Books for Children

brave baby hummingbird by sy montgomery

Brave Baby Hummingbird

An orphaned baby hummingbird shares his memories of growing up alongside his older sister, who hatched two days earlier. The two birds, originally small as bumblebees, hatch from eggs the size of navy beans in a soft, tiny nest. One day their mother does not return to feed them—but they are rescued, and a bird rehabilitator raises them until they fly free on their own. Illustrated with gorgeous acryllic painted on wood by Tiffany Bozic, this is the story of the lightest birds in the sky—vulnerable orphans who grow up to accomplish great feats. Based on a true story, the book features ways we can all help hummingbirds, from avoiding pesticides to planting pollinator gardens.

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of time and turtles by sy montgomery

The Book of Turtles

From National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Sy Montgomery comes an ode to some of the most diverse, fascinating, and beloved species on the planet: turtles. With dazzling illustrations and emotionally engaging, fact-filled text, this picture book will speak to the wisdom these long-lived animals can lend. The clear, simple language is easy enough to kids to read—but the surprising info and classy art will appeal to readers of all ages.

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The Seagull and the Sea Captain

The Seagull and the Sea Captain

The captain met the seagull when they both were out riding the winds around Gloucester Harbor. They became fast friends. The seagull even landed on the captain’s shoulder to enjoy a cracker. But after winter comes, and the seagull must fly south and the boat can’t set sail, will the friends find each other again in the spring?

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Condor Comeback

Condor Comeback

The largest land bird in North America was declared extinct in the wild in 1987. But today, hundreds fly free—while hundreds more breed in captivity. This is the story of the California condor’s comeback from extinction, a story of equal parts human vision and human blindness, and a testament to power of these sociable, intelligent and long-lived species to inspire our own.

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Becoming a Good Creature

Becoming a Good Creature

Adapted from HOW TO BE A GOOD CREATURE, this picture book, illustrated by Rebecca Green, shares the secrets taught by Sy’s animal friends. From tigers to tarantulas, from sharks to Scotties, animals have so much to teach us about friendship, courage, compassion—and how to be a good creature on this sweet, green Earth.

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The Magnificent Migration: On Safari with Africa's Last Great Herds

The Magnificent Migration: On Safari with Africa’s Last Great Herds

Traveling with wildebeest expert Dr. Richard D. Estes and fellow safarists, Sibert medalist Sy Montgomery takes readers on a staggering, emotional journey alongside the greatest land migration on earth—that of the wildebeest across the Serengeti—to provide a you-are-there account of one of nature’s most fascinating occurrences. Montgomery explores the wonder of migration, asking questions like, how do migration patterns sculpt the environment? Why do animals migrate? And how do they know where to go?

With lyrical prose, abundant facts, and the inclusion of other species who undertake remarkable migrations, Montgomery makes a journey of thousands of miles fly by—but not without leaving its mark. Featuring beautiful color photography by Roger and Logan Wood.

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Inkys Amazing Escape

Inky’s Amazing Escape: How a Very Smart Octopus Found His Way Home

Learn all about Inky the Octopus, an international sensation known for escaping from the New Zealand aquarium in April 2016, in this fascinating picture book from National Book Award nominee and octopus expert Sy Montgomery.

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The Hyena Scientist

The Hyena Scientist

This myth-busting new addition to the critically acclaimed Scientists in the Field series by Sibert medal winning team Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop is perfect for nonfiction readers looking for more female scientist narratives, or a fresh perspective on an underrepresented animal—Hyenas!

Timely and inspiring, The Hyena Scientist sets the record straight about one of history’s most hated and misunderstood mammals, while featuring the groundbreaking, pioneering research of a female scientist in a predominately male field in this offering by Sibert-winning duo Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop.

As a scientist studying one of the only mammalian societies led entirely by females, zoologist Kay Holecamp has made it her life’s work to understand hyenas, the fascinating, complex creatures that are playful, social, and highly intelligent—almost nothing like the mangy monsters of pop culture lore.

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The Great White Shark Scientist

Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish Are Saving the World’s Largest Rain Forest

Considered the “lungs of the world,” the Amazon provides a full fifth of the world’s oxygen, and every year unsustainable human practices destroy 2.7 million acres. What can be done to help? That’s where Project Piaba comes in.

Join the award-winning author Sy Montgomery and the photographer Keith Ellenbogen as they traverse the river and rainforest to discover how tiny fish, called piabas, can help preserve the Amazon, its animals, and the rich legacy of its people. Amazon Adventure is an eye-opening—and ultimately hopeful—exploration of how humanity’s practices are affecting and shaping not only the Amazon, but our entire environment.

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The Great White Shark Scientist

The Great White Shark Scientist

Just off the coast of New England’s iconic Cape Cod, great white sharks are staging a phenomenal comeback from near extinction—offering shark scientist Greg Skomal and his team an unrivaled opportunity to study these mysterious and misunderstood predators. Sy Montgomery and photographer Keith Ellenbogen come along with Greg and his team as they locate, identify, film and track great whites, often just off some of the Cape’s most popular beaches.

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The Octopus Scientists: Exploring the Mind of a Mollusk

The Octopus Scientists: Exploring the Mind of a Mollusk

Sy Montgomery and Keith Ellenbogen dive into the world of the octopus and take us along for the ride. They’ll brave razor sharp coral, swim with blacktip reef sharks, and dodge the deadly stonefish to find out what the octopus has to teach us about our planet and ourselves. What can be learned from their amazing changeable bodies? How might their behavior reveal the health of the world’s oceans? What amazing discoveries await us when we journey into the mind of the mollusk?

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Chasing Cheetahs: The Race to Save Africa's Fastest Cat

Chasing Cheetahs: The Race to Save Africa’s Fastest Cat

Since the year 1900, cheetah footprints quickly dwindled in African dirt as the species plummeted from more than 100,000 to fewer than 10,000. At the Cheetah Conservation Fund’s (CCF) African headquarters in Namibia, Laurie Marker and her team save these stunning, swift, and slender creatures from extinction. Since the organization’s start in 1990, they’ve rescued more than 900 cheetahs, most of whom have been returned to the wild.

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The Tapir Scientist: Saving South America's Largest Mammal

The Tapir Scientist: Saving South America’s Largest Mammal

If you’ve never seen a lowland tapir, you’re not alone. Most of the people who live near tapir habitat in Brazil’s vast Pantanal (“the Everglades on steroids”) haven’t seen the elusive snorkel-snouted mammal, either. In this arresting nonfiction picture book, Sibert winners Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop join a tapir-finding expedition led by the Brazilian field scientist Pati Medici. Aspiring scientists will love the immediate, often humorous “you are there” descriptions of fieldwork, and gadget lovers will revel in the high-tech science at play, from microchips to the camera traps that capture the “soap opera” of tapir life.

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Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo

Snowball The Dancing Cockatoo

Snowball The Dancing Cockatoo, for kids in grades 3 and up, is the true story of how an unwanted cockatoo achieved international fame as a YouTube sensation, television star, and scientific study subject, all by rocking out to the beat of his favorite tunes. Snowball tells the story (well, this is what he would have said if his language skills were as good as his dancing.) But everything he says is true, including how he inspired the World’s First Bird Dance-Off Contest, became the subject of a groundbreaking study about music and the brain, and has now gone into teaching children how to dance and doing charity work.

The book is illustrated with the whimsical paintings of my friend, Judith Oksner.

All author’s proceeds from this book go to benefit Bird Lovers Only, the bird rescue where Snowball now lives.

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Temple Grandin: How The Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism And Changed The World

Because of severe autism, a brain disorder that affects as many as 1 in 100 American children, Temple Grandin didn’t speak a word until she was 5 years old. Even now, at age 63, she doesn’t think in words—she thinks in pictures. But today, this brilliant designer and professor has become one of the most powerful spokespeople in the world—not just on behalf of others with autism, but for all the other wordless individuals on the planet: the animals, especially the 10 billion farm animals who provide Americans’ milk, eggs and meat. This is her story, the first written especially for kids.

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Kakapo Rescue: Saving the Worlds Strangest Parrot

Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World’s Strangest Parrot

One explorer called it “the most wondrous of living birds.” Extraordinarily friendly, curious, and huge, the kakapo is the world’s only flightless parrot, the world’s heaviest parrot, and the only parrot who is active at night instead of by day. Fewer than 90 of them remained on Earth when Sy and Nic journeyed to their only breeding ground, remote Codfish Island off new Zealand’s south coast, to record the world’s most dramatic effort to save an endangered bird.

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Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia

Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia

Snow leopards survive in some of the most extreme habitats in the world. They live at altitudes too high for trees—sometimes in places with only half the oxygen people need to breathe easily. They thrive in temperatures cold enough to freeze human tears. Prowling along ridges, slinking below skyline, the snow leopard is as invisible, yet as powerful, as the wind, and as elusive as a ghost. Nic and Sy join Snow Leopard Trust scientist Tom McCarthy and his team in the Altai Mountains of the Gobi Desert as they try to study and save an animal they can’t see—before it becomes a ghost for real.

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Quest for the Tree Kangaroo

Quest for the Tree Kangaroo

It looks like a Dakin stuffed toy designed by Dr Seuss: Impossibly soft, with a rounded face, button eyes, pink nose, upright ears and long, thick, furry tail, the 25-pound animal hops like a kangaroo, carries babies in a pouch like a koala, and climbs trees like a monkey. The Machie’s Tree Kangaroo lives in mysterious, misty cloud forests of Papua, New Guinea, where other researchers concluded the animal would be impossible to study. But Dr. Lisa Dabek of the Seattle Zoo loved them so much she just had to try—and brought Nic and Sy along with her on the quest.

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The Tarantula Scientist

The Tarantula Scientist

Superheroes of the spider world, they’re the biggest, the hairiest, and some of the most ancient spiders on Earth—and some species can live for 30 years. Sy and Nic joined tarantula expert Sam Marshall on an expedition to the Tarantula Capitol of the World—French Guiana, in South America—to search for the biggest tarantula of them all: the quarter-pound Goliath Bird-Eater Tarantula.

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The Snake Scientist

The Snake Scientist

You hear them before you see them: the sound of 18,000 slithering snakes! The Narcisse Snake Pits in Manitoba, Canada host the largest gathering of snakes in the world. Sy and Nic accompany snake specialist Bob Mason and his team on an expedition to discover their mysteries.

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The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans

The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans

In this mysterious swamp off the Bay of Bengal, tigers swim out after your boat like a dog chasing a car and leap on board and eat you. Yet the people of Sundarbans don’t hunt or hurt the tigers—instead, they worship them. Why? Come along and help solve the mystery.

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Encantado: Pink Dolphin of the Amazon

Encantado: Pink Dolphin of the Amazon

They seem impossible, but they’re real: dolphins as pink as bubble gum really do live in the Amazon river. But they’re not like other dolphins—they’re a whole other kind of whale. They seem to flying like birds between the branches of the trees that are drowned by the rains of the wet season. The local people say there’s an enchanted world beneath the river where the pink dolphins rule. To learn about these amazing dolphins, you’ll need to talk with scientists and shamans and swim with piranhas and electric eels.

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Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropic

Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropic

When biologist Gary Galbreath came upon a beautiful golden bear caged in a small town in tropical China, he was mystified: no bear like it had ever been described by science. He wondered about that bear for a decade. What was it? Could it be a new species? Or was it just an oddball individual? One day Sy met a man who had seen one just like it in Cambodia—and that’s when she started planning a new expedition. Join Sy, Gary Galbreath, and their Cambodian colleague Sun Hean on their journeys in Southeast Asia, with hopes of discovering just what this golden bear might be.

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