Welcome to episode seventy one of Get Out Alive. What is typically a bi
weekly podcast about animal tax but today we have a very special episode with an
even more special guest. I'm your host, Ashley, and this may be
my favorite episode yet because I had the honor of sitting down with Si Montgomery,
who has written many books such as Soul of an Octopus, How to
Be a Good Creature, Spell the Tiger, and most recently of Time in
Turtles, Mending the World's Shell by Shattered Shell. If you've been listening to
this podcast for a while, you may remember our sixty fourth episode in which
we discussed size book about man eating tigers and the Shunderbuns. And although I
did ask her some questions about her time there and what it was like looking
for tigers that actively hunt people, we talk about so much more, especially
about turtles, which is a type of animal we do not often get to
talk about on this podcast because they aren't out there attacking people. But before
we get into the interview, I just want to note a few things.
So first of all, before we started recording, I was talking to say
about one of her books that I loved, called The Hawk's Way, which
is about her time practicing falconry here in New Hampshire. So we touch on
that a little bit during the interview. So that's what that's about. Just
a note on that. And then there's also a few times near the beginning
that you'll hear what sounds like an email notification, So I apologize in advance.
I try to cut them out where I could, but it only happens
a handful of times. But that is all I had. So let's get
into my interview with Si Montgomery. My name is Si Montgomery. I go
by she her. I'm an author of over thirty five I think it's up
to thirty six, maybe thirty seven books, and I get described as a
writer adventurer. I would say those are very appt titles. I've seen you
described as a naturalist as well, and I think that's also extremely fitting.
Well, thank you. I wear lots of hats. Yeah, So what
was your path to becoming an author, Like, did you always want to
do that or did it just like kind of you fell into it. Well,
when I was little, and I'm talking about before I could even read,
I wanted to work with animals. Animals were always my people. I
never identified as a little girl, and in fact, as soon as I
could speak, I informed my parents that I was actually a horse. My
mother was horrified and took me to the pediatrician. I almost said veterinarian.
Took me to the pediatricure and he said, don't worry, She'll grow out
of it, and I did when I realized actually I was a dog.
So my big problem growing up was everyone was so eager to teach me to
be a little girl, and I had no interest in this. And finally,
when I was like six, my parents brought home a Scottish terrier puppy
named Molly, and even though she was younger than me, she matured faster
than I did. And I could see that, and I apprenticed myself to
her. I had found my older sister slash mentor slash Muse, and my
dream was to live in the woods in a hollow tree and have her teach
me all the secrets of the animals. And although Molly has gone now,
I keep her picture on my desk and I'm pretty much living that dream of
apprenticing myself to all these different animals who have been so generous in showing me
their secrets. But as far as writing, I thought I would be a
veterinarian until I began to read. My father began sharing with me articles in
the New York Times when I was little that were about animals. This is
just when I'm starting to read, and he helped me read them. Well,
what were all the stories about in the New York Times in the nineteen
sixty when I was learning to read. They were all about animals going extinct.
They were being polluted out of their environments. They were being crowded out
of their world by our huge numbers. They were being overhunted. It was
entirely our fault. And it was then, as a small child, that
I realized that possibly as a writer, I might be able to do even
more good for my animal friends. And I could be if I became a
veterinarian. So that is what I did. Yeah, you know, I
had the same experience growing up, not where I thought that I was like
an animal, but I definitely identified more with animals than people per se.
But I feel like when you say, when you tell someone as a kid
that you love animals, it's often okay, cool, We're going to put
you in this veterinarian box and there's no other options for you. You know,
I kind of wasn't because you know, I was born in nineteen fifty
eight and actually women didn't even go into veterinary practice very much back then.
But that never bothered me. I heard about, you know, so many
people my age women growing up, looked at the professions of folks working with
animals, and they saw Jack Gusteau like a guy, and they saw you
know, researchers traveling to African South America exploring the jungles, and it was
usually some guy. But I guess because I didn't identify particularly as a human
to start with, the sex of the humans doing the thing I wanted to
do didn't bother me. One bit. Did not apply to me as far
as I was concerned. And I mean, I still think being a veterinarian
is one of the highest and best uses of a human life. But I
guess one of my talents was I like, didn't pay attention to anybody who
tried to put me in a box or told me that I couldn't be what
I wanted to be. Well, your most recent book of Time and Turtles,
Mending the World Shell by Shattered Shell, it's about turtles, their biology,
and what it takes to rehab them, among many other things. So
can you tell us why you chose to write about turtles and why write about
them now? Well, my last really big heart book that took me years
to research and I totally immersed myself in, was called The Soul of an
Octopus and the subtitle was a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness. Well,
for this book, I felt it was time to do another deep dive,
and I thought I would look at what is considered the other deep question
in philosophy other than consciousness, and that is time. And at this point
I had crossed the line into my sixties. And it's then that you start
thinking about time in a different way because you have a bunch of it accrued.
A lot of people feel like your time is running out like sands in
an hourglass. I haven't really felt that, But the turtles have taught me
so much about the nature of time. And little did I know, though,
that I'd be living the stories in this book during the pandemic, when
time for most of us just stopped, but turtle time kept on going,
and they helped me to think through into the mystery of time, and they
were the perfect guides, you know, since, after all, you know,
they're ancient creatures. They rose at the same time as the dinosaurs,
they survived the asteroid impact, they survived the glacial ice ages. They've survived
so much, they know so much, they live so long, they have
excellent, long memories, and they show us that there's nothing wrong with being
old. And I'm kind of proud that I share being old with some of
my favorite individuals who happen to be turtles. One of my closest friends is
a turtle who is probably my age, and many turtles live to one hundred
or more. The oldest known turtle lived two hundred and eighty eight. Wow,
just got better and better with every year. Yeah. I always jokingly
say that time is a social construct and have never felt that so hard than
after reading your book, especially when you talked about how animals process time differently,
which I had never considered, and you pointed out that like turtles process
time or like visually slower than we do. So although we can see a
car, turtles might see it as just a blur and they don't even realize
that it's a car coming at them. And I had never considered maybe that's
why they get run over so often. Yeah, becauseides people being cruel,
obviously, and also they can't. Many turtles can't move extremely fast. Some
can't. Soft shells, finy soft shells can run faster than a ten year
old doing the one hundred yard dash, But most turtles, there's not a
whole lot that they could do, even if they could see the cars.
But they can't. And earlier, as you and I were talking about falconry,
it was when I was researching that book and started taking falconry that I
began to realize the different flicker fusion ratios of different animals. I did not
know until my falconry instructor, Nancy Cowen, told me that while we look
at a hummingbird's wings beating and see a blur, other animals, including hawks,
can process that visual information so differently that they see the hummingbird's individual wing
strokes. But it's on the opposite end of that spectrum where we would expect
and in fact do find turtles. Turtles who are hit on the road probably
never saw the car that hit them. So your book is about more than
just turtles, of course, so you talk about things like traditional Jewish burial
practices, how insects perceived time, like we were just talking about, and
even what it takes to be a transgender person. So were there any tangents
or facts that you really wanted to fit into this book but you couldn't.
Yeah, Actually, there are always are things that end up on the cutting
room floor. There were some stories such as Gosh, one time, Matt
Patterson, the artist and one of the main characters in the book, and
I went out and we tracked box turtles through the woods with radio telemetry with
these wonderful mess too sit scientists, But it didn't like fit in the narrative
of the book, even though it was a wonderful story, and I took
copious notes, and these people who certainly deserve a ton of credit for the
fascinating things that they are doing, that never made it in. There was
a concept I wanted to discuss further also, which is a Jewish mystical concept
that I learned about from my husband, Howard Mansfield, who has written extensively
about time and about repair, and that is called to koon and he wrote
so beautifully about this, I just felt like I couldn't step on on his
words, but this knowledge really helped me as I wrote my book. There's
this concept that in the beginning of the world, light from God spilled as
if from a bucket, and it's our job to pick up the spilled light
and restore it. And in this way, our job is to constantly repair
the broken world. So the idea of repairing our broken world, which seems
like a very good use of a life right now, it goes back hundreds
or thousands of years. People have wanted to do this and recognized the urgency
of repairing the world for a long time. And so we're joining a great
tradition when we make our attempt to mend a world we see as shattered.
Whether we are mending broken turtle shells, whether we're trying to restore the peace
of dark night skies, whether we're trying to bring families or nations or the
globe together, we're all united in this effort to make the world whole and
perfect again. That was so good. It's so hard for me to be
like, Okay, here's another question after that was so beautiful. But my
gosh, well, I guess this ties in. So one of my favorite
parts of the book was when you're part of a team rescuing stranded sea turtles
in the middle of winter, which obviously is part of this whole like mending
the world back together by helping in danger species. So can you tell us
more about that experience and why it was so important? Yeah, Oh,
my gosh, and it was. It was a blest first of all because
it seemed so unlikely. We do not expect here in New England to be
seeing turtles on a beach. We do not expect here in New England to
be seeing turtles in the dead of winter during a snowstorm. And yet this
is exactly what Matt and I were preparing to do on a day in which
all of power was knocked out in our part of New Hampshire, and we
drove down to the cape to join our friends Alexia Bell and Natasha Nowick and
other friends from the Turtle Rescue League to who work with the Autumn Wealthleet,
people who have been rescuing turtles who get cold, stunned and wash up on
the beaches in the winter. So this is increasingly problem for turtles because of
climate change, warming faster than any other body of water in the world.
The Gulf of main. The area around the cape is warming so quickly that
turtles who are swimming out off the cape right now think it's not time to
migrate deeper into the Atlantic until it's too late, until it is too cold
to do so. And because they're reptiles and they can't generate their own body
heat, they start swimming, they run into this cold and they just get
so cold they can't swim anymore and their bodies just start to shut down and
they are washed like driftwood back up on shore during storms. So we were
on the li is a storm coming, He's a storm coming, And once
we heard a storm was coming, we headed out from New Hampshire to join
them. And it's a nighttime activity, at least it was on that day
because of the timing of the storm. So we were out on the beach
in December during a storm at night looking for turtles. It was surreal.
It was a long, long, hard walk. And my hat is really
off to Matt Patterson, who is super strong. He's just turned forty recently.
He was a wrestler. He's got muscles in his arms as big as
my thigh. But it still was quite an effort for him. To haul
this sled full of Kemp's Ridley turtles and heavy seaweed for what turned out to
be more than ten miles over the sand of the cape that night. But
it was so worth it because these five highly endangered turtles who would have definitely
died, definitely, we're going to live. We got them all in time
and they were taken to the New England aquariums Quincy facility where they were rehabbed
and let go. And we're just fine. And to be able to take
a hand at something like that help someone live. They'll live a hundred years,
you know, if fate is kind to them. And to be able
to save someone like that, oh my gosh, what an amazing feeling.
I know, you know, it's one thing to not that I'm saying,
rescuing like a squirrel, for example, isn't a noble thing to do.
But to rescue a species were like, yeah, for one hundred years they
could be reproducing and making more and more of those endangered turtles like that is
such a huge deal. They're right, you are. And turtles even though
we think we think we know turtles and we see turtles everywhere, and you
go by the pond, and there's a whole bunch of them in the summer
piled up on a log. Turtles as a group, which encompasses over three
hundred and fifty species, is the most endangered terrestrial vertebrate on our planet.
So when you save one, you're saving generations of an endangered species, as
well as saving that individual's wild and precious and hopefully long life. So to
pivot from turtles for a bit. So, we recently did an episode on
this podcast on tigers and the Sooner Bonds, and we discussed your book Spelled
the Tiger the Man Eaters of the Sooner Bonds, and I have ever since
reading that book been dying to know, like, what was it like purposely
seeking out tigers known to eat people as a person. Well, first of
all, I had to convince my husband that I would be just fine because
they were man eaters, and in fact, they mostly do eat men.
The women stay home where they can be eating my crocodiles, so that calmed
him down a little bit. But I discovered that most of the time it's
not the tigers coming into the village to snack on the people, it's the
people going into a tiger reserve where it is illegal for them to go.
Who are up to mischief end up getting eaten by tigers. So although I
did go into the tiger reserve, I did so with proper permissions, and
frankly, I was just so mesmerized by the idea of seeing these swimming tigers
who swim out after your boat and get on board and eat you that I
wasn't frightened at all. What I was frightened of was not being able to
see any tigers. Yeah, that's totally fair. So, like, can
you explain a little bit what was it like being in that part of the
world that's so unique and has tigers that swim regularly in saltwater. Yeah,
this is the only mangrove swamp in the world that has tigers, and mangrove
swamps feel absolutely magical. You know, the tides are coming in and flushing
through the forests, and the forests are flooded for part of the day,
so the land and the tides, everything's getting resculpted. So you never feel
like you really got a handle on everything. You have this feeling of being
lost almost all the time, being at the mercy of something larger all the
time, and when I felt this most keenly was when I was on the
small handmade wooden boat that was piloted by my friend Jurindro Nath Mrita, who
lived in the village of Jamesport. Made eventually four different expeditions into Shunderman,
and the first one everything that could go wrong went wrong. I was supposed
to go in with a scientist who spoke English and Bengali, he had a
speedboat. He was going to help me with a permitting process. You can't
just go to Shunderman. You have to go through this long permitting process to
get there. All of that fell through. So I ended up out there
with my friend and the photographer Diane Taylor Snow with no translator, no speedboat,
no guide, no scientist, completely at the mercy of whatever this place
and its animals had to throw at me. And I'm so glad that I
met Jurindra and that he took me and Diane on his boat. But what
was horrible was because I thought I was going to have a translator. I
didn't learn Bengali back then. This was in the early nineties. Back then
Bengali was just not taught anywhere there weren't even language tapes, and it took
months for me to mail away and finally get a Bengali English Bengali dictionary,
which had to come from Bangladesh. Actually there were two of them. They
were thick, and they arrive and I'm thrilled, and I throw it open
and there's the English and next to it squiggles. It was all in the
Bengali alphabet, which I couldn't read. So I had learned some phrases in
Bengali, but not enough to conduct interviews. Meanwhile, Jurindra, you know,
he lived out in the boonies in a beautiful handmade house made out of
mud, and he hadn't gone to college to learn English. I mean he
had learned a little English. He learned more English than I Bengali. But
every single word we had in each other's language we had to deploy like a
Swiss army knife. And he kept telling me tiger accident here, and I
would say when, and invariably he would say yesterday. And I thought,
yesterday, yesterday, a tiger ate someone yesterday right here. I didn't realize
until much later that the word yesterday meant any time in the past. Oh
boy, so it was real, real hard. But the thing was,
I came back and came back and came back again. I was committed to
it. I had stayed I think for my first trip. I was actually
in Bangladesh and India. The total trip was about two months long. Wow.
And I came back a second time and a third time, and then
I went back with the National Geographic TV a fourth time. So they knew
that I was really committed to this. And I eventually found these wonderful translators
who I am still in touch with, who live in Calcutta. They were
young college students, Wow. And they were up for going to this tiger
reserve and this fabulous adventure through them, and thanks to the fact that Jurindra
and his family and his village were so welcoming to me, I think I
got a much better and much deeper story than I would have had all of
my previous arrangements with this wonderful scientist worked out. I did end up meeting
the scientist later and interviewing him, but this way I went in humbly as
this foreign woman, full of curiosity, asking for them to graciously favor me
with their knowledge. And these were poor people in a country that operates with
a caste system, and having a scientist connected with the universe, a big,
you know, male, respected scientist may have made them nervous. But
I didn't make them nervous because I was harmless. But they did respect me
for being an author, and I knew the word for author, so I
was able to get that across Lakika Nice in West Bengal and in Bangladesh as
well. People revere writing to the point that I was not allowed by them
to put my notebook on the ground because it was disrespectful to my book.
Oh but these people, you know, they live among tigers all the time,
and almost everyone I met had had a friend or a family member killed
by a tiger because many times people went into the tiger reserve. Sometimes they
were illegally poaching wood, sometimes they were illegally taking fish. The reason it's
a lea is that you need to have some areas that are off limits to
humans so that the fish, you know, can replenish themselves in special nurseries,
and so that the trees have a place to grow and then produce the
seed pods that they drop into the water and distribute it everywhere. There's good
reasons for this, and the people know the reasons. They encode those reasons,
though not in stories of science, but in sacred stories about a tiger
god and a forest goddess. And they shared these stories with me that might
have been dismissed by a university researcher, but I knew that these stories were
deeply true. Maybe not true in terms of time and direct fact, but
true in their heart, in the way that the parables of Jesus are true.
Yeah, I mean, the book is as much of about their culture
as it is about tigers. Like I didn't expect going into it to know
so much about their culture at the end, but it was beautiful and honestly,
as a scientist, made me rethink the things I consider to be true,
because I'm like, well, I mean, who's to say that there
isn't a tiger god? And that's why these strange mystical things seem to happen
there, you know, right, And so many of the things that they
say that we would dismiss a silly superstition are in fact excellent natural history observations,
such as you know, they would say, oh, the tiger can
become invisible. Well, to a Westerner, you think that they turn transparent
like cling wrap or Casper the friendly Ghost. But no, a tiger can
become invisible just by hiding behind a blade of grass because their camouflage renders them
invisible to us. So that is accurate. The tiger can fly through the
air. When you and I think of that, we might picture tinker Bell
flying through the air or a hawk flying through the air. But no,
tigers can leap for quite a distance, and when they do, they're flying
through the air. So my practice was to recognize that these people knew more
about that area than I did, and to listen for truth when they spoke.
And I think this is something that we need to apply when we meet
new people, when we visit other cultures, and when we read our own
sacred texts. I get frustrated as a Christian by folks who feel like,
you know, I'm dismissing the Bible because I don't think that the world was
created in six days. You know, the Bible is not a big book
of answers about science. And when you speak to people who live close to
the earth, when they tell you their truth, they're not doing it in
science speak, but they have a great deal of knowledge, and what they're
telling us is true in a deeper sense, in the way that a parable
or a myth is deeply true. So, speaking of your time over there,
I'm assuming you did get to see tigers, and didn't you have an
experience where a tiger tried to get onto the boat you were on a tire
swam after our boat, but we did not know it at the time.
Oh boy, Yeah, it was even more magical because we didn't see it.
Now, on our first trip with Diane, we did see a tiger
swimming in front of our boat and it was such an unexpected site that my
brain registered it as a rock, a striped rock, orange and black,
but it was a tiger's head. But rocks don't move. But that's what
my brain saw until I realized it's a swimming tiger. The tiger that swam
after our boat, though, that was even more amazing. And how do
we know what happened without seeing it. Well, we were on Jurindra's little
handmade boat and it's low in the water. A tiger could very easily get
on it. We were going down a main part of the river and then
turned up just a little tributary. These tributaries because they you know, the
sea is rising and falling, you got to be really careful because you can
get stuck in these tributaries. And we saw that we were fixing to get
stuck. In fact, we kind of were stuck, so we decided to
turn around. While we were turning around is when the tiger was yards from
our boat, and we knew it because we saw absolutely fresh footprints pug marks
coming out of the water leading into the forest. And we thought, oh
my gosh, we just missed seeing this tiger. Where did he come from?
So we checked the area around us, and we saw no other pug
marks. So we retraced our steps to the larger river, and we saw
where the tiger had seen our boat had come out of the forest. We
saw the footsteps leading out of the forest had swum after our boat had turned
with our boat up the little tributary, and then for some reason decided not
to get on our boat and just walk back into the forest. Oh how
lucky is that? Yeah, it was really great. I have certainly enjoyed
my life since then, and it's been I'm sure your husband was grateful.
Yes, this is true, and I don't think I had any insurance at
that point. Oh boy, would you consider that area of the world the
most dangerous in terms of the wildlife there that you've experienced? Well, you
know what, the only time an animal has ever hurt me was in Borneo
and it was a mosquito. Oh boy, I got danky fever, which
can kill you. It's called breakbone fever. And that's the only time any
animal has ever hurt me. I don't feel in danger around animals at all.
I have been endangered by people. I've twice had a gun held to
my head in my trips. Oh my gosh. People scare the hell out
of me, but animals not so much. Yeah, that's totally fair.
Yeah, that's something we actually talk about in this podcast quite a bit.
Like we have, you know, listeners around the world, and we have
some from Australia who have said, like, oh man, I can't believe
that you guys go hiking where there's bears and coyotes, and I'm like,
not one time have I been worried about a black bear, But I am
always worried about people messing with me in the woods. Yeah, no kidding.
And it's funny that they're in Australia, which all of poisonous snakes and
red fires. Again, you know, I've seen red backspiders. I lived
in Australia for six months in a tent, and they're very shy and you
just don't want to squash them, in which case they're going to defend themselves.
But most animals really aren't gonna buy. They also have a salties,
you know, the crocodile, you know, So it's very funny that they're
afraid of our black bears. I've stuck my head in a den with a
fully awake mother bear and her cubs, my face inches from her face,
and she didn't even square her lips at me. I mean, she didn't
even snort. Are black bears in the East, They're gonna look at you
and run away. I know so many scientists who, in an effort to
get weights on cubs and make sure everybody is all right, have been stuffing
mothers cubs into bags to to weigh them, and the mater bear run away.
Yeah, black bear is really not gonna body. So I would welcome
all our Aussie friends come on over. The woods are fine. What you
gotta worry about it? Here is ticks and if they be a lime disease.
I know. It's so funny. It is really just what you are
used to and what you know, because like when I go out West,
I'm terrified of grizzly bears, but a lot of the people there just it's
just part of living there. You just get used to it. So,
yeah, that's right, grizzlies. I've never met a grizzly in the wild.
Have you ever seen one? I saw one. I went to Yellowstone
two I think two or three years ago now, and I look through a
nice man's monoscope and saw a grizzly with a wolf. But for some reason
you could probably relate to this. But like my whole life had been leading
up to me going to Yellowstone, like that was the big thing I wanted
to do. I want to see wolves in the wild. They're one of
my favorites. And I got up at like four in the morning with my
parents. We went out to Lamar Valley and Yellowstone where all the wolves were
known to be, and there was just this group of like forty people all
gathered around this parking lot watching the wolves. And for some reason, like
even though I saw a wolf, through this monoscope with a grizzly bear,
which is like the best you could ask for at Yellowstone. It just it
didn't feel right to me, Like it didn't feel as exciting as if I
was to go out into the woods by myself and see it on my own,
you know what I mean. Yeah, I totally, I totally know
what you mean. It's still massively cool that you've got to two for also,
you know, two seater than one scope, that's great. But yeah,
there is something wonderful about the intimacy of meeting a wild animal unexpectedly when
you're alone, when the two of you are alone, that is really really
special. Yeah, Like I saw on that same trip, I saw this
one area that was full of rocks on this little hike, and I was
like, I bet that there is a pika in there somewhere, and if
I just stand here still, and sure enough, I stood there for like
fifteen minutes and just looked at the same area, saw movement and there was
a pike gut And that was like the highlight of the trip because I was
like, I put in the effort. It was just me and this little
dude, and it was, Yeah, the best wildlife encounter I'd had that
whole trip. Did he look at you for a while or did he just
pop up and then pop up down in the gun. He was going about
his business. But I got some good pictures, which is what I really
cared about. So great, Yeah, great, that's wonderful. So that
being said, I guess what has been the most harrowing adventure you've gone on
while researching for a book? Was it when you got Dan gay fever?
Or was there some other terrible experience or scary experience. Well, probably the
most harrowing and probably the most dangerous thing that I did was I went to
areas of Cambodia where there's a lot of land mines, and I was riding
around on a motorcycle and very very muddy area. And again, would you
have to worry about besides unexploded ordinance? Is people there? It's kind of
At that time anyway, it was rather lawless out there. I was researching
a book called Search for the Golden Moonbear. And at one point our guide
looked very nervous, and we asked our friends Son Hen, like, why
is our guide so nervous? And Son Hen told us, well, in
this area about a year ago he was kidnapped and held hostage in the woods
right here, and I kind of felt like, well, thank you for
sharing. It's all the people you gotta you gotta watch out for, Yeah,
but generally, you know, with the with the animals themselves. And
maybe it's just because I've been lucky, but I don't think I've really felt
threatened by any animal ever. M hmm. Well that kind of answers the
next question I had, which is from our patron Emily, who asked,
what animal have you worked with that has scared you the most? Humans?
Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense, and I'll tell you, I
mean I'm not crazy about leeches. One time, this was in Australia,
in Queensland, I was out looking for cassawerries. I mean cassawarries are basically
dinosaurs with a big helmet, a bone on their head, and a killer
claw, and they do they do kill people. They haven't killed anyone in
Australia in a really long time. They kill people in Papa New Guinea all
the time, and I've been there. But when they kill people in Papa
New Guinea, it's because the people are trying to kill them. And who
can blame them, but anyway, so I'm in the forest looking for a
cassowary, not finding one. Come back out. I'm waiting in the parking
lot of this place for my friends to pick me up. They come in
their car and I see their faces through the windshield, spotting me, and
there's a look of horror growing over their faces as they see me. And
I'm like, what is my braw showing or something the matter? And I
look down and I'm covered in blood. Oh god, it was for leeches.
I had dozens and dozens of leeches all over me, and leech drool,
as you know, contains an anticoagulant that makes you just bleed for hours
and hours and hours, So that was probably the most gruesome experience. But
as well as the anticoagulant, leeches also have an anesthetic so that it doesn't
feel like you've been shot by a machine gun all like you have. That
must have been so funny to your friends too, because you're just covering blood,
like smiling, happy to see them, and you must be in shock.
Well, once I figured out that I was covered with leeches, I
was kind of in a hurry to get to a shower. And get them
off. Yeah, but they were you know, once they fill with blood,
they just PLoP right off you. And they were like falling out of
my pants, legs onto the floor of the heart. I mean it was
a lot. God. Yeah, that and like leeches and ticks scare me
way more and like gross me out than any other animal on the planet.
I can't, I can't do it. Hemmy, I really don't. I
mean, nobody, nobody else really bums me out so much. I'm not
crazy about biting flies, including mosquitoes who are flies, particularly in the tropics,
when they can carry all kinds of diseases. But they're just doing what
they've got to do, and usually there's a way around getting totally sagminated.
Yeah. So on the flip side of that question, patron Robin Smith and
Emily asked similar questions. So, which individual animal that you've met or worked
with has been your favorite? Well, he's right here, thurber and Border
College. He's eight years old. He's a love of my life. Were
But in terms of species, if that's what they would like to know,
Yeah, probably the most interesting to me because they are so unlike us,
and it is octopus. I wrote that octopus book. I got a new
book coming out on octopus, interestingly National Traffic and Random House in the spring,
called Secrets of the Octopus. But my first octopus book, which was
The Soul of an Octopus, I got to know very well several giant Pacific
octopuses who would recognize me, look into my face, choose to come to
me, flush red with excitement when they saw me, loved to play with
me, were very gentle with me, clearly recognized individuals, some of whom
they liked, some of whom they didn't. But talk about an alien being.
To have someone like that be your friend is amazing. This is,
you know, a critter who has not one bone in their whole body.
They can pour their baggy bodies even though they might be forty pounds, through
an opening the size of a clementine. You know, they can change color
and shape, They can taste with their entire body. They have venom like
a snake, and they can you ink. They just their mouths are in
their armpits. They have three parts. Their brain is a circle around their
throat. And that you could be friends with someone like that who chooses to
spend time with you and share their world with you, and I am still
completely awestruck by that. I'm not just saying this because you're in front of
me right now. But The Soul and Octopus is the most recommended book by
like any other science loving person that I know, Like every single person I've
met who I'm like, what's a good book recommendation? They say, the
Soul of an Octopus? Wow, Well that makes me feel great. No,
it's a very beloved book. Also, have you heard the theory that
some people think octopuses came from space and that there actually are aliens? Yeah,
I have heard that, but you know, we are all aliens.
Life truly was seeded from outer space on our planet because our planet was just
well without form and void pretty much according according to both the Bible and what
we know of you know, the Big Bang. So the elements necessary for
life rained down on our planet from outer space. So we're all aliens.
Very good point. That is a great rebuttal or, as they say in
the Age of a Query, I think at age we are Stardust. I
do love that saying, yeah that we all contain Stardust, we do,
and to Stardust we return, which is lovely. So patron Ness asked,
you've worked on a lot of different species. Is there an animal that you
don't know enough about and that you plan on researching in the future. Oh,
gosh, I don't know enough about the ones I have researched. I
know. Yeah, gosh, yeah, there's a ton. There's a ton
of animals I want to learn about. The next animal that I'm going to
travel to research is the giant manta ray. Yeah. I can't wait.
This is something that I've we had planned to do. Gosh, it's years
and years since we plan to do it, but all kinds of things screwed
up, And I'm going to Ecuador to work with Michelle Guerrero who is studying
these giant manta rays. Huge. Essentially, they're like flying carpets who can
launch themselves out of the water and fly through the air and then plunge back
down. They're relatives of sharks. They're very smart. They can live for
seventy years. They do recognize individual humans. They are known to come to
humans for help when they have a hook or some line lodged in them,
and they frequent this one very special area to basically go to the spa when
they get full of icky parasites or just want their dead skin cleaned off.
They go to this one area and different species of cleaner fish come and tend
to them, and during that time you get to see lots of them.
So I'll be going there in August September to research a book for young people
on this fantastic, nice species and this great guy doing the research awesome.
Yeah. Also, Ecuador is a fantastic place for wildlife, so I'm sure
you're gonna see a lot of good stuff just besides the band rays as well.
Yeah, did you go. I've never been, but it is on
my list from everyone that goes there. The pictures are incredible. Yeah,
and this is not actually in the Galopagos, but the Galopagos is one of
those places that I've always always wanted to go. Unfortunately, Ecuador this morning
I heard on the radio that you know, it's being a big mess right
now. There's all kinds of drug gangs running around, and I just hope
that isn't wrecking their tourism trade, which keeps alive. A lot of the
conservation efforts at that country is doing to conserve these unique animals. Oh boy,
I feel like that's the way with pretty much every kind, even our
country. It's like, ah, man, there's certain places you go and
it just everywhere is slightly messed up, which stinks. I know. There's
just so many of us. Yeah, you know, even though humans kind
of aren't my people. I did marry one, and I have lots of
human friends, but we are so numerous right now that even if you love
our earth and try to tread lightly, there's just so many people everywhere that
you know, you almost can't help but cause disruption. So for me,
what that says is that right now is a great time for us to be
alive and be courageous and be creative in coming up with the solutions to make
up for all the problems that our kind is intentionally or otherwise causing. Yeah.
Well, that is a great segue to our last question, which is
if after reading your book of Time in Turtles or just this conversation, people
are feeling a call to action to help turtles, what can they do to
get involved. There's a whole bunch of good stuff you can do from crossing
the turtle that you see crossing the street in the direction that they're going.
Don't be afraid to pick up a snap or just learn the right way to
do it. Two, if you see a turtle hit on the road,
call a wildlife rehabilitator. Even if the turtle is dead. They can help
because they often can harvest the eggs and incubate them and release those babies.
Dozens and dozens of babies in some cases join an organization like Turtle Survival Alliance.
They are needing people to support their work protecting turtles around the world who
are endangered or even in some cases extinct in the wild, but only being
kept alive at breeding facilities such as those that they operate. Also, you
can be a volunteer for some of these places. You can be a volunteer
even if you don't want to work with turtles per se. You can help
do some fundraising, You can help with publicity, you can help contribute your
artwork. There's so many ways that we can help. And in the back
of every one of my books, I give some references for people who want
to do more, because that is exactly why I write these books, not
just as a peon of praise of the glories of these wonderful animals and the
people working to understand them and protect them, but also to mobilize the readers
who are moved by their stories, who are moved by their beauty, who
want to become part of the solution. Wellsi, where can people find you
specifically? Well, I'm in Hancock, New Hampshire. Don't go knocking on
her door boy website Si Montgomery dot com and I update that with news and
new books and reviews and media and all kinds of good stuff like that.
I'm on Facebook thanks to my young assistant. I'm also on Twitter and Instagram,
although I have no idea how to operate it, and now I am
on get Out, a live podcast. Totally awesome. Well, thanks so
much for being here. And that was my interview with Sion Montgomery. I
cannot recommend her books enough, especially her new book of Time in Turtles.
And even if you're not someone who likes to read nonfiction, like I've been
reading a ton of fantasy lately, but her method of storytelling keeps you hooked
even as you're learning about science. And you can find her books anywhere at
any local bookstores or online. And if you'd like to follow her on social
media or see links to people or places mentioned within the episode, check out
the episode description and I'll have every thing for you there. Also, if
you are a member of our Expert Survivalist here on Patreon, which you can
also find a link to in the episode description. Soon I will be sending
out your next gift, and it was entirely inspired by this episode and her
new book, so please make sure I have your correct address within the next
few weeks so we can get to you. You can also follow us for
free on Patreon for some extra content and latest updates from us, and you
can also support the show for free by rating us five stars wherever you're listening,
and also by subscribing otherwise, I'll keep this outdoor, short and sweet.
You can find links to our social medias within the episode description as well
or on our website get Alive podcast dot com, where you can also find
stickers of ours and other merch. Thank you so much to my good friend
and second great husband Josh Walsh for making our interro music and his brother Jesse
Walsh for being our editor. And I'll be back in two weeks for a
new animal attack story. Thanks