Books

Secrets of the Octopus by sy montgomery

Secrets of the Octopus

Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This book, companion to the highly-anticipated National Geographic special of the same name, explores the alluring underwater world of the octopus, reporting new science since the 2015 publication of Montgomery’s iconic The Soul of an Octopus.

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of time and turtles by sy montgomery

Of Time And Turtles:
Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

With elegance, journalistic curiosity, and gorgeous artwork, this nonfiction narrative relates the dramas and insights gleaned from working in a hospital from injured, sick, and abandoned turtles—and at the same time, investigates the mystery of time itself. (Really, who better than these long-lived, ancient reptiles to help probe what philosophy considers, along with consciousness, the “hard problem” of time?) Lived during the pandemic, when life for many seemed stalled and broken, the stories of courage and patience in these pages testify to the power we all have to mend our shattered world.

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The Hawks Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty

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

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

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

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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The Soul of an Octopus

The Soul of an Octopus

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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Birdology

Birdology

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 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

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

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.

And now you can download the audio book. Listen to a sample.

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Journey of the Pink Dolphins

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

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

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

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

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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