In-depth Written Interview
with Sy Montgomery
Insights Beyond the Movie
Sy Montgomery, interviewed in Hancock, New Hampshire on February 27, 2012.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You are the creator of in-depth books about animals for children, including your Scientists in the Field series. Have you always loved animals?
SY MONTGOMERY: I've always loved animals. Even as a tiny child. I was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and before I was two, I toddled into the hippo pen at the Frankfurt Zoo. By the time my parents noticed, I was right next to the hippo. The hippo didn't mind, and I was thrilled.
By the time I was learning to read, I had already thought of what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a veterinarian to be with animals. They were my people. I'm fascinated by the way they move. I'm fascinated by their senses. I love what they have to teach.
But when I began to read, I was interested in what my father was reading as well, and he was reading the newspaper. I was born in 1958, so when started to read in the 1960s, there were very upsetting words in the papers like "pollution," "species extinction," and "overpopulation."
I was learning that the animals I loved, all around the world, from elephants to whales, were endangered—another word that people didn't even know before the 1960s. It was then that I decided that rather than be a veterinarian, I might be able to help animals more as a writer by telling people about the incredible lives that are hanging in the balance and whose lives we can protect and save.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Did your parents help foster this love of animals?
SY MONTGOMERY: My father was a general in the Army, and he was my hero. My mother was very tolerant, so growing up my other family members—my playmates—were all animals.
I had loads of friends; they just all happened to be lizards and worms and bees; my Scottish terrier, Molly; and a little green parakeet whom I brought home in a box from the dime store and named Jerry. He was actually the first male ever to court me. I fell in love when he threw up on my finger. I also had crickets in the little bamboo cages that my father brought home from China.
I never thought of the animals as dolls to be dressed up or as my babies. They were always my equals or my betters.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Were there books that you read as a kid that helped perpetuate your love of animals?
SY MONTGOMERY: The books I loved best as a child were all about animals: Charlotte's Web, The Wind in the Willows, a great book called Cleo about this Bassett Hound who had a gig working on television. I loved all the Lassie books.
I would go to the library and read books full of facts about animals because I was just so hungry to know, to understand. Everything I found out thrilled me more and made me fall even more in love with these creatures.
Animals have so much to teach us, and I've known that from the moment I was tiny.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Did your parents share your love of animals?
SY MONTGOMERY: My father loved animals, and my mother was a hunter. She grew up in Arkansas hunting squirrels. She didn't like all the pets that I had, because they invariably got out of their cages and did something horrible.
The parakeet would get out and would sit on the crystal chandelier and poop on the mahogany dining room table. The lizard, of which my mom was terrified, would always escape its cage. Meanwhile, I would be at school, and my dad would be running the Eastern Seaboard transportation for the military complex.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Where do you think the human love of animals originates?
SY MONTGOMERY: Until pretty recently in human history, we were hunter-gatherers. If you did not pay attention to the natural world, someone came and ate you, or you couldn't find any food, or you couldn't remember where the good berries were. So it's part of our heritage; it's part of who we are. I think when we shut that off, we're closing off something very essential about who we are. Without a connection to the natural world, I think we can't be fully human.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Did you study animals in college?
SY MONTGOMERY: I studied magazine journalism at Syracuse University, but I quickly added two other majors. The two others were French language and literature, which have actually come in very handy because as you travel, knowing one language helps you to learn other languages in that language group. The other major I added was psychology.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you tie your majors into your passion for animals?
SY MONTGOMERY: The reason that I studied journalism was to learn how to be a reporter. A lot of great writers don't think of themselves as reporters, but that's how great writing is made: going out to the larger world and bringing back that news.
I don't write that much for newspapers anymore, and most of my writing is in books, but it all goes back to my journalism background of setting out, gathering the facts, being a good observer. Being a good observer is essential if you want to know the natural world.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please explain the difference between reporting and writing narrative.
SY MONTGOMERY: To me, the narrative is what makes the facts matter. People say that my books are fun to read because they tell an actual story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In every book, it's the same love story over and over. I am saying, "Look at this fantastic creature. Look at the abilities this creature has. Don't you love it? Don't you want to save that? You don't want to live on a planet without this. Don't you want to join in the effort to protect and preserve this animal?"
TEACHINGBOOKS: What was your first job out of college?
SY MONTGOMERY: When I got out of college, my first job was as a business reporter for the Buffalo Evening News. I quickly took a job at the Courier News in Bridgewater, New Jersey, as an area reporter. After a year, I was promoted to a science and health writer. New Jersey is a state that has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other, so it was a busy job. New Jersey is also a state with lots of environmental issues, so I had a lot of good work to do and loved reporting on it because you really can make a difference.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Are there issues about which you have written that have made an impact in the policies or protections for animals and/or habitat?
SY MONTGOMERY: I've seen stories I've written make a difference. A story that I wrote in both the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times helped ban the sale of ivory about 10 years ago. That was fantastic to be able to have a hand in that.
Also, when kids come up to you and they say, "Gosh, I want to do what you're doing," that makes me feel like I have earned the right to draw another breath.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What were some of the first ideas that you thought to actually turn into a book rather than a newspaper article?
SY MONTGOMERY: I loved writing for newspapers, but the thing is, when you write for a newspaper, your story is on the bottom of someone's birdcage within 24 hours. It's nice to write a book that's going to last forever. It's great to have that many pages in which you can go on and on about your subject.
I thought long and hard about what my first book would be, and I wanted to write a tribute to my heroines growing up: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas—the three ladies who studied the great apes.
Before I could read, I remember seeing in National Geographic Jane Goodall standing humbly, actually crouching before a chimpanzee and holding her hand out to this beautiful, wise, intelligent creature that no one knew anything about.
She was the first, followed by the two in this kind of scientific sisterhood. I wrote Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas for grownups.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What got you started writing books?
SY MONTGOMERY: I had been working at the Courier News for about five years when my father gave me the gift of a dream vacation. He offered to pay for me to go to Australia. I always wanted to go to Australia because it is full of marsupials, and who can't love someone with a belly pocket?
I didn't want to just vacation and look at the animals. I wanted to find some way that I might be able to help. So I joined this organization called Earthwatch, which pairs paying laymen from around the world with scientists working on real projects that can use your help for about two weeks or 10 days at a time.
So I join this project called Drought Refugia on a refuge for the southern hairy-nosed wombat. I fell in love with the experience. We lived in tents at the Brookfield Conservation Park, we cooked at night over eucalypt-scented fires, the skies were full of parrots, and there I would find spiders as big as my hand in my tent. It was great.
When it came time to leave, I had worked very hard, and the principal investigator, Dr. Pamela Parker, said, "I would love to hire you to work for me, but I don't have any money to do that. I would love to give you the money to come back here and do a study of your own, but I can't do that." She said, "But if you ever did want to study something out here, I would make sure that you had food."
So I quit my job, bought a tent, and moved to the Outback and studied emus, the giant, flightless birds that can run 40 miles an hour over the outback on their tall legs. They stand as tall as a person. No one had documented a close-up study of emus before; I was the first person to do that.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How were you able to study emus close up?
SY MONTGOMERY: I did it essentially the same way that Jane Goodall did. I let the animals know I was there, and I just humbly followed them at a distance at which they were comfortable, and they revealed their lives to me. I've never been happier. It was brilliant. It was fabulous.
Essentially, I repeat that experience every time I begin to intimately know any animal, whether it's an exotic animal far away or an animal in my own barnyard.
You cast yourself almost as their acolyte. You say to the animal, "You're the teacher. I'm the student. Let me learn." And they always give you so much more than you ever dreamed of.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You got to take your dream to an ultimate level.
SY MONTGOMERY: I think I'm the luckiest person in the world; I have the greatest job ever. I can't believe my luck. What I'd like kids to know is that this dream of mine to do what I'm doing wasn't a career path that was well known.
You can't go to college and major in jungle exploration, but you can make your dreams come true, even if there's not a major in that, even if there's not already a job you can go into. You can make that job. I created my job, and I'm no smarter than anyone else.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Besides the animal themselves, what holds your fascination in making your books?
SY MONTGOMERY: It is exciting to go to some exotic location, and maybe have to overcome all kinds of leeches or mosquitoes. We have to hike for hours, and we might have to swim for hours in swift current—all this without knowing whether or not we are going to see the animal.
Or maybe we are pretty sure we are going to see the animal, but can we radio collar it, or are we going to be able to get the data that we really need? Are we going to be able to find out what we want to find out?
Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't, but kids are happy to come along on the adventure, and that's what my books bring.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you ground your findings?
SY MONTGOMERY: I try to read whatever there is out there that scientists have written. But I might see something different that they didn't see, and I might not see what they saw. Animals are individuals, and they're not necessarily going to behave the same way in one spot as they do in another.
Animals also have a culture. So while it's really important and thrilling to read all the scientific and popular works that you can, and see whatever films you can on your study subject, you mustn't believe that that's the last word. Otherwise, what are you doing there?
I also talk to local people a great deal. Many times local people's observations are dismissed as silly superstition but they really know what they are talking about.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please share an example of learning about one of your study subjects from talking with local people about the animal.
SY MONTGOMERY: My book The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans is about tigers that swim out after a boat like a dog races after a car. They get on board, and they eat the people on the boat. They live in the only mangrove swamp in the world that has tigers, so their lives are quite different from tigers elsewhere.
Scientists had studied these tigers to try to figure out why they do what they do. No one knew. I went to India and Bangladesh and talked with the people who lived right outside the tiger reserve and who were frequently snacked on. These animals eat about
300 people a year. You'd think that would irritate people, but they don't want to wipe out the tigers.
People I talked to would say things like, "The tiger can become invisible." Okay. And they'd say, "You know, the tiger can fly through the air." I'm writing all this down, but rather than dismissing it, I'm thinking, "How can this be true?" It turns out it is completely true.
If you have ever seen a tiger even at a zoo then you know that a tiger may become invisible behind a single blade of grass. He's not see-through, but he's invisible if you can't see him. Tigers can leap for dozens of yards, which explains the observation that they "fly through the air."
The other thing that people told me that turned out to be utterly true was a story that is almost like a myth. It is the story of a tiger who presided over the forest and owned all the riches of the Sundarbans mangrove forest and agreed to share those riches with the people. If the people respected the tiger, he'd share freely, but if they didn't, he would send one of his minions to eat that person.
Well, it turns out that story is true, because the tigers hardly ever come into the village and eat the people. Instead, the people who are eaten are eaten because they've gone into the tigers' territory, and that's when they get eaten. It's almost like the tigers are the eco-police of the area. It's almost like they are hyper-territorial. The people really knew what they were talking about.
TEACHINGBOOKS: It sounds like what you're talking about is perspective—to both empathize and offer a different point of view.
SY MONTGOMERY: When you're doing a book like this, you're going to use everything available to you: the scientific literature, the knowledge of the local people, and direct observation. But also, you're allowed to use your intuition, and you are allowed and encouraged to use your emotions.
This is something I learned from Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, because they actually befriended the primates. They didn't consider their animals just study subjects. They named them instead of just numbering them like rocks. They used their friendships with the animals as a tool to understand them.
So I'm constantly giving my heart away and putting my heart and soul—as well as my intellect—into my books. That's what I think we all should do: fall in love over and over with this great, green, breathing world.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Have you ever been afraid of the animals you are studying?
SY MONTGOMERY: The first time I ever held a wild tarantula, I was frightened, but not for the reason that you would think. We had met this beautiful little pinktoe tarantula in a bromeliad. She had been hiding in there, and Sam Marshall, the tarantula scientist about whom we were writing, found her and took her out of the flower. He said, "Would you like to hold her?" I said I would love to.
Here's why it was scary: I happened to be standing on a little patio at the nature center where we were staying. If she didn't like me, she could jump off my hand and could have broken her whole exoskeleton on the patio. What I was afraid of was that not that she'd run up my face, which would have been fine, but that she'd jump and hurt herself. Because of this, my palm was sweating.
Guess what happens when you're holding a spider, and your palm is sweating? They can taste with their feet, so she was standing there perfectly happy, then all of a sudden she started holding some of her feet up. This can be a threat gesture—they'll threaten you just like any other animal will. They'll hold their legs up. Sometimes they'll show their fangs. Sometimes you'll actually see venom dripping off the fangs. But she wasn't doing anything with her fangs. She was just holding her feet up because she didn't like the taste of my sweat.
TEACHINGBOOKS: So you are scared because you might hurt the animal, not because it might hurt you.
SY MONTGOMERY: Right. I didn't think that the tarantula would hurt me. That's the funny thing. Kids ask me often, "Weren't you scared when you were swimming in the Amazon River with piranhas and electric eels as long as a limousine?" Or, "Weren't you scared when you were looking for the snow leopard in the Altai Mountains of the Gobi in Mongolia?" Or, "Were you scared that there were swimming tigers that could come up and eat you?"
I wasn't ever particularly scared. I knew that animals have a perfectly good right to bite you sometimes or kick you or eat you, but that's not what worries me. What worries me is that I won't be able to write a good book. That is when I'm terrified.
TEACHINGBOOKS: When do you make your field notes?
SY MONTGOMERY: Here's how I take notes in the field: I use four things. One, I have a tiny notebook that usually will fit in my breast pocket, and I'll take that with me as I'm hiking, or riding on a camel or elephant. I'll write down things that people might say to me or observations that I make.
I also do interviews. I've done several interviews on tape, but I've learned that you can't really rely on your tapes. An orangutan ate my tapes one time. My most important tool, I think, is at the end of every day, when I am exhausted, and when I am sweaty, when I am dying to go to sleep, I force myself to write a narrative, not just a diary entry, but a real story of what that day taught me.
Sometimes whole chunks of my journal are almost verbatim in my books. I think that's what gives the books that I write for children such immediacy. The readers feel like they are there because I wrote the words when I was there. The reader, therefore, is there with me.
TEACHINGBOOKS: It sounds like what you are saying is it is best to write when the subject is close to you; when it's in your head and when it's in your heart.
SY MONTGOMERY: Yes, exactly. You wouldn't believe the stuff you can forget in just a matter of days—details that may not seem important at the time, but later are extremely important. It's just crucial to get those details down because that's what brings an experience to life.
For example, when you climb up a huge tree in the Amazon, and you can smell the epiphytic ferns, and you smell the flowers up there, and they smell like vanilla . . . that matters. That brings everything back. I include what it felt like to swim in that dark river— it felt like satin sheets. That brings it alive. What is it like to ride a two-humped or Bactrian camel? It feels like you're sitting between two really warm, really hairy airbags. It's quite secure. Riding on a camel is very easy.
I might be covered with leech bites or mosquito bites or there are ants in my bed, and I haven't had a shower in days. All of those things are important to capture in my writing at the end of the day, not after I've gone back to the United States and taken 10 showers.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What's the relationship between you and the photographer? Who is choosing those and developing the end result, the book?
SY MONTGOMERY: Photographer Nic Bishop and I work together in the most mysterious manner. He has never said to me, "You've got to make sure that you include this scene." I have never said to him, "Nic, make sure you get a picture of such-and- such." Because we're on site together and experience everything together, I know what his pictures look like. And, somehow, he knows the narrative that I'm going to tell.
When I write the book, I write with his images in mind. One of the great things is digital photography, because I can actually see all the pictures he's taken, in his camera, when we're flying back to the States or even as we're sitting around a campfire at night. Since I know what images are there, I often write to the images.
I think a lot of books are done in which there's the writer, and then they get a photographer to go out and take pictures to go with their narrative. That's not what happens with us. We're totally equal partners. I really feel like we read each other's minds a lot because we go into it in the same spirit, and we're experiencing every moment together in the field.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How do the scientists you feature use the books you've made about them and their work?
SY MONTGOMERY: Part of the ministry of what many of the scientists do is to talk to kids, sometimes in the foreign country or the exotic country where they're working. For instance, Lisa Daybeck has handed out Quest for the Tree Kangaroo to kids in villages in Papua, New Guinea. They're thrilled to see this, and many of them are studying English and can read it. Even those children who can't read it can look at these great pictures. The books are wonderful tools to show kids in the country where the scientist is working what they are doing.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You have talked about what scares you in the field. What makes you laugh?
SY MONTGOMERY: Some very funny things happen when you're in the field. One example comes from when we were researching the book Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot. It is a book about this giant, flightless, nocturnal parrot that was so endangered that there were fewer than 90 on the planet when we went there.
The males set up areas where they try to attract females. They rush out, do a little dance, make this incredible sound, and then jump on their lady friend and try to make more kakapos.
Well, there was this one kakapo. His name was Sirocco, and he had been raised by humans, so he had a little bit of an identity crisis. He had a crush on every human he saw. He either thought that he was a person, or that we were kakapo. He wisely built his booming bowl, his display area—not out where the other kakapo were in the forest, but between the one hut where all the people stayed and the latrine.
So at night when these birds come out, if you had to visit the latrine, bam, this huge bird would come rushing out at you and claw his way up your back onto your shoulder and onto your head, and then he'd take his considerable talons, and holding onto your head, proceeded to whack you first with one wing, then the other wing, then the other like windshield wipers.
This happened to me my first night on Codfish Island. It kind of hurts, but it was hilarious, and I have the glorious honor of having the amorous attentions of one of the world's rarest birds focused on me. Nic Bishop photographed it happening.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you prepare for your fieldwork?
SY MONTGOMERY: Preparing to write a book like the ones I do is a little different from what most authors do, because in addition to reading everything that you can, and doing interviews in advance, and watching all the movies that you can, I have to do a lot of physical conditioning.
Some of my books involve swimming for hours in fast current, or riding an elephant or a camel, or hiking for hours at a high altitude.
For example, when I was preparing for my research expedition for Saving the Ghost of the Mountain about snow leopards in Mongolia, I knew I needed to prepare for hiking at high altitudes months before the expedition. When researching for a previous book, I had gotten some altitude sickness. So I spent a huge amount of time training at the gym. I would walk six miles a day. For Saving the Ghost, we walked not only at altitudes over 10,000 feet, but on very slippery talus slopes. If you fell off, it was goodbye.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please give another example of how you have prepared for research.
SY MONTGOMERY: When I went to India to write about the man-eating tigers there, I wanted to learn a little Bengali. I was in West Bengal and in Bangladesh, and that's the language that they speak. This wasn't very easy because at that time it appeared that there were no language tapes that also had English on them. I had ordered some language tapes, but I had no idea what they were saying. I memorized all these sentences, but I didn't know what I was saying.
So I ordered Bangla-English and English-Bangla dictionaries. They came from Bangladesh. I flip them open, and sure enough, there's a word in English and next to it squiggles because it's in the Bengali script. I still couldn't learn the language.
Finally, I was able to find a tiny phrasebook, and I discovered that I had learned how to say things like, "Which days of the week does your sister not go to college?" and "Oh, I will sing the songs of Rabindranath Tagor." Very helpful. I actually ended up saying these things at various times during my trip, and folks were very glad to hear that Bengali spoken.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you come to partner with Nic Bishop on your books?
SY MONTGOMERY: My writing for children really started with Nic Bishop. I met him at the New England Aquarium in Boston. I was at a conference, and I was speaking there. And after my talk, this guy came up to me and said, "Say, how about traveling around the world with me? I'll take the pictures. You write the books. We'll write for children."
Now Nic pays about as much attention to his appearance as I do. So the guy could have been like an axe murderer. He could have slept in a pile of leaves, for all I knew. But the one concern I had with Nic was not if he was going to murder me in the middle of the night, but how is he going to treat the animals he photographs?
Now there are some fabulous wildlife photographers out there who not only get a great shot, they also treat the animals respectfully. But it's also true that some photographers stress the animals to get their pictures, and it's not unheard of for them do things like refrigerate reptiles so the creatures don't run away. For instance, many pictures that I've seen of tarantulas are actually of dead tarantulas, or worse, just the shed exoskeleton.
So I asked Nic to send me some of his pictures. When I saw them, I was so thrilled because you could see on the faces of even the insects that they were calm and happy. You saw an utterly different creature than you do in pictures taken by photographers who are just scaring the animals to death.
When he's photographing a tarantula, he does not put the animal in the refrigerator. He will often hand it to me, and it can walk like a little turtle in my hands until it feels calm. Then the animal is so calm that you can put it down. Nic can actually use a paintbrush to position its feet. The animal is that calm.
I've been his handler for snakes and tree kangaroos, and he's the same with every animal. The animal's comfort is essential to getting a good picture, but the picture is not as important as the animal being comfortable and healthy. He would never dream of hurting an animal or killing an animal. In fact, he doesn't even want to inconvenience the animal. So he's a joy to work with.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please share some stories from the field that involve you and Nic working together.
SY MONTGOMERY: Nic has saved me a number of times. I think when he was born he beat his way out of the womb with a walking stick. He's from New Zealand, and he's incredibly fit. He's way fitter than I am, plus, he has testosterone, which really helps. And there have been times that I've been really struggling going up talus slopes and puffing and huffing. And Nic doesn't turn around and say, "Oh, you wimp, what's the matter with you?" He just helps you along when he needs to.
One time, I think I would have died if it wasn't for Nic. This was in Papua, New Guinea. It was after our first day of hiking for eight hours in the cloud forest at 10,000 feet. It was raining, and people were pitching their tents for the night. I got hypothermia, and I kind of wandered off thinking, "Gee, I don't feel very good," but I wasn't with it enough to figure out I should get inside a tent and drink something hot. I was wandering off into the trackless cloud forest where no one had ever been. I could have vanished. Nic found me, stuffed me in a tent, gave me something to drink, and I was fine.
When we went to Papua, New Guinea, for Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, it turned out, to my delight, that Nic Bishop speaks fluent Tok Pisin, because he had lived in Papua, New Guinea, as a child. He was totally in his element.
We wanted to show a lot of the different animals that live in Papua, New Guinea, and one of them was this beautiful green tree python—quite a large animal. I'm sure it was six feet long. We were given access to the python, and Nic handed it to me to handle it until it was calm. Finally it got on the stick, and it got in just the position that he wanted. I enjoyed being with the snake. It was great. After we handed him back, we were told, "By the way, that one's a real biter."
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about The Snake Scientist.
SY MONTGOMERY: We had such fun with the book that kicked off the Scientists in the Field series. When Nic and I decided to write The Snake Scientist, I told my mother, and she was appalled. She thought that since I was going to be writing for children, I would be writing about puppies and bunnies. I said, "No, I'm going to work in a pit with 18,000 snakes. And by the way, they get into giant balls of 100 snakes and copulate." Everyone thought that I really needed to go to therapy for wanting to write this book about the largest gathering of snakes in the world.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What's it like going into a pit with thousands of snakes?
SY MONTGOMERY: I loved going into the Narcisse Snake Dens. I loved being with 18,000 snakes. Snakes are not slimy. They're perfectly smooth, and they were a little cold. I mean, when they'd get into your clothes, it was kind of cold having their scales next to you. But they wanted to warm up, and it was nice being welcomed by these snakes.
Most of the time, a snake looks at you, and it's out of there. You don't get to see that snake. It's terrified. But these snakes, they've just awakened from hibernation. They're kind of sleepy. A lot of times they want to slither in under your clothes and kind of nestle there. I was honored to help warm up some snakes.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about your other Scientists in the Field books.
SY MONTGOMERY: The Tarantula Scientist was equally creepy to the snake book. For this book, we journeyed to French Guiana, which is probably the tarantula capital of the world. We traveled with the world's top expert on tarantulas, Dr. Sam Marshall, with whom we are still very close friends.
For Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, we got to travel 10,000 feet into the cloud forest of the Huon Peninsula of Papua, New Guinea, which is always described as a lost world. It's this wonderful, seething place, full of amazing animals that sound like they're some combination of a Dakin toy and Dr. Seuss, and where tree kangaroos really live in the trees. They are real kangaroos that can jump 30 feet high out of a tree, and just boing away into the forest. That was a fabulous trip.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What is it like to see a tree kangaroo?
SY MONTGOMERY: Tree kangaroos are the most unlikely looking creatures. They really do look like something that Dr. Seuss came up with working with someone who makes plush toys. They're almost orange and yellow. They look incredibly adorable. They have dear little pink noses. They have claws that don't look scary (though they can mess you up), and great long tails.
You would think an orange and yellow animal in a big, green forest would be very easy to spot. But they're high up in the trees, and there's a kind of moss that looks exactly like the color of a tree kangaroo. Every time you see this hanging moss, you think it's a tail. We did get to see them up close and personal, because our goal was to put radio collars on them. For that, we had to get them out of the trees and onto the ground. I actually got to rub the bellies of these animals, and they have such wonderful, incredible fur. It was just such a thrill to see them up close.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you pick a topic for your books? For example, how did you decide to study tarantulas?
SY MONTGOMERY: I picked tarantulas because I knew kids would love them. The next step was finding the tarantula scientist whom we wanted to showcase. Well, there are a number of people studying tarantulas, but some of them are studying their venom— squishing them up and looking at their juice. I didn't want to write about that.
I wanted to write about someone who was studying tarantula behavior, who respected and loved tarantulas, because that's a person I want to spend weeks with. That's the person I want to share with my readers. I found the perfect person in Sam Marshall. He never liked science growing up. He loved tarantulas though, and it was his love of these animals that got him to love science.
Dr. Lisa Daybeck, who is the tree kangaroo expert we featured, had such bad asthma as a child she couldn't even have a cat. When she wanted to study animals, she had to study the ants walking around on the tarmac on the roof of her house in New York.
But she found a way, and now she travels around the world is able to go up 10,000 feet into the cloud forest.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What are some of the challenges of writing books about field science?
SY MONTGOMERY: These books are about scientists working in the field, doing this incredibly exciting work. Field science means being a really good observer, knowing how to record what you observe in a way that's quantifiable, but it also means quite a bit of adventure.
For example, when we wrote Saving the Ghost of the Mountain, which is an expedition to Mongolia searching for the snow leopard, we knew going into that it was very unlikely that we were going to ever see a snow leopard. Now was this going to be disappointing? Well, it did pose a bit of a quandary for me as a writer. I would love to have seen a snow leopard. And Tom McCarthy, our scientist, would love to have seen a snow leopard. Everyone on the expedition would have loved it. Every time we turned a corner, we hoped we would see one, but we never did. We saw some scat. We saw one footprint. How do you write a story about the excitement of that?
The fact is, it was really exciting because even though we didn't see a snow leopard, snow leopards certainly saw us. We know that. Part of what makes snow leopards so thrilling, so mysterious, is that you never see them. You can still make that missing character very, very vivid.
One way that I handled that was in interviewing Tom, I got him to talk about snow leopards that he had radio collared earlier. So we got to learn about those individuals, and they became real personalities.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What are children's reactions to your having studied tarantulas?
SY MONTGOMERY: Kids aren't as afraid of tarantulas as grownups are. Most grownups are really petrified of them, and they believe they're all terrible and deadly. I think it's really a kind of a learned response, and it's very easy to turn on that response when it comes to spiders and snakes. But most snakes are not venomous. Most snakes won't hurt you. Most of the time, venomous snakes would rather get away from you. They won't bother you. One will even squirt blood out of its eyes rather than try and bite you.
The same is true of tarantulas. It turns out that of the 800 species of tarantulas on earth, there is not one whose bite is toxic enough to kill a healthy adult. Most tarantulas won't bite you at all, and a lot of them will just shed their hairs on you and try to get rid of you that way.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about your living conditions on your field studies.
SY MONTGOMERY: When we researched Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, we stayed in tents. We had to bring everything we were going to have with us on our backs or our heads. Therefore, we had 40 local people come with us to this trackless rain forest with all the gear that we would need for the entire expedition. The same was true for Saving the Ghost of the Mountain. In the Gobi Desert, we stayed in tents.
But sometimes we even stay in a place with running water. That was pretty great for The Tarantula Scientist. We stayed at a little nature center. I loved this nature center. Not only did you have running water, your room was full of fauna. There were these enormous toads hopping around—as big as your fist—everywhere. There were tarantulas right in your room, and there were little lizards running up and down. It was fantastic. At one point I was lying in my bed under my mosquito net, and I saw something going on with my shoe. A snake was crawling out of it. It was great.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about your living conditions during research for your book about pink dolphins and your book, The Tapir Scientist.
SY MONTGOMERY: When I was working with pink dolphins in the Amazon for Encantado: Pink Dolphin of the Amazon, I made four different expeditions. For one of those, I stayed on a floating house that was tethered to a tree so it would not float away. I could hear dolphins swimming underneath the house. It was fantastic.
The other houses were on stilts. After a meal, you would just scrape your plate over the side of the house and the water would boil with piranhas as they came to eat your leavings.
For The Tapir Scientist, we got to stay at a working ranch in Brazil. It was fantastic to be with this great family that opens their home to visitors and scientists.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about The Tapir Scientist.
SY MONTGOMERY: For The Tapir Scientist, Nic and I got to go visit the world's largest wetland called the Pantanal in Brazil. It is 10 times the size of the Everglades. It's filled with incredible animals and bird life. But probably one of the most cool-looking, improbable creatures who lives there is the largest land animal in South America, called the tapir.
A lot of Brazilians don't even know what it is. It looks like a cross between an elephant and a rhino, but it's actually more closely related to the horse. They have big snouts drooping over their lips, ears kind of like a hippo, and a body sort of like a rhinoceros. They can swim as well as they can run, and they whinny like horses. And very little is known about them, even though they're absolutely crucial to regeneration of all the forests. They're big fruit eaters.
This wonderful woman, Patti Medici, has been studying them for many years, and she moved to the Pantanal to study them in that habitat. Before she had been working in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. We had the most amazing expedition where she was trying to capture these animals and radio collar them.
These are big critters, and capturing them, you'd think, would be extremely difficult. But there were days that we would catch two of them in traps. We were up close with this prehistoric being in this incredible place with this wonderful scientist and a team gathered from around the world. What could be more exciting than that?
TEACHINGBOOKS: What were you trying to learn about the tapirs?
SY MONTGOMERY: So little is known about the tapir. We don't know what they do all day, and we know almost nothing about how they behave in the Pantanal. Animals, like humans, lead very different lives in different places. You know, if you looked at people living in the Arctic, they would live very differently from the folks living in South America.
Animal species are that way too. They may eat different things, they may behave differently with predators, they may have different predators. She's trying to find out everything she can about them, everything from their DNA to what kinds of ticks are found on their body.
TEACHINGBOOKS: And what are some stories that happened in the Pantanal?
SY MONTGOMERY: Well, one day we caught a tapir in a box trap, and it looked like we'd be able to get nice video of that animal as it exited the box trap. I don't think we tranquilized that one; I think it had already been radio collared. Anyway, I was standing behind a tree, and we figured which way the tapir was going to run when he came out of the box trap, but we didn't figure that he was going to run directly at me. That was very exciting.
In the video I took, you see the animal coming closer, closer, closer, and then there's a bush and my shoe, and then my backpack in the sky because I had to kind of leap out of the way. But that was absolutely thrilling.
It was great working with all these different people too, who had come from around the world. Four different languages were being spoken: Spanish, Portuguese, and English, and French. That was an incredible thing to realize that even as a scientist, foreign language can be very important.
What you don't realize is doing this kind of field science, you're drawing on everything. You are drawing on your scouting skills. You are drawing on sewing skills. You are using, of course, your science, but also your language, physical fitness. Nothing goes to waste in the field.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Where are you going next in the world?
SY MONTGOMERY: I'm headed to Namibia to write about a cheetah scientist, Laurie Marker. She's a fabulous lady. She always loved animals, but she wanted to be a vintner—to grow grapes and make wine. So to make some money so that she could buy her vineyard, she started working in an animal park, fell in love with cheetahs, discovered how endangered they are, then discovered how to breed them in captivity, which no one else had really done well before. She was so respected for her way with cheetahs that the National Zoo actually asked her to show them what is was that she was doing.
But she kept hearing all this time that cheetahs are terribly endangered, and hoping that someone would do something about it. Well, no one did. So one day she sold all her possessions, moved to Namibia, bought a small farm, and created a foundation to preserve cheetahs. And she's done this in various different ways. One of the ways that
she helps them is that she has an orphanage and rehabilitation center. She gets to know cheetahs up close and personal. They are one of the big cats that you actually can be around, and they won't kill you.
In fact, there's a thing called "coursing" with cheetahs that kings used to do. They would hunt with their pet cheetahs. In a video, you can see Laurie Marker walking around in the tall grass, and there's this set of ears in the grass. And if you look closely, you'll see it's belonging to the fastest land animal in the world. This incredible predator considers her a friend.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You have had a vast number and variety of experiences in your travels and research studies.
SY MONTGOMERY: Yes. In the course of my research I've been undressed by an orangutan in Borneo. I've been hunted by a swimming tiger in India. I was charged by an upset silverback gorilla in Zaire. I've been bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica. It was totally my fault, because I was taking him out of a mist net, and he was horrified.
I've just had a ball all around the world. There's a Buddhist saying that I like to share with kids and adults, and it goes like this, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."
Well, the teachers who have appeared to me have been tigers, tarantulas, snakes, emus, wombats, and kangaroos. We just don't always know to look for them, but they're there, and they teach us and to guide us. This isn't just true for people who want to travel all over the world. They're right in our yards, even in our houses.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk a little bit more about animals as teachers.
SY MONTGOMERY: Many cultures around the world have traditionally looked at animals as our teachers, our mentors, our healers. Throughout the Native American nation, for example, the bear has been seen as the great medicine woman. You can learn a great deal about medicinal plants from watching bears. For example, aspirin comes from willow bark, and bears use that as a pain reliever.
Many people talk about spirit animals, or animals that inspire us. How can you not look at an eagle or a dolphin, for example, and not feel the power and the grace of those animals, not admire the abilities they have to see things we can't see and hear things we can't hear—to experience the world in a way that we can't?
TEACHINGBOOKS: You take animal advocacy to heart.
SY MONTGOMERY: I've always looked at animals as equals. I've never felt that animals were less than people. In many cases, they are more than people. I want to give back at a time that we're poisoning this planet. We're crowding animals off. We're killing them for ornaments in our houses, for food.
We've got to change our relationship with the earth and not just for the animals' sake, but for ours as well. I'm hoping that my work helps further that. I think this is a great time to be alive because I think we really are changing the way that we look at animals and the rest of the natural world.
I think we're finally beginning to appreciate that animals love their lives just as much as we do and that their lives, in their own way, are just as vivid and as important as ours are.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you find scientists and stories to feature?
SY MONTGOMERY: I look for someone who really loves the animal, not just for the glorious idea of the animal, but who cares about every individual out there, and whose work is not just to discover the animal's secrets because it's neat or it's fun or it's interesting, but they're going to use that to help the animal itself—even if the animal is not highly endangered.
For example, the snake scientist, Bob Mason, had this great study area and a great way to find out cool things about snakes, but he also wanted to give back to these individuals. He wants to come up with was a way to get them to use these snake tunnels so they won't be smooshed on the roads while they sun themselves. One of the things that he's been looking into is whether you can use the chemical trails that they use to find each other to lead them into these snake tunnels.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you come to write Temple Grandin: How The Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism And Changed The World?
SY MONTGOMERY: When my publisher suggested the idea, I felt like this was the opportunity of a lifetime. I've always wanted to write about food animals for kids, but what kid is going to want to read about the horrible life of, you know, some poor chicken stuck in a cage the size of a piece of paper? No one is going to want to read that. But they're going to want to read this triumphant story about a woman with autism who is world famous and beloved by both the food animal industry and by the Humane Society. They're going to want to read that story, particularly at a time when people are being diagnosed with autism left and right.
I had followed Temple Grandin's career for a very long time, ever since there was an article in The New Yorker by Oliver Sacks called An Anthropologist on Mars because that's how she felt in human society. She felt like she was just observing these other organisms who behaved in a different way that she did. She thinks differently than most of us do. So this was my way to do something I had always dreamed about and meet somebody whom I so admired.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Who is Temple Grandin?
SY MONTGOMERY: Temple Grandin has used the gifts of her autism to help food animals. More than any other person who has ever lived, she has made a difference in the lives of food animals—the 10 billion animals that we use in America each year for food. Temple is able to design humane devices, humane restraining areas, even humane slaughterhouses that cut down on animals' fear and their sense of panic. This really makes a huge difference in their lives. She is able to do this because of her unusual brain, a brain that was sculpted by her autism.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Why did you want to write a book about Temple Grandin for children?
SY MONTGOMERY: I wanted to write about Temple for young readers for two reasons. One is the perspective that she gives on other minds. Her autism comes with all kinds of challenges but also comes with gifts. And that's important to know, whether you have autism, whether you have ADD, or whether you're just a regular old person. Knowing the gifts that you've been given makes you different, and being able to use those gifts in a way to give back to the world—that's exactly what she has done with her life. That's a very powerful message.
The other message I want to bring to kids is to show that animals saved her. At a time in her life when, because of her unusual brain, she felt nervous every day, and she felt like there was a live cobra in the room, animals showed her a way out.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What about the food animal component to Temple Grandin's story? Was that message important for you to share?
SY MONTGOMERY: I want kids to know what happens to food animals in the United States. Adults often feel that they can't make a change, that they can't make a change in their diet, or they can't make a change in the way farms are run, that it's just all set in stone, and they throw up their hands. Kids won't do that. Kids won't accept that.
Writing for kids is so important, not just because they're tomorrow's leaders. They're very powerful right now. I heard that 70% of the knowledge that adults get, they get from the kids in their household. That's really powerful.
Children are also powerful consumers. They are all about change. They are not afraid to change themselves, and they are not afraid to change the world. That's why I write all of my books.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Let's talk about writing a biography. How do you go about doing that?
SY MONTGOMERY: I had read all of [Temple Grandin's] popular books. I really cared about what she was doing, from a standpoint of interest in her mind. Remember, I was a psychology major, among others, in college, so I was very interested in the way that minds work. Also, her humane work was extremely important to me. She was making breakthroughs day after day in the way we treat animals, and the way that we understand they experience their lives.
I read many of the things that have been written about Temple. I saw videos in which she was speaking. Her website has a ton of really interesting stuff, including her own drawings of diagrams of different devices and corrals and things. I spent three days with her in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she lives and teaches, and I drew on telephone conversations that we had together.
I used observation skills. I used interview skills, and she would evoke all of her senses describing how she felt when she heard the school bell ring, how much that hurt, for example, or how awful it was when someone wore perfume and it just flooded her senses.
I think that's what makes any book really live. The other stuff is really important for background, but you want to bring your reader up close with that person as if they can be in your skin, as if they could be the person interviewing her. What would they want to know? And that's what I ask.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What can students learn about writing biographies from your work?
SY MONTGOMERY: Writing a biography is more than just a tally of all the stuff the person did. That's on your CV. It's important to include the stuff that they did, but I find that my job in writing a book is to also share how the person felt.
Writing the biography of Temple Grandin wasn't all that different from writing the Scientist in the Field series in terms of what I did to get my information. I used my friendship with her and my observations of her: I'm watching her teach, looking at how she interacts with her students.
Some readers are going to be on the autistic spectrum, and some won't. For those who are not on the spectrum, it helps them to hear from kids how they felt about this very unusual person in their classroom.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about your pig, and how you came to write The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood.
SY MONTGOMERY: When our pig, a great big Buddha master and a great member of our family for 14 years died, I knew I had to write a book about him. It was the most difficult book I've ever written. It's my memoir, and it's about him and how he was like a center of our family and, in many ways, the center of our town.
When Christopher Hogwood died, it was the lead story in the local paper. It was the lead story on the state page of The Concord Monitor. Christopher Hogwood, the great conductor after whom our pig was named, had a link on his website to our pig's obituary. I got food. I got cards. I got letters from all over the world. Everyone knew this pig. I miss him every day to this day.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about your book, Birdology.
SY MONTGOMERY: I wrote a book for adults called Birdology, about what birds are. It looks at seven different birds, each of which shows a different aspect of birdiness. In it you meet my parakeet, Jerry, who pooped on the dining room table much to my mother's horror. We also meet emus, briefly, but we spend a lot of time with the cassowary, the most dangerous bird in the world. It is a 150-pound flightless bird with a killing claw that will eviscerate you if you come upon him at the wrong moment. I made a point of not coming upon one at the wrong moment.
I got to spend one my birthdays with this famous dancing cockatoo named Snowball, and I have a book for kids called Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo. This bird is internationally famous. His video went viral of his dancing to the Backstreet Boys.
For Birdology, I got to take falconry lessons. I got to know Harris Hawks, somewhat, which was thrilling, and I had so much fun. I got to meet racing pigeons. I got to work with a hummingbird rehabilitator who is raising these tiny birds who hatch out of eggs the size of navy beans—they're the size of bumblebees when they hatch—and set them free. It is all so fantastic.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What is next for you?
SY MONTGOMERY: I'm at work on a bunch of different books, and one of them is about an octopus. For that book, I hope to learn to scuba dive. I've met several octopuses and embraced them, and they have embraced me.
The most tentacles they'll have on you at one time is three or four, but each tentacle has 200 suckers, and each sucker is powerful enough to give you a big hickey.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck in your writing?
SY MONTGOMERY: Sometimes I can just force myself through it like an athlete running a race when I am tired. Sometimes I just have to go in the woods and walk with my dog, or go out and listen to my hens talk, or go out and visit an octopus. Usually, the natural world is what recharges me.
I can't be stuck for long. As a journalist, I couldn't be stuck for long because there would be a big, ugly hole in that newspaper. I just force myself to go through it.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What's a typical day like for Sy Montgomery? Is there such a thing?
SY MONTGOMERY: I have different days depending on what project I'm working on. If I'm in the active writing phase of a project, that kind of day is going to be very different than a day that I'm in the field, for example. If I'm writing, I get up, and I feed Sally, and then I feed my husband and the chickens, and I walk Sally.
Then I go to work. I don't answer e-mails. I don't look at e-mails. I don't answer the phone. I turn the phone off, or I unplug it and just write.
And then at lunch, I make Howard's lunch, walk Sally for about an hour or an hour and a half with my friend, Jody, and her dogs, who are Sally's best friends. In the afternoon I'll look at e-mails, and I'll do stuff like that. But when I am clear in the morning, that's when it's really crucial to write.
If I'm in a research phase, my day has to wrap around the research, which might be library research, or it might be doing a phone interview, or it might be arranging, you know, 10 flights to Mongolia, or it might be talking to Nic Bishop on the phone, or I might have to be going to the aquarium for another cuddle with an octopus. You just never know.
Of course, in the field, every day is totally different.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You get to talk to students a lot. What do you like to tell them?
SY MONTGOMERY: The best part of talking to students is, very early in the program I say, "How many of you like animals?" And a forest of arms goes up. Then I know I'm among friends. That's my favorite.
But more than anything else, more than science or literacy, more than talking about how to be a good writer or finding a career, I want to affirm for kids what they already know: What matters in this world is not accumulating wealth or having a big car or fancy clothes. It's perfectly fine to have those things. But that's not what really matters. I want them to know that what gives humans joy and will continually refresh us, will always teach us, that will never fail us, is this natural world—this great, breathing, real world. Never buy the idea that the real world is about banking or status. That's not the real world.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You get to talk to educators a lot. What do you like to say to them?
SY MONTGOMERY: Well, I like to listen to teachers a lot, and I love to talk to librarians. The first thing I want librarians to know is that they are my heroines and heroes. I always went to the natural world for refreshment as a child. But if the library hadn't had all these great books for me, I would have been a basket case.
I say, "Thank you for having this treasure trove of wonderful books that kept me alive as a kid."
This In-depth Written Interview was created by TeachingBooks.net for educational purposes and may be copied and distributed solely for these purposes for no charge as long as the copyright information remains on all copies.
Questions regarding this program should be directed to info@teachingbooks.net
