As “The Animalist”, former Boston Globe reporter Vicki Croke brings us news about the natural world. Vicki and Sy are kindred spirits, so it was a great pleasure to have Vicki visit.

Vicki asked Sy: Do you feel as though you’ve learned, not just about an animal’s natural history, but lessons about life for yourself?

Sy answered: How to be a good creature. How do you be compassionate?… I think that animals teach compassion better than anything else and compassion doesn’t necessarily just mean a little mouse with a sore foot and you try to fix it. It means getting yourself inside the mind and heart of someone else. Seeing someone’s soul, looking for their truth. Animals teach you all of that and that’s how you get compassion and heart.” Watch a video of the interview here.

Chasing Cheetahs: The Race to Save Africa’s Fastest Cats has been chosen as A Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2014. The Junior Library Guild’s honor is unique because it is awarded in advance of the publication date. Chasing Cheetahs will be published this April.

Booklist has chosen The Tapir Scientist as one of its Top Ten Books on Sustainability for Youth: 2014.

How Thinking in Pictures Brought Temple Grandin Success. The fourth, fifth and sixth graders who are part of Wolcott Elementary School’s Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Club have been reading Temple Grandin: How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World. Many of the students wanted to know more about Temple Grandin’s work with animals. Others were interested in how Sy researched and wrote her books.

Sy answered their questions on Vermont Public Radio. You can listen or read a transcript of the short interview here.

Cheetahs are coming. Sy’s newest book in the acclaimed Scientists in the Field series will be published this April. Chasing Cheetahs: The Race to Save Africa’s Fastest Cat features Nic Bishop’s award-winning photography. Read about the making of Chasing Cheetahs here.

Temple Grandin has won a 2014 Norman A. Sugarman Children’s Biography Award Honor. The Sugarman Award is given biennially by the Cleveland Public Library to honor excellence in the field of biography for children. Endowed by the Joan G. Sugarman family, the Norman A. Sugarman Children’s Biography Award was established in 1998.

Q. What came first, the fascination with and love of nature or the desire to write? When did the two intersect?

A. I loved animals and plants long before I could read or write. I am told that before I was two, I toddled inside the hippo pen at the Frankfurt zoo—and the massive hippos were apparently quite welcoming and did not (obviously) bite me in half, as they are prone to do to humans in similar circumstances in the wild.

From an interview with Sy in The Penmen Review, Southern New Hampshire University Online Journal for Creative Writers. Read more of the interview here.

Go pig, go! There are now 100,000 copies of The Good Good Pig in paperback, and more than 40,000 copies in hardcover in the U.S. and Canada. And Christopher Hogwood has ventured overseas in Dutch, British, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese editions.

The Tapir Scientist has been chosen as an Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12 for 2014. This list is a cooperative project of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the Children’s Book Council.

The Journal of Children’s Literature Fall 2013 issue has a long interview with Sy Montgomery and the photographer Nic Bishop. Working together in the field they have created seven acclaimed children’s books. They have followed scientists in the field as they study snakes (18,000 in one big pit!), tarantulas, tree kangaroos (who knew that kangaroos climbed trees?), snow leopards, kakapos (“the world’s strangest parrot”), tapirs and cheetahs (forthcoming).

What’s next? Octopuses. But Sy does listen to her readers: “I have piles of great letters from kids. One child urged me to write about eels to show they don’t just want to electrocute people. I thought that was great.”

Thinking Deep. Sy will be the first of a dozen speakers at the day-long TEDx AmoskeagMillyard 2013. The day’s theme is “Mindset.” Sy’s talk is titled: “Thinking Deep: Octopus Mind, Eel Dreams and the Consciousness of the Other 99%.” Watch the TEDx talks streamed live, starting at 9 am here.

National Book Month 2013. The New York Public Library has created this guide to the Best Children’s Books of 2013. And who’s that we see waiting for readers, age 12 to 14, but our favorite tapir. This is a clever, inviting map that directs young readers to the next book.

A short interview with Sy about her work with the octopus scientists on Moorea (near Tahiti). “You put on your wetsuit, go down with an underwater dive slate, and set about administering a personality test to octopus,” she said. “So you float there and take notes like a psychologist on whether this particular octopus to advances or retreats, changes color or reaches out, and so on.” That’s Sy at work underwater. Click here to read more.

Just published: 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.

The Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards has chosen Temple Grandin as an Honor Book for older children.

The Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards are given annually to the children’s books published the preceding year that effectively promote the cause of peace, social justice, world community, and the equality of the sexes and all races as well as meeting conventional standards for excellence. The awards have been presented annually since 1953 by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Jane Addams Peace Association.

A Snake Cake — as well as a fabulous banner, good questions and student performances — greeted Sy at her presentation April 18 at Cutler School in Swanzey, NH

Fourth and fifth graders at Chamberlain School in South Burlington, Vermont showered Sy with their great artwork and letters after they talked by Skype. Some students had suggestions for subsequent books. Taken under consideration!

Consider a Skype session: Sy is dramatically limiting her appearances over the next 9 to 12 months as she concentrates on researching and writing her book on octopus. But happily, there’s Skype. Readers can visit with Sy in her office, meet her border collie and watch as Sy shares some of her treasures, including the shed exoskeleton of a tarantula and the beak of an octopus. Email Sy for details: sy@authorwire.com

Sy’s newest book for kids, Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo, sold out at its debut March 1 in New York at the Barnes and Noble on 86th Street. With video of Snowball dancing and talks by Sy, illustrator Judith Oksner and Irena Schulz, the founder of Snowball’s bird rescue, Bird Lovers Only, the New York event drew more than 100 people, including kids from three schools.

The dancing cockatoo is a charmer, but at Abby Emerson’s 5th Graders at La Cima Charter School in Brooklyn they love The Tarantula Scientist.

New book. All my proceeds go to benefit Bird Lovers Only.

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.

How to get the book?

• Order through Birdloversonly.org (all these copies are signed by Sy and Judith!)
• Order through University Press of New England at www.upne.com/0872331563.html
• Ask for it at your local independent bookstore (the ISBN is 978-087233-156-3)