was in the hippo pen with the hippos, having a great time. I’ve always been able to sit still and watch stuff. I just wanted to sit quietly and see what the animal did.
I lived in a number of different states growing up: Virginia, New York, New Jersey. I was always interested in animals, and anything in the natural world: biology, botany, astronomy. And writing. As a little kid, over the summer, I would check out books from the library about the natural world and just write book reports for nobody. I worked at the weekly newspaper in high school and did a lot of writing for that. My journalism teacher, Walt Clarkson, and I stayed in touch, and he was actually with me to celebrate my first book being published. I was really influenced by working on the newspaper – and also by my church. I feel like my writing praises the creator of all life, no matter what you call it, no matter how you understand it. I really feel like the world is holy, and I got that from church. I also got exposure to excellent oratory there and learned how moving words can be. I thought I loved reading for information, but it made me understand that some reading was also joyful to me because of the poetry of language.
I went to Syracuse University and was a triple major there; I wanted a fourth major in biology, but they had never had a triple major before, so they thought that was enough. I studied French language and literature, magazine journalism, and psychology. I knew I wanted to travel to see animals around the world, so I wanted to learn a language. Psychology was because I couldn’t figure out people at all and I wanted to know, “What are they thinking?” I worked at the daily newspaper in college. My now husband, Howard, hired me there in 1976. He is also a full-time freelance writer and author now.
After graduating in 1979, I worked for a few months at the Buffalo Evening News in a temporary job in the business department. After that I was an area reporter for the Courier News in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and covered nine little rural towns. I think my first story was on potholes. I really wanted to work my way into science writing though, and within a year I became their science, medical, and environmental reporter. Getty Oil had this pipeline that, due to deferred maintenance, broke and destroyed a beautiful trout stream, and I covered that. I also wrote about New Jersey’s infamous “Cancer Alley” and Johns Manville, the asbestos manufacturer located there. Occasionally I was able to write about the natural world. But what I was doing more than anything else was getting experience writing science news and discovering the impact of these stories beyond one day’s headline. I worked there for five years.
Then my father, who always was my champion, gave me the gift of a plane ticket to a place I always wanted to go: Australia. I wanted to go because the marsupials are so different from the placental mammals we have; we only have one marsupial here in North America, the Virginia opossum. I wanted to see if I could contribute in some way to understanding or protecting the animals that I would see there, and so I went with Earthwatch, a program that partners laymen with real scientific projects – many of them conservation-oriented. I joined Dr. Pamela Parker for two weeks to study the southern hairy-nosed wombat in Blanchetown, South Australia. We lived in tents and observed the animals and collected their scat. It was so fantastic. I worked my tail off because it was a joy. At the end of it, she said to me, “I can see you love this, and I wish I could hire you, but I can’t. But if you want to come back and study something on your own, you can stay here and I’ll give you food.”
So I went back to New Jersey, quit the Courier News, and moved to a tent in the outback of South Australia. People thought I was crazy. I had this good career, and I had health insurance. I had a lot of freedom, colleagues I loved and respected, and my editors treated me great – there was nothing wrong! But I so wanted to go back. I didn’t know what I would study, so at first, I helped someone else collecting plants. One day, I looked up and saw three emus walk right by me. I had never been so close to an emu. They’re magnificent and powerful birds who can run 40 miles per hour and sever fencing wire with a single kick from their amazing feet. They’re smart and beautiful – so, right then and there, I decided to study them. I figured I’d use the same kind of technique that Jane Goodall had used with chimps – I just started hanging out near them.
I spent six months following these three emus around, and I was in heaven. It was so great in every single way. I loved that I could just crawl out of my sleeping bag and put on my boots. I had to shake them out first, because there was always a spider in my tent – a really big one – and I didn’t want to upset him. But I didn’t have to look at a mirror, I didn’t have to put on stupid pantyhose. I would just go out and watch the birds all day.
After six months it was about to start getting really hot and I had no money, but I couldn’t go back to having even a smart person that I respected telling me what to do. I knew I would be a freelance writer. Howard and I moved to New Hampshire because it was inexpensive and at that time it had 90 percent of its original wetlands and was forested. It was near enough to Boston that I could do freelance for the Boston Globe. I wrote for them and eventually wrote medical and nature columns for them. I also freelanced for Animals magazine, the Massachusetts SPCA publication back then, and New Hampshire Times, which also no longer exists. And I wrote for national and international wildlife magazines.
I realized that while it was great to have months to research a story for a magazine, I wanted to take years. That’s when I started writing books. I knew that I wanted my first book to be an homage to my heroines growing up: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. What interested me about them was what distinguished their work from all the other people who had gone before them: their relationships with their study animals as a tool of inquiry. Scientists in the past did not want to do that or didn’t want to admit to having relationships or caring about their study animals. Jane Goodall’s first paper on tool-use, which electrified the entire world, was rejected over and over again at first, because she named her subjects instead of numbering them. And she published this account of the first animals known to use tools besides humans. Of course, now we know many animals, including fish and insects, use tools. All of this happened in my lifetime: I was born in 1958, and Goodall started going into the field in 1960.
I got a book deal with McGraw-Hill only to find out they were going to axe their entire trade book division and just do textbooks. While I was trying to figure this out, I wrote a profile for the New Hampshire Times on Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived with the Bushmen in Namibia and published a book on it called The Harmless People. She’s one of my best friends now, but at the time of the profile she was writing this novel and I told her about my situation and she said, “Let me mention it to my editor at Houghton Mifflin, Peter Davison.” And he bought my book. It got published in 1991 and it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and after that it was easier to pitch a second book and a third book. And now this year, I will have my 40th and 41st books published.
I didn’t really mean to branch out into children’s books – I knew nothing about children, and I was never going to have them. I gave a talk on this panel at one point where I was the only woman. The other people were nice and all, but they wouldn’t let me answer a single question and the moderator apparently wasn’t moved to do anything about it until someone asked about children’s books. Suddenly – I guess because I had ovaries – all of their heads turned toward me. I finally had a chance to say something, but I had nothing to say. Afterwards, this guy, Nic Bishop, approached me and asked if I would be interested in writing the copy for some children’s books on animals with him. He was a photographer, and he looked like my kind of guy – like he woke up in a pile of leaves and was ready to go out in the field. I could tell from his photographs that he didn’t scare the crap out of the animals to get their picture.
So Nic and I pitched the idea of children’s nonfiction books based on a scientific expedition in the wild to Houghton Mifflin, and that became the basis for the Scientists in the Field series. I was really enthusiastic about it because children are not just the leaders of tomorrow, they’re the leaders of today, and they have an enormous amount of power in convincing their parents and teachers and community that we need to take care of our world. My first book for the series, The Snake Scientist, came out in 1999. People thought it was crazy to do snakes, but the thing is, children are not naturally horrified by snakes, and snakes need us to not fear them. We went to the largest snake pit in the world – 18,000 garter snakes – and I got to sit in the pit with them crawling up my pant leg, going into my sleeve and it was wonderful.
All of my experiences in the field have been wonderful. I got to go to Whenua Hou in New Zealand to do a book on the kakapo, which is a flightless endangered parrot. When Nic and I flew there to see them in March 2008, there were only 84 of them in the world. We waited 5 years for them to mate because they wait until their mast tree, the rimu, fruits. But sometimes they don’t mate, or they do but they don’t lay, or they do lay but the eggs are infertile. So it’s all very touch and go. In 2008, we got the call that one of the birds had hatched. I got to hold the only kakapo chick that year in the universe. This darling, white, fluffy, still kind of pear-shaped, still sightless creature was in my surgically gloved hand.
Another time I got to cage dive with great white sharks, and I’ll never forget being in that cage. I didn’t know for sure how I’d feel. I didn’t think I’d be afraid, but you just don’t know. I remember the moment great white shark was coming towards me and what I felt was tremendous relief and joy. I was not at all afraid. I felt like, “Someone is coming to my rescue. Someone in the ocean knows what the heck they’re doing here.” It was a male named Jacques after Jacques Cousteau. He looked like a knight in white satin, and there was no menace in his eye. Another time I met an octopus in the wild and she reached out one of her arms to me and essentially led me around by the hand. It was freaking amazing – and I could just go on and on. But I feel so, so lucky. I am so in love with this world.
The topic for the next book usually suggests itself. When I was in Sundarbans, a mangrove forest between India and Bangladesh, researching the man-eating tigers there, they have river dolphins there, which gave me the idea for a book on river dolphins in the Amazon. Then when I was in the Amazon, I met a man who was staying in the same lodge as me who gave me the idea to write about moon bears. When I was on a speaking tour, I met Dr. Lisa Dabek, who was studying tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea, and she invited me to come visit her and I wrote a book about that. Other books I think carefully about – they come out of soul searching. With The Soul of an Octopus, I wanted to write about consciousness in an animal where we would not normally look for it. With Of Time and Turtles, I wanted to know about time: what the heck is it? How does it work? Does it flow through us, or do we flow through it?
I just found out I’ll be doing another two bird books – one on pigeons and one on parrots. I have one coming out this upcoming October on giant oceanic manta rays. I got to go on a fabulous scuba expedition with Michel Guerrero, who discovered the largest aggregation of giant oceanic manta rays in the world. It was such an adventure. I’ve got a caterpillar book coming out with Matt Paterson in 2027 – a children’s picture book – and then we want to do a bat one after that.
The most rewarding part of the work is to have a chance to lose myself in the company of these dazzling creatures. That means a lot. My octopus friends – Athena and Octavia and Karma and Kali – only live three to five years. Some of these animals live a very short time, and yet people have been reading about them and moved to tears by their lives more than a decade after they’ve been gone. My books will continue to bear witness to their lives long after I’m gone and hopefully move others to take steps to protect and preserve all of these creatures who love their lives like we love ours.
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