As someone who describes animals as her first teachers and friends, Sy Montgomery is living a life that she could have only dreamed of as a young girl, captivated by the work of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birut Galdikas.
Those three female scientists all affected her life in a tremendous way and showed her the possibilities of connecting with the animal world. It really helped lay the groundwork for what Montgomery has turned into a successful writing career that has taken her around the world to research some of the most fascinating and unknown animals, insects and water critters there are. In fact, one of Montgomery’s first published works was a triple biography of sorts that took her to places like Rwanda, Zaire, Tanzania and Indonesian Borneo to live among the great apes, and walk in the footsteps of her childhood heroes she spent some many hours reading about.
The writing for Montgomery is just the bonus at the end of an amazing journey. She has been cage diving with great white sharks in Mexico, chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and found herself in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba. Add in handling a wild tarantula in French Guiana, swimming with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon and searching the Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi for snow leopards and it’s a life straight out of National Geographic.
“When I saw my first great white shark appear, rather than be nervous, I was flooded with a feeling of relief and joy,” Montgomery said.
After all that time spent observing, interacting and chronicling the day to day habits, unique characteristics and fascinating details of an octopus, tree kangaroos, or her pig, Christopher Hogwood, Montgomery is finally ready to sit down and write – knowing all well the importance of her work to those who read her books.
“These books usually take more than a full year to do the research before I even write a word,” she said.
This week is particularly busy for Montgomery, as is with any week when she has a new book hot off the press. Her latest, “Becoming a Good Creature,” with illustrator Rebecca Green, was released on Tuesday. It’s a picture book adaption of their New York Times national bestselling “How to Be A Good Creature,” where Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 of her animal friends who have profoundly affected her life, combined with the drawings of Green. On Friday, Oct. 9 at 7 p.m., Montgomery will be part of a Zoom event with the Toadstool Bookshop to discuss “Becoming a Good Creature.”
Montgomery began her book career writing for adults, but along the way saw that her work could relate to children.
“If I really wanted to throw my hat in the ring to try and further this goal of changing the world, I had to write for kids and adults,” she said. “And the reason I write for kids and adults is cause I’m trying to restore the connection between people and animals, people and the natural world.”
Montgomery is a firm believer that not all teachers are found in a classroom. They are all around us, some with two legs, others with four and even those that have eight. She has learned so much from her animal friends, starting with her childhood dog Molly, a Scottish Terrier that Montgomery so desperately wanted to be like.
“My dream as a kid was to run away to the woods and have Molly teach me the ways of the wild,” she said.
Those hours spent combing through National Geographic, and reading of those three influential women gave Montgomery the foresight to see anything was possible.
“I always felt if it was doable by a human being, it was doable by me,” she said. “Why should I not think I could do anything?”
While her work has taken her to all corners of the globe, Montgomery always knows she has a home to come back to, which has been hugely important. Growing up with her father, Austin Montgomery, who served as a brigadier general in the Army, she moved around a lot as a child. She was born in Germany, lived on Fort Hamilton in New York and later in Alexandria, Virginia. Her mother, Willa, was a pilot and also worked for the FBI. So she never had a place that she could truly call home, but that all changed once she finally landed in Hancock.
“I wanted a home my whole life,” Montgomery said.
She hated packing up and going to a new place to live, but the one constant was that passion for animals and what they could teach her. And it was easy to make new friends with animals in a new place.
“I was an animal person first,” she said. “I’ve always loved animals and connected with animals. They were my first teachers and my first friends.”
There was also that love for the written word. She took a journalism class in high school and got the advice to pursue a degree in the field and off she went to Syracuse University, where she eventually landed a staff position on the Daily Orange. She was hired by her future husband, Howard Mansfield, who Montgomery describes as “just the best writer I’ve ever known” and is an accomplished book writer himself. She worked for a few newspapers right out of school and then landed a job as a science writer at the Courier News in New Jersey, which had more scientists and engineers per capita than any other state.
“The best thing you can do as a writer is to know how to report the facts,” she said.
It was a good job where she made what she thought was good money, but after five years it was clear she needed a little break. Her father offered to buy her a ticket to Australia, a place Montgomery had always wanted to visit, but she had no idea where she would go and what she would do.
After a little research, she found Earthwatch, which connects regular people to volunteer positions on projects with scientists around the world. She volunteered for Drought Refugia in South Australia, working with Dr. Pamela Parker, studying the habitat of the rare and endangered southern hairy nosed wombat.
“They were even more rare and more cool than the common wombat,” Montgomery said.
The experience left a lasting impression and not long after returning to her job in New Jersey, she decided to take Parker up on an offer to come back. Montgomery quit her job, bought a tent and decided to move to the Outback for six months to study emus.
“Everyone thought I was a nut job,” Montgomery joked. “But it was the most wonderful experience.”
She had found that passion and knew it was a time in her life that she had to try. It meant leaving Mansfield for six months, but it all worked out as they are still happily married.
For those six months, she simply followed a trio of emus, who Montgomery said were likely adult siblings. There were no huge scientific breakthroughs, but as Montgomery put it “no one knew what they did all day.”
She gained their trust, wearing a red handkerchief as a daily identifier, and learned how curious and intelligent these birds were – and found they had quite the sense of humor.
“As you’re observing animals, you use your senses to answer the who, what, where, when and why,” she said
She was hooked on the research and had a ton of ideas that she pitched to various publications, and before she knew it, she was stopping in New Zealand to write a story about the Giant Weta, the world’s heaviest insect, for International Wildlife Magazine.
“Every animal, like every person, is an individual,” she said. “Their lives are just as valuable.”
She freelanced as she got her book writing career off the ground, but it was clear to that Montgomery she had found the career that would bring her the greatest job – bringing the animal and human world together.
“It’s been a wild ride and it’s still going on,” she said.
She helped found the Scientists in the Field series, which Montgomery said “shows scientists as more than people running around in white lab coats with beakers in hand.”
“It really changed the course of non-fiction for kids,” she said.
Her adventures have been both exhilarating and chaotic. She got a mosquito-borne disease called dengue fever in Borneo, which can kill you. She was held up by a man with a gun in Africa and was near getting kidnapped twice in two different countries. There was also the time she got stung way too many times to count by yellowjackets, although that was merely during a walk to pick berries and not researching a book.
But if none of that has stopped her from criss-crossing the globe, nothing will stand in the way of her next great adventure – except for possibly a global pandemic that forced her to cancel a trip earlier this year to the Galápagos Islands to study the giant manta ray. She is currently working with New Ipswich artist Matt Patterson on two books about turtles and has another about hummingbirds coming out next year.
While Montgomery has plenty of human friends, she has a special place in her heart for all of the others that she’s met along the way, including her dog Thurber.
“I feel bad for people who don’t have friends of other species,” she said. “It just enlarges your world.”
And there are many friends she has yet to meet, as she still plans to go on a trip to see the giant manta rays and has never seen a wild polar bear or swam with whales.
But when Montgomery gets a chance to sit back and reflect on where her life has taken her, it’s hard not to feel like she’s living the perfect life and career.
“I’ve come to realize I have everything I ever wanted and more,” she said. “I’m married to the greatest guy in the world and my career is so much fun.”