Sy Montgomery Dances on the West Wind with “The Hawk’s Way”
“Come dance with the west wind and touch on the mountain tops
Sail over the canyons and up to the stars
And reach for the heavens and hope for the future
And all that we can be and not what we are.”
~ John Denver
It may seem to some nearly heretical to use the lyrics of a song to highlight the poetic and beautiful writing of Sy Montgomery but I suspect that she of all folks would understand that expressions of the beauty and joy that the animal kingdom brings to us all serve to complement one another and give more strength to the final message, not dissonance.
Researching articles, films, and her 31 books for adults and children, nationally bestselling author Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Rwanda, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and pink dolphins in the Amazon. Her work has taken her from the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea (for a book on tree kangaroos) to the Altai Mountains of the Gobi (for another on snow leopards.)
For THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS (a National Book Award finalist) she befriended octopuses at the New England aquarium and scuba-dived and snorkeled with wild octopuses in Mexico and French Polynesia; next, she drew on her scuba skills to cage dive with great white sharks.
Her latest book, out May 3, 2022, is “The Hawk’s Way” in which she becomes “the junior partner” to this extraordinary ruler of the sky.
Sy lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the writer Howard Mansfield, and their border collie Thurber.
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The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty
How does an animal loving vegetarian get inside the mind of a fierce, flying predator? Sy Montgomery gets to know the soul of a hawk by becoming, essentially, its hunting partner—and in so doing, discovers an incandescent kind of love like no other.
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The Hummingbirds’ Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings
Baby hummingbirds: nothing could be cuter, more delicate, or more vulnerable. They hatch from eggs the size of Navy beans and are born the size of bumblebees. This is the true story of how the author, assisting her friend, hummingbird rehabilitator Brenda Sherburne La Belle, helped to rescue and raise two orphaned baby hummingbirds, eventually releasing these most magical of all fliers in time to fly to Mexico.
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How to Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals—her friends—who have profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic, and life-affirming memoir featuring illustrations by Rebecca Green.
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Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind
Two of the world’s most celebrated animal writers—also best friends—offer this engaging collection of essays offers extraordinary insights into the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals.
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In this astonishing book from the author of the bestselling memoir, The Good Good Pig, Sy Montgomery explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus—a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature—and the remarkable connections it makes with humans.
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Birds are the wild animals we see every day, but we fail to appreciate who or what birds are. If we did, we would be awestruck—as is the author throughout these seven adventures exploring what makes a bird a bird. Sy works with a bird rehabilitator to raise orphaned baby hummingbirds, travels to the Australian tropics in search of a living dinosaur, rocks out with a dancing cockatoo and more, reawakening a sense of awe in the presence of creatures at once so breathtakingly similar to us, and yet so startlingly strange.
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The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood
Christopher Hogwood came home on Sy’s lap in a shoebox, with a touch of every disease in the barn: the runt piglet was so sick that nobody expected him to last the night. But he grew into a beloved town character, a 750-pound Buddha master adored by adults and children alike. He grew to command a vast slops empire that extended beyond the small town of Hancock, NH. His fan club crossed oceans. His story proves that a family isn’t made of genes, but love, and that a great soul can come at any time, in any form—even with a flexible nose disk and curly tail.
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Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in Pursuit of a New Species
Only eight bear species are known to science, but from a scientific colleague Sy hears of what could be a new one: a Southeast Asian bear with a mane like a lion, a white crescent on the chest and a luminous golden coat. Documenting the existence of this unknown bear, the author and scientific colleague Dr. Gary Galbreath travel through the warn-torn jungles of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. This is a tale of hope and horror and sometimes hilarity, a report from the frontiers of science and the fullness of the human heart.
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Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in Pursuit of a New Species CD set
The entire, unabridged text, read by the author, with a Scientific Addendum read by Dr. Gary Galbreath. Only available through The Toadstool Bookshop, Sy’s local bookseller.
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Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest
Scientists call them Inia geoffrensis, an ancient species of whale whose origin dates back about 15 million years. To the local people of the Amazon, pink river dolphins are “boto,” shape-shifters who, in the guise of human desire, can claim your soul and take you to the Encante, the enchanted world beneath the river. Scientists know little of about the pink dolphins when Sy begins her quest, so she follows them to discover their secrets. On four expeditions to Brazil and Peru, they lead her through myths and legend, back in evolutionary time, deep into the spirit world, and forward to the future of the Amazon.
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Spell of the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans
The largest mangrove forest on Earth hosts the world’s densest population of tigers—tigers like no others. Healthy tigers elsewhere almost never attack humans. But here, at the mist-shrouded boundary of forest and ocean, tigers swim out after boats, leap on board, and seize men in their mouths. It happens 300 times a year. In her extensive travels through the tiger swamps of West Bengal and Bangladesh, Sy pursues dual mysteries: why do the tigers of Sundarbans hunt people? Why don’t the local people hurt the tigers?
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Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas
Three remarkable, intrepid women changed forever the way people understand animals’ lives. Jane Goodall, working with the chimpanzees of Gombe, Dian Fossey, studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and Birute Galdikas, living among the orangutans of Borneo, devoted their lives to understanding humankind’s closest relatives and revolutionized ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior. To research the only triple biography ever of this unique scientific sisterhood Sy traveled to Rwanda, Zaire, Tanzania and Indonesian Borneo and lived for a time among the great apes, walking in the footsteps her childhood heroines.
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The Curious Naturalist: Nature’s Everyday Mysteries
Outside your window, in your backyard, or in your local beach or park, on city streets or even inside your house, plants and animals are doing something wholly unexpected and incredibly interesting. Houseflies are washing their eyes with their hands. Porcupines dance. Worms are making love in the wet, green grass while spiders are weaving messages into their webs. Sy’s first collection of Nature Journal columns from The Boston Globe, with a generous foreword by the late great Roger Tory Peterson, will make you appreciate the ordinary miracles unfolding around us every day.
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The Wild Out Your Window: Exploring Nature Near at Hand
Beneath your porch, creatures with their skeletons on their outsides and their ears on their knees are singing with their wings. In your backyard, songbirds may be murdering mice, while on your lawn a battle rages between exotic and native species. This second collection of Sy’s Globe columns further explores the natural dramas unfolding before us, from the crevices where bugs hide in winter the world between grains of beach sand.
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