Sy Montgomery - Photo by Michael Sterling
New from Sy Montgomery
What the Chicken Knows
A conversation with award-winning writer Sy Montgomery about the joys of knowing and raising backyard chickens.
What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird
A charming and eye-opening exploration of the special relationship between humans and chickens from Sy Montgomery, “one of our finest chroniclers of the natural world” (The New York Times).
For more than two decades, Sy Montgomery—whose The Soul of an Octopus was a National Book Award finalist—has kept a flock of chickens in her backyard. Each chicken has an individual personality (outgoing or shy, loud or quiet, reckless or cautious) and connects with Sy in her own way.
In this short, delightful book, Sy takes us inside the flock and reveals all the things that make chickens such remarkable creatures: only hours after leaving the egg, they are able to walk, run, and peck; relationships are important to them and the average chicken can recognize more than one hundred other chickens; they remember the past and anticipate the future; and they communicate specific information through at least twenty-four distinct calls. Visitors to her home are astonished by all this, but for Sy what’s more astonishing is how little most people know about chickens, especially considering there are about twenty percent more chickens on earth than people.
With a winning combination of personal narrative and science, What the Chicken Knows is exactly the kind of book that has made Sy Montgomery such a beloved and popular author.
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Other books and podcasts from and with Sy Montgomery
The Hummingbird's Gift
From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of the “fascinating…entertaining” (The Daily Beast) National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus, a charmingly perfect gem of a book about the most exquisite and extraordinary of winged creatures—hummingbirds.
As one of the most beautiful and intriguing birds found in nature, hummingbirds fascinate people around the world. The lightest birds in the sky, hummingbirds are capable of incredible feats, such as flying backwards, diving at speeds of sixty-one MPH, and beating their wings more than sixty times a second. Miraculous creatures, they are also incredibly vulnerable when they first emerge from their eggs. That’s where Brenda Sherburn comes in.
With tenderness and patience, she rescues abandoned hummingbirds and nurses them back to health until they can fly away and live in the wild. In The Hummingbird’s Gift, the extraordinary care that Brenda provides her peanut-sized patients is revealed and, in the process, shows us just how truly amazing hummingbirds are. With Sy Montgomery’s signature “joyful passion” (Library Journal), and including sixteen pages of gorgeous color photos, this beautifully written and inspiring little book celebrates the profound gift that hummingbirds are to our planet and is the ultimate gift for nature lovers and bird watchers everywhere.
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.
More Info | Reviews | Excerpt |
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| Order the Hawks Way here |
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| Order the Book Here |
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.
Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet’s rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy’s life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets.
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| Order the Good Good Pig |
A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish—and she soon found herself engaged with her small-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible. Unexpectedly, Christopher provided this peripatetic traveler with something she had sought all her life: an anchor (eventually weighing 750 pounds) to family and home.
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| Order "The Wild Out Your Window" |
What could be better than watching the natural world out your window or on your television? Going out and experiencing it firsthand. In these fifty essays, acclaimed nature and science writer Sy Montgomery takes her readers on a season-by-season tour of the wilderness that is often as close as the backyard. Sy invites ― almost dares ― readers to follow her and form hands-on relationships with the plants, animals, birds, and even the insects that share space with people. These essays, most of which originally appeared in Sy's Boston Globe column Nature Journal, are by turns enlightening, entertaining, sometimes amusing, and always absorbing and informative. Filled with natural history and lore, the essays urge readers to appreciate what they find around them.
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| Order The Curious Naturalist here |
Sy Montgomery takes you on an exploratory adventure through the seasons, into the woods, along the seashore, over frozen lakes, and right outside the back door
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| Order "Journey of the Pink Dolphins" |
When Sy Montgomery ventured into the Amazon to unlock the mysteries of the littleknown pink dolphins, she found ancient whales that plied the Amazon River at dawn and dusk, swam through treetops in flooded forests, and performed underwater ballets with their flexible bodies. But she soon found out that to know the botos, as the dolphins are locally called, you must also know the people who live among them.
And so in Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Montgomery―part naturalist, part poet, part Indiana Jones―winds her way through watery tributaries and riverside villages, searching for botos and hearing the tales of locals who believe these ethereal dolphins are shape-shifters―creatures that emerge from the water as splendidly dressed men or women only to enchant their human onlookers, capture their souls, and then carry them away to the Encante, an underwater world. Montgomery takes readers on four separate journeys, exploring the river-dwelling dolphins’ natural history, chronicling their conservation pressures, unraveling their prehistoric roots, and visiting with shamans who delve into the Encante.
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| Order Tamed and Untamed here |
Extraordinary new insights into the minds and lives of our fellow creatures from two of the world’s top animal authors, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Sy Montgomery.
A Mail on Sunday “Critic's Pick” Best Read of the Year
"In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures.”―from the foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of Elephant Company
Tamed and Untamed―a collection of essays penned by two of the world's most celebrated animal writers, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas―explores the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals as diverse as snails, house cats, hawks, sharks, dogs, lions, and even octopuses.
Drawing on stories of animals both wild and domestic, the two authors, also best friends, created this book to put humans back into the animal world. The more we learn about what other animals think and do, they explain, the more we understand ourselves as animals, too. Writes Montgomery, “The list of attributes once thought to be unique to our species―from using tools to waging war―is not only rapidly shrinking, but starting to sound less and less impressive when we compare them with other animals’ powers.”
With humor, empathy, and introspection, Montgomery and Thomas look into the lives of all kinds of creatures―from man’s best friend to the great white shark―and examine the ways we connect with our fellow species. Both authors have devoted their lives to sharing the animal kingdom’s magic with others, and their combined wisdom is an indispensable contribution to the field of animal literature.
The book contains a foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of the bestseller Elephant Company.
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| Order Birdology here |
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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| Order the Moonbear Book here |
Search for the Golden Moon Bear :
Sy Montgomery--acclaimed author of The Soul of an Octopus and best-selling memoir The Good Good Pig--has shared her amazing encounters with intelligent octopi, great apes, man-eating tigers, and pink river dolphins with listeners, but here her muse is an animal whose name and appearance evoke another world altogether. Southeast Asia's golden moon bear--with its luminous coat, lionlike mane, and Mickey Mouse ears--was unknown to science until Montgomery and her colleagues got on the trail at the dawn of the new millennium.
Search for the Golden Moon Bear recounts Montgomery's quest--fraught with danger and mayhem--to reconstruct an evolutionary record and piece together a living portrait of her little known subject. This beautiful animal is not just a scientific eureka! It is also a powerful symbol of conservation. Search for the Golden Moon Bear is a field report from the frontiers of science and the ends of the earth, seamlessly weaving together folklore, natural history, and contemporary research into a fantastic travelogue.
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| Order Spell of the Tiger Here |
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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| Order Great Apes here |
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.
