The John Burroughs Association has awarded the 2018 Riverby Award to Amazon Adventure. “The Riverby Award recognizes exceptional nonfiction natural history books for young readers. The books selected present perceptive and artistic accounts of direct experiences in nature and invite young readers to explore the natural world for themselves.” Amazon Adventure is one of five books honored with the Riverby Award in 2018.

Sy enjoyed talking about Tamed & Untamed on the Mongabay podcast. Mongabay brings its listeners “news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.” You can hear Sy here or find Mongabay on Spotify.

Octo keeps swimming. The Soul of an Octopus is number 3 on the list of nonfiction bestsellers in the Bay Area.

We’re late on this. Last year the Berlin Medical History Museum presented an exhibit called: The Soul is an Octopus: Ancient Ideas of Life and the Body.

The exhibit examined the “ancient conceptions of the soul and its interaction with the human body. In Graeco-Roman thought the soul was not only the basis of an individual person’s thinking, feeling or moral character. It was also a biological principle that gave life and structure to the body…

The exhibit asked “three important questions that were central to classical philosophers and physicians alike:

• What is the ruling part of the soul?
• Where does it reside?
• How does it communicate with the body?

“In short what did it mean “to be ‘ensouled’ in ancient times.”

Coming in February to bookstores in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novogorod, Omsk, Kazan, and elsewhere, the Russian edition of The Soul of an Octopus.

“Bearing Arms: The Amazing World of the Octopus.” Sy enjoyed talking about octopuses on the NPR show 1A. She was on with Danna Staaf, author of Squid Empire, and Kelley Voss, a doctoral student at the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Mehta Lab in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. (1A is produced by WAMU 88.5 and is distributed by NPR.) Listen here.

Octo on the list. The end of the year is the time for reading lists. Former Congressman Steve Israel (D-N.Y. 2001 to 2017) asked his old colleagues in the House to tell him about books that they read this year for “insight, knowledge and, yes, escape.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) enjoyed reading The Soul of an Octopus because it’s “a fun and fascinating diversion from the political stuff I usually read. It’s about a biologist’s relationship and attachment to octopuses. Amazing animals, octopuses posses powers of thinking and feeling far beyond anything I knew.”

Check out Freya on the move. “Freya,” the octopus you can now see at the New England Aquarium “seems to have strong opinions about some things. For example, she’ll grab the magnetic glass cleaner from her side of the glass when she decides it is not time to clean the glass. Her personality definitely shines through the glass,” say the folks at the aquarium. They’d love it if you’d come “meet this spunky new addition to the Olympic Coast exhibit.”

When Sy was in New York recently talking at the 92nd St. Y with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Barbra J. King, she was treated to a tour of The Butterfly Conservatory at the Museum of Natural History. Reader and museum volunteer Sandya Satia was a gracious guide. In the photo Sy enjoys a visit from a Blue Morpho and a Magnificent Owl.

Tamed and Untamed is the number one bestselling paperback at the Concord Bookshop in Concord, Massachusetts.

Sy was delighted to be on Brendan O’Meara’s Creative Nonfiction podcast. She told Brendan: “I have never picked the safe option and I have never regretted choosing what I’ve chosen ever.” After the show Brendan said, “Frankly, I came away from this conversation feeling good, just good, and the people who make you feel that way are the people you want to surround yourself with. I know I ended that sentence with a preposition, but whatever.”

Rendezvous mit einem Oktopus is popular in Germany. The German translation has just gone back for its fifth printing.

Spanish Octo on the way. Seix Barral, an imprint of Planeta, will be bringing a translation of The Soul of an Octopus to Spain.

The Good Good Pig paperback edition is now in its 17th printing.

Tamed and Untamed has crossed the pond. The Daily Mail in London has named Tamed and Untamed as one of the Best Reads of the Year, calling it “a charming collection of short, sometimes funny and occasionally eccentric essays.”

Un Animal Fantastique. The cover for French edition of The Soul of an Octopus is here. The “livre fantastique” will be published in April 2018.

Love of spiders. The fourth graders in Megan Popp’s and Christine Wittig’s class at PS/MS 200 in Flushing, Queens enjoyed The Tarantula Scientist. The class wrote Sy beautiful letters, and they are now pen pals with Sy. One student, Rochelle, wrote: “I really love your book and before I read it I hated spiders…Sam Marshall was a big help and taught me to learn about how important spiders are.”

Vulture Days. This is the view from the condor pen on a recent morning at the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in California. Sy is researching a new book about the critically endangered California Condor. Estelle Sandhaus took this photo through binoculars. Sandhaus is the Director of Conservation and Research at the Santa Barbara Zoo. Sy is also working with photographer Tia Strombeck as they create a new entry in Scientists in the Field series.

And here Sy is holding Condor 771, a “sub-adult” female, to be exact. She’s getting her health and telemetry check, as does every precious California alive on Earth, thanks to cooperation between the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Santa Barbara Zoo, and others.

Sy had a great visit with the students at the Moharimet School in Madbury, New Hampshire. Mrs. Schmitt’s third grade class sent Sy home with a pile of drawings of the animals they love. A few of them are here.

Tamed and Untamed is a bestseller. For the week ending October 29, 2017, Tamed and Untamed is number 6 on the trade paperback nonfiction list of the New England Independent Booksellers Association’s IndieBound Bestsellers.

Listen to Sy and Liz talk critters on KGNU, an independent community radio station in the Boulder-Denver metro area.

The New Statesman magazine asks: “Have we underestimated the octopus? Far from a childhood memory from a Disney film, or something tasty on your plate in a seafood restaurant, the wriggling cephalopod is suddenly in the news. One might be forgiven for thinking some mollusc mastermind was running a very successful PR campaign. But it’s not as if the animals have just started doing all this stuff – they’ve been around for 300 million years. It’s just that we’ve taken a long time to realise it.” Read more here.

Artist Hannah Ellingwood recently went to the New England Aquarium with Sy (the writer) to meet Sy the Octopus. Hannah says: “Putting my hand into the water and having Sy reach out to explore me with her suckers was such an experience and I was excited to create my first octopus cut out inspired by her! Much thanks to Sy Montgomery for introducing me to Sy the octo!” See more of Hannah’s cut-out art on Instagram.

Liz and Sy thank the Norwich Bookstore for having them come by to read. The turn-out far exceeded the small store, so everyone gathered in a nearby church.

Tiny Fish, Big Honor. Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish are Saving the World’s Largest Rainforest is a Junior Library Guild Selection for Fall 2017.

Liz and Sy talk about their friendship in The Valley News: “She was what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Montgomery said this week, during a telephone conversation from her farm in Hancock, N.H. “From the first time we met, the thing that we shared was an understanding that animals can think and feel and know. That was — and something not everyone could agree upon — that all animals were a ‘who,’ not a ‘that.’ A ‘he’ or a ‘she,’ not an ‘it.’ ”

Sy talks about what most people don’t know about animal intelligence for Care2, “the world’s largest social network for good… with over 40 million standing together, starting petitions and sharing stories that inspire action.” And Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Sy talk about “anthrophobia” and our shared lives with animals on NHPR’s Word of Mouth.

The Soul of a Naturalist. “Montgomery has brought us closer to the consciousnesses of the animals with whom we share our world,” says literary magazine Tin House. “The result is a body of writing that is as rigorous in its thinking as it is enchanting, and that our planet in environmental crisis is lucky to have. It was an honor to speak with one of our greatest naturalists—and one who takes dance lessons with her dog, to boot.” Sy had a lovely time talking with associate editor Emma Komlos-Hrobsky. Read the Tin House interview.

Sy and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas talked with Steve Curwood, the host of Living on Earth about their new book, Tamed & Untamed. As Sy told Steve: “What we’re saying in this book and every single essay, whether it’s about hyraxes – these little groundhog-sized relatives of elephants who live in Africa – or an octopus at the New England Aquarium or the dog at your feet, these lives are so fascinating, so intricate, so mysterious, so thrilling, and so worthy of our respect and affection and awe.” Listen to the interview.

Octopus is the Solution. The New York Times Acrostic Solution for Sunday, October 1, 2017 was based on this: “(SY) MONTGOMERY, (THE) SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS — Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can… stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange.”

Three scientists starring in three of Sy’s Scientists in the Field titles have been nominated for the Indianapolis Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in conservation. Scott Dowd, featured in Sy’s latest kids book, Amazon Adventure; Lisa Dabek, star of Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, and Laurie Marker, subject of Chasing Cheetahs, all made the cut to be considered for the prize honoring the most successful conservationist in the world. Congratulations to these wonderful friends on this recognition for their crucial work saving animals.

Rendezvous mit einem Oktopus. The Soul of an Octopus is a bestseller in Germany. It debuted this week at #12 on the Spiegel bestseller list. Extrem schlau, as the book’s subtitle says, Extremely smart.

Octo Returns. The Soul of the Octopus has bobbed up at number 9 on The Boston Globe’s nonfiction paperback best seller list, leaving us to ask: Is this good for the Sox?

Jannine Pizarro and daughters Madeline, 5 and Natalie, 4 brought their octo-paintings to Sy’s talk and signing at Stoddard, NH’s Town Hall on August 4. Their treasured octo-portraits now adorn the walls at Sy’s home.

Sy has been out and about talking about her new book for young adults, Amazon Adventure. You can hear her in this short interview on WGBH, along with the subject of the book, Scott Dowd, Senior Aquarist at the New England Aquarium. For more than 20 years, Dowd and his colleagues having been working with the native people to save many of the fish that make their way to North America’s home aquariums. Amazon Adventure tells the surprising journey of these small fish.

While at the aquarium, OctoNation caught up with Sy. She fields a few questions in this short video. OctoNation is the largest Octopus Fan Club with 83,900 followers on Instagram and 32,500 followers on Facebook. That’s one of their t-shirts below.

Sy also spoke to the BBC for the show, Natural Histories: Octopus. This “programme” (as our English friends spell it) will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 15 August at 11am, and repeated at 9pm the following Monday. It’ll be kept on the BBC iplayer and be available to download until September 15.

The Octopus and the Professor. The summer reading list of former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is, as you’d imagine, long on weighty political books and studies of inequality, but he’s been immersed in a “fascinating book by a fellow named Sy Montgomery.”

“I, never, personally have been terribly interested in octopuses,” Reich admits, “but this is an absolutely fascinating, interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking, piece of work.” To which we can only add that if you haven’t seen Reich’s documentary Inequality for All, you’re missing the best concise explanation of this problem, and the best use of graphics to explain statistics. Inequality for All is as swiftly told as a thriller or a murder mystery.

As part of the celebration of Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday, Sy was honored to receive the Henry David Thoreau Prize from PEN New England, a chapter of PEN America. The Thoreau Prize is awarded annually to “a writer demonstrating literary excellence in nature writing.” Previous winners include Gretel Ehrlich, E. O. Wilson, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen, Diane Ackerman, and Linda Hogan.

Bella Polpo. Ricca, a publisher in Rome, has just bought the rights to publish The Soul of an Octopus (or Polpo) in Italy. And a publisher has just signed up to translate Journey of the Pink Dolphins into Chinese.

The Andrew Luck Book Club. Sy enjoyed talking with Andrew Luck, the Indianapolis Colts quarterback, about The Soul of an Octopus. You can hear Andrew and Sy discuss play-action passes, scrambling on third-and-long, and protecting the pocket. Actually, no. It’s all octos and Mr. QB asks good questions.

Brain Pickings. The nimble Maria Popova has gained a large following for her discussions of fascinating thinkers, artists, and writers. Recently writing about the “central mystery of consciousness,” Popova referred to The Soul of an Octopus, which she also wrote about in earlier post.

The wonders of inner lives. Coco and her mom, Jessica, are reading The Soul of an Octopus. Coco is 11 years old. She has autism and Rett Syndrome. She doesn’t speak, and until two years ago everyone thought she was nonverbal, says Jessica. But then Jessica discovered a way for Coco to communicate by pointing at big capital letters on a clear sheet. Coco goes letter-by-letter until she has completed her thought. “Now we know she is highly verbal and has been misunderstood her whole life (and is still so misunderstood by many),” says Jessica.

They are having a good time reading Sy’s book. “She is really identifying with these octopuses!” says Jessica. Here are Coco’s thoughts about three different parts of the book:

“Octopuses are awesome. Octopuses are clearly more intelligent than they look. Autistic people are also more intelligent than they look. Besides autistics there are probably many other creatures who are misjudged because they look or move differently than what humans consider to be normal. Seeing the truth about someone when it contradicts what you always thought might be scary for some. Leaving behind long held assumptions can be difficult because doing so can feel antithetical to our core beliefs.

“Dying octopuses can become violent. People can easily misunderstand octopus behavior . They are a lot like humans yet so alien to us too. Can we presume to understand these creatures? Getting to know them is a first step. Having been misunderstood my whole life has made me particularly sensitive to this.

“Do animals feel what we feel? Do they attain wisdom through life experiences like humans? Scientists have looked for evidence except they are assuming that behaviors are the only indicators of the internal workings of the creatures they are studying. I am a creature whose behaviors are closely monitored. Bcbas [Board Certified Behavior Analysts] track and analyze my behaviors. So do they know my mind? Dare I say certainly not. I behave in ways that can be confusing. I scream sometimes when nothing is wrong. I pull hair when I want kids to like me. Once my cat came up for a pet and I picked her up by the tail. Never would I want to hurt her. I love her. My hare brained compulsions do not add up to the sum total of my intellect. Speaking of hares, who is to say that they do not have brilliant brains? It’s time we humans stopped making assumptions that are unfair and unfounded. Calling a bunch of ignorant observations data does not make it scientific fact. There are wonders and inner lives in all animals and people.”

Thank you Coco and Jessica. Sy loved hearing from you.

The most wonderful things just show up in Sy’s mail. These games were created by a reader in Poland, graphic designer Magdalena Stadnik. She had read the Polish translation of Journey of the Pink Dolphins. “I love it,” she wrote. “The book is un-put-downable magic.” The game Creatures include beautiful and endangered animals like the hirola, the gharial and the indri. Another game, Spectres, highlights animals who recently went extinct. Each species is represented in beautiful detail on black and white cardboard cards. To play, you put all the cards showing the animals face down next to one another. Turn over any two; if they’re identical, collect them and reveal another two. If different, put them back where you found them, and let another player take a turn. Your aim, like Noah’s, is to collect matching pairs. The player with the most matching pairs wins.

Dear Match Book: What Books Best Capture Science and Nature? Match Book is a New York Times dating service for readers looking for a good book. (You know the plot: Book club seeks a good book, meets a good book thanks to the Times, and the rest is a page-turning happily ever after.) One science book that Match Book suggests? The Soul of an Octopus.

The Soul of an Octopus is #4 on the Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller list of nonfiction paperbacks for May 28.

What do NFL Quarterbacks do in the off season? Andrew Luck is reading The Soul of an Octopus. Top that Tom Brady.

Bank Street College of Education has chosen The Great White Shark Scientist as one of the Best Children’s Books of 2017.

New translations on the way. ART Grup Editorial has signed up to publish The Soul of an Octopus in Romania. And a Spanish publisher will bring The Spell of a Tiger to that country.

Sy spoke at the Boston March for Science. She was speaking to kids and teens, to future scientists:

I want to tell you about a very special place I visited a few years ago.

It was on New Guinea—a place that has been called a Stone Age Island. Located north of Australia, it’s been known as “a lost world,” “a land that time forgot”. New Guinea was mostly unexplored by outsiders till the middle of the 20th century, for a number of excellent reasons: Tangled jungles. Steep mountains. Erupting volcanoes. Aggressive crocodiles. Poisonous snakes. Tropical diseases. Also, cannibalism and headhunting.

But because of New Guinea’s long isolation, there are animals who live here that even Dr. Suess couldn’t invent. Birds who grow tall as a grown-up, with helmets of bone capping bright blue heads. Spine-covered, worm-eating mammals who lay eggs. And kangaroos who live in trees. Real kangaroos, with pouches, who climb into towering, moss-covered trees, and then jump out of them—and bounce away!

That’s why I came—for the tree kangaroos. Working on one of my books for young readers, I joined a team of researchers trying to do what others had told them was impossible. We wanted to capture and radio collar a particular kind of tree kangaroo—the Matchie’s tree kangaroo. It’s about the size of a big cat, with orange and yellow fur and a sweet pink nose. It spends most of its time 80 feet high in the trees. It eats orchids.

Nobody had done this before.

To get to the animals we had to hike along some of the toughest trails I’ve ever done. For three days, we struggled up steep slopes slippery with sucking mud. We were up so high—10,000 feet—we were literally in the clouds. The air was thin and hard to breathe. The second day of hiking, I quietly wondered whether I was having a nine-hour heart attack.

Leading our group was my friend, Dr. Lisa Dabek. And it’s her story I want to share with you today, because this scientist is as amazing as the Matchie’s tree kangaroos she studies.Holly with carrot

Lisa always loved animals, but as a kid growing up, she couldn’t even have a dog. She had to give away her beloved cat, Twinkles, when she was 11. Why? Because she had terrible allergies, and asthma so bad she would wake in the night gasping. She couldn’t play sports. She loved nature but she lived in New York City. She wanted to be a wildlife biologist. So what could she do?

Despite her asthma, Lisa found ways to study animals as a child. She studied fish at the New York Aquarium. Fish didn’t give her asthma. Neither did the seals. At her house, on her asphalt roof of her parents’ apartment, she studied ants. Lisa let nothing get in her way.

Lisa met her first tree kangaroo at a zoo. She knew right away they were special. When she learned they were endangered, she vowed to anything she could to help them—and that meant she had to learn how they lived in the wild.

She started traveling to New Guinea to meet them. The mountain hikes were really hard! She carried an inhaler to help her breathe. She took special pills to open her airways. But she discovered that America’s polluted air made her asthma worse. The clean air of New Guinea made it better!

Breathing, though, was only one of her problems. The second was finding the tree kangaroos. She spent weeks looking for them. The tree kangaroos were hiding because people hunted and ate them. After five weeks in the field, Lisa saw only two tree kangaroos.

And then she didn’t see another for seven years.

But Lisa kept trying. Finally she found a group who hadn’t been hunted and weren’t afraid. But up in the trees they were still hard to see. She needed to outfit them with radio collars—but everyone told her it would be impossible. People said the telemetry you need to detect the signal from the radio collars wouldn’t work in the cloud forest. There were too many trees. They’d interfere with the signal. Folks told her not to even try.

I can see how people might get discouraged trying to do something like this. At the end of every day, our little group was exhausted, bruised from falling, and wet and muddy. Once we ran out of food and had to eat ferns. Other things went wrong. Equipment didn’t work in the rain. Our satellite phone failed. We worried about the stinging nettles, and also about the leeches—they sometimes get in your eye.

But all our discomfort vanished the minute we saw our first wild Matchie’s tree kangaroo. He was even more adorable than we imagined. His colors were crazy-brilliant. His nose was the cutest, softest pink. He looked like a big stuffed animal. And his fur was as soft as a cloud.

How do I know? Because I touched it—because we captured, radio collared and tracked FOUR tree kangaroos on that trip. And today, Lisa has data on many dozens of tree kangaroos, data that is helping to save this species and the cloud forest upon which these and so many other wonderful animals—and the wise, local people—depend.

So why am I telling you about New Guinea as we march together here half a world away in Boston?

Because this story reminds us the power of what science can do. Science can change the world.

And this story also shows us what science demands of us.

Science demands we share our data. But today, much data–like on climate change–is being repressed; for political gain, many of our leaders openly deny the facts–supported by billions of data points from thousands of scientists— showing beyond a doubt that our climate is changing due to man-made pollutants. That’s bad news for tree kangaroos—and for whales and reindeer and eagles and coral reefs.

Science can show us the solutions. But science also demands determination. And we all need to muster that determination right now—to not only gather data, but get it out there—to heal the world.

Doing science isn’t always easy. But we’re not going to quit. Like Lisa, we’re not going to back down. We’re going to keep collecting and sharing and discussing the data— we’re going to find the way to save the tree kangaroos and their forests–and our oceans, and our air, and the climate of our beautiful Earth.

Thank you.

---

Girls & Gills. When Loula Thomas turned 6 years old, she had a “Save the Sea” birthday party. “Loula is a shark, octopus and manatee lover,” says her mother Tassia, adding that Sy is “pretty much a hero in our family.” Loula is a member of The Gills Club, which connects girls and women marine scientists. As party favors, Loula gave out copies of Sy’s The Great White Shark Scientist and The Octopus Scientist. And her big sister, Penny, age 10, made a Pin The Dorsal Fin on the Shark game (seen behind Loula).

Sy is a guest blogger for the National Geographic where she asks readers to Consider the Octopus.

Octo in La La Land. The Soul of an Octopus is number 10 on the Los Angeles Times paperback nonfiction list.

This drawing was a present from the Fishes Staff at The Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center. The Senior Aquarist, the charming Evan Culbertson, introduced Sy at the evening All Henrico Reads program. (You old Muscle Car enthusiasts will note that the Octo is at the wheel of a GPO, which is strikingly like a 1969 Pontiac GTO.)

The Great White Shark Scientists has won the Riverby Award from the John Burroughs Association. Each year the John Burroughs Association honors authors, illustrators, and publishers of the best published nature writing.

The Riverby Award is given to “excellent natural history books for young readers that contain perceptive and artistic accounts of direct experiences in the world of nature.” This year seven books were honored.