“Equal parts poet and scientist.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Part Indiana Jones part and Emily Dickinson.”
—The Boston Globe

“Sy Montgomery has insight into the Others that every nature writer on this continent envies. I am no exception. Clear, emotionally telling and always right to the point, her accounts of the other forms of life are without peer.”
—Farley Mowat, author of /Never Cry Wolf

To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica. She has worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. She has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon.

But her latest, nationally-bestselling book for adult readers is a love story-a true one-about home, about family, and particularly, about a pig.

The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood is a memoir of 14 years of comfort and joy shared with a 750-pound Buddha Master, who happened to have a flexible nose disk and a curly tail. Since his adoption as a piglet deemed too small and sickly to live, Christopher’s is a runt-to-riches story: in his new home, Christopher gains not weight, fans and fame. Local children flock to brush and wash him at “Pig Spa”; he commands a vast slops empire; he even gets write-in-votes in local elections. “It took a village to keep Christopher fed and entertained, and Montgomery’s description of Christopher’s amazing adventures and celebrity status are hilarious, enchanting, and deeply affecting,” writes Donna Seaman for American Library Association’s Booklist advance review. The book made summer reading lists across the country and was featured in People magazine, O magazine, and on Good Morning America. It was named one of the top books of 2006 by The Christian Science Monitor, the Houston Chronicle and the American Library Association’s Booklist, among others. It is available in paperback as well as translations in Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian and Mandarin Chinese.

Montgomery’s newest children’s book, Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia, was researched in the Altai Mountains of the Great Gobi. Upon release this August, the book joins the award-winning “Scientists in the Field” Series that she pioneered with photographer Nic Bishop for Houghton Mifflin, for kids in grades 4-8.

Montgomery writes for adults and children, for print and broadcast, in America and overseas in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible at what she considers a critical turning point in human history. “We are on the cusp of either destroying this sweet, green Earth-or revolutionizing the way we understand the rest of animate creation,” she says. “It’s an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures. It’s a great time to be alive.”

Montgomery has written and developed two television documentaries for National Geographic, one featuring her work with man-eating tigers in Sundbarbans Tiger Reserve in India. She is a contributor to the national environmental radio show “Living on Earth” (you can hear them on www.loe.org). Montgomery also lectures widely on conservation topics at zoos, museums, universities and schools, for both adults and children. Her speaking agent is The Lavin Agency (www.thelavinagency.com).

Writing about science, natural history and conservation for children has become an increasingly important priority. In spring 2010, Montgomery and Bishop contribute another volume to the Scientists in the Field series of books, which they founded for Houghton Mifflin. Researched on remote Codfish Island off New Zealand’s South Island, Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World’s Strangest Parrot will be published in May, the story of one of the most heroic efforts in history to save an endangered bird.

She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Rainforest Conservation Fund, an Advisor to the Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation at Antioch/New England Institute, and on the Advisory Board of the New England conservation group, RESTORE! The North Woods. In 2003 she was honored with the Edward Hyde Cox Medal for work which “advances the well-being of animals and acknowledges the power and beauty of the relationship that humans share with them” by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In October at its annual meeting, she will receive the nonfiction award from New England Independent Booksellers Association, a lifetime achievement award.

Montgomery is a 1979 graduate of Syracuse University, a triple major with dual degrees in Magazine Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and in French Language and Literature and in Psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees, conferred at the commencement ceremonies at Keene State College in Keene, N.H. in May, 2004.

In press now are two books on birds. Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World’s Strangest Parrot will be published in April. A new book for adults on birds — featuring baby hummingbirds, dancing and talking parrots, pigeons, Montgomery’s famous chickens (“The Ladies”) and her encounters with a 150-pound flightless dino-bird from Down Under (among others). It will be published by Free Press in early June.