A beautifully written book about the natural world that supplies the reader with an enormous amount of information about the world we seldom see and the other lives which inhabit it.

This is a book that I will never lend out. I will buy a few extra copies of it to give away, but I want to keep my copy forever. I found it by searching Amazon for some good natural history books to read in the winter, when I miss my garden. I really lucked out with this one.

Sy Montgomery was the nature columnist for the Boston Globe. She is extremely knowledgable, and her writing is concise yet filled with wonder at her magical subjects. I learned about the lovelorn messages sent by singing insects on autumn evenings, the messages contained in spiderwebs, the effects of winter snow on the way sound travels, the way all life depends on the unusual structure of water. Most fun is the author's description of ways to interact with other creatures. I learned that it is easy to teach wild birds to eat out of your hand, and that one can flirt with fireflies in their own language using a flashlight in the grass. The author offers some of these suggestions as experiments for children, but at the tender age of 54 I am looking forward to trying them all out by myself.

Another thing I like about this book is that each essay can be read in a single sitting (or a single night before going to sleep, in my case). They are concise. I get a lot of delight per unit time spent reading.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it needs a better title. If Sy Montgomery had the lovely titles that Diane Ackerman comes up with, she would quickly overtake Ackerman's sales numbers.

In the middle of a bleak, New England winter and at a time in my life when I felt disconnected with the natural world due to health difficulties, I purchased this book. I opened it to the section on winter and read the first essay entitled, "Sounds and Silences of December." Not only was it interesting to learn that sound travels farther and is clearer over frozen ground, but it encouraged me to go outside and see for myself! Since then, this book has been a source of valuable information regarding the unique aspects of each season. Also, it has been a source of encouragement, drawing me out-of-doors to explore. I don't have to venture far from home to experience some of the things written about in the book. Learn about peepers in spring, mud season, insects, messages in spider webs, chipmunks and squirrels, animal migrations, exploring the off-season beach in winter...just to name a few. If you've never been an outdoorsy person or need some guidance to reconnect, this is an excellent choice.

Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop have managed to bring this awesome display of nature and the man who studies it to life! This book would be a wonderful addition to any household, library or school, as it describes the work of a dedicated scientist who has committed his life to understanding what we as humans can gain from the lives of garter snakes. Dr. Mason obviously loves his work and loves passing along his knowledge to others, young and old. "The Snake Scientist" is an accurate picture of an almost undescribable phenomenom.

This book about the adventures of Bob Mason, an Oregon State University scientist who studies snakes all over the world, is a must-read for any child (grades four to seven would be great) who loves science or nature - and a good gift idea for any parent who would like to steer their kids in that direction. Easy to read, great photography, compelling stories about snakes, science, the growth of a young boy who just started out watching nature shows on TV and turned that interest into a career as a world-class zoologist. Excellent choice!

A fabulous book, replete with color photographs of the snakes. Kids will gravitate to the pictures first, and then the text will engage them in Dr. Mason's research. His comments are child-oriented, yet will not insult the older readers in the audience. Bob's stories of his childhood and career path are an added bonus to this book....and may even encourage more budding "Snake Scientists"! Well done!

An astonishing writer named Sy Montgomery thoughtfull wrote Walking With The Great Apes. Montgomery's captivating novel portrays three women who are fasinated about how primates live and care for one another. In a dire world of poaching and murder, these three scientists attempt to protect and preserve the world and nature of humanity's closest cousins. All together Walking With The Great Apes is a thought-provoking book and a must read for anyone interested in the Great Apes.

A very well written book and a great introduction to those who want to know more about the lives and studies of these 3 extremely remarkable woman Jane Goodall, Birutas Galdikas and last but not least for me THE woman of the 20th century Dian Fossey.

Sy Montgoemry writes extremely well, and as a consequence, her book is compulsively readable. Not only that, but the subject matter is pure fascination, as she sheds light on each of these great apes, their extraordinary environments, and the daring women scientists who study them - their unique approach to science, their trials and tribulations. A great book.

This is a marvelous book for your kid, your nephew or niece, your grandchild.
Full of the excitement of discovery and the adventure of investigating a little-known creature in a dazzlingly diverse and mysterious rainforest world.
A fun read, and packed with great facts kids will want to learn and share. More than facts, though, the book gets across the idea that the young reader CAN be an explorer, CAN be a scientist, and CAN help save the rainforest. Every kid should read this, and it would make a great addition to grade school curricula.

Encantado guides readers on an amazing Amazonian journey, ostensibly to ferret out information on pink dolphins. Montgomery, however, is fishing for young conservationists! Her enthusiasm, glorious descriptions and hilarious comments disguise the fact that Encantado is not only a beautiful, information-packed picture book, it also represents a very real problem in a very real place that is vitally important to all of us.
I wish I'd had this book when I was a kid!

I found this book to be incredibly well written, bursting at the seams with imagry and science. Sy Montgomery brings to the table a mixture of "common man's" love for something simply beautiful as well as a scientists need to know the reasons why. She delicately weaves in native stories told by people indigenous to the areas she visited with a scientifically justified look at an elusive species. All this is done while painting a beautiful portrait about life in the amazon basin. This was an amazing book that made me want to read everything she's written.

I never knew that there are man-eating tigers until I read this book.On an island off the coast of India where for some reason the tigers eat people. Scientists don't know why. This book is very interesting and I recomend it!

the subject is a tempting one to begin with: tigers who are seldom seen, but who seem to kill people whenever they like. Montgomery's powerful insight into this strange region of the world is that these killer tigers, revered by some locals as supernatural, are actually protecting the entire ecosystem from destruction. They are difficult to study scientifically, and take on an incredible air of mystery that is as compelling as the lush environment and the strange effectiveness of some of the local cult religions. A superb study.

The Wild Out Your Window: Exploring Nature Near At Hand is a wonderful and highly recommended collection of fifty essays by naturalist and Sy Montgomery, most of which originally appeared in the Boston Globe column "Nature Journal," in which Sy invites the reader to share in a season-by-season exploration of the wonders of nature. Insightful, poignant, filled with reverence and wonder for the splendor of the world, The Wild Out Your Window is a "must read" for both armchair travelers and active nature enthusiasts.

Another great book by Sy Montgomery, a gifted natural history and travel writer. In this work she focuses on her search for a new animal, officially unknown to science, the golden moon bear. Is it a color phase of a known bear, the normally black moon bear? Or perhaps a subspecies of it? Or even a new species altogether, the first new bear species to be described in almost a century? Accompanied by the gifted American biologist Dr. Gary J. Galbreath and Sun Hean, a young and promising Cambodian conservationist, they search throughout Southeast Asia for evidence and accounts of the elusive golden moon bear. Traveling all through Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, from illegal back alley markets selling endangered species parts to remote forest reserves threatened by encroaching refugees, illegal logging, and poachers to charity-run wildlife rehabiliation centers to dwindling primitive hill tribes vanishing in the face of approaching civilization, their time-honored wisdom of the ways of the forest dying with them, their quest is a long, wild, and sometimes dangerous one. Montgomery and her companions must face all manner of possible threats, from unexploded ordinance from the Vietnam War (Laos being one of the most bombed nations in world history) to concealed land mines deep in the jungle (a legacy of the Khmer Rouge, having left thousands of mines in Cambodia which frequently claim lives and limbs to this day) to warring hill tribes, opium growers, poachers, huge leeches, jungle illnesses; it would seem only their passion and thirst for knowledge kept them going.

This book has been described as a mystery, and rightly so. As they proceed down tangled jungle trails and even more tangled urban ones, the mystery deepens. Is there only one possible new species of bear haunting the rain forests and mountains of Southeast Asia or are there more? Locals in various areas speak of other new bear species, not matching descriptions of the golden moon bear, telling Montgomery and the others of "horse bears," "dog bears," "pig bears," and "man bears." Others speak of "honey bears" or huge compleletly black mountain bears, lacking the distinct markings of moon bears. Are these local variants of the two species of bears known to live in Southeast Asia, the sun bear and the moon bear? Perhaps they are new populations of more distant bear species, such as the brown bear and the sloth bear? Or do they represent altogether new species?
Not daunted by this but becoming even more enthusiastic they do their best to expand the frontiers of zoology and answer these questions.

The book focuses mainly on bears but other wildife is given some attention. Learn about the dholes, wild rare, red Asian dogs once venerated and protected by Laotian hill tribes. The Asian elephant, still revered by many in the region, particularly in Thailand; in Thai newspapers an elephant's age is always mentioned with his name, and honorific titles are bestowed, Pang for lady elephant, Pai for tuskers, and Sidor for tuskless males. The khting vor, an enigmatic animal first described in 1993, originally said to be a new type of wild ox, later a type of wild sheep or goat, an animal about which Montgomery makes some surprising revelations about.

However, more than the natural history of these animals Montgomery brings to readers their plight, that they are in danger of extinction. A rampant black market for animal parts, largely for medicinal purposes, threatens the very existence of some of Southeast Asia's more spectacular wildlife. Bears are captured and savagely and cruely harvested for their paws, made into soups which are more "powerful" if the animal is still alive when the paw is removed. Montgomery describes in heart-rending detail how animals are inhumanely abused and tortured in the region for the supposed exlirs and potions that they can produce, even when substitute are cheaply and easily avaiable through man-made sources.

Perhaps even worse than the market for animal parts is the simple extermination of animals for food. Montgomery describes nearly empty forests in Laos, where virtually every wild animal, from insect to civet to song bird to bat to bear and tiger are collected for the dinner table. Barrels full of smoked bats and empty caves, skewered songbirds and silent sunrises - and worse -are the result in a virtual wildlife holocaust.

As in other books by Sy Montgomery the book is a much a travelogue as a work of natural history. Particularly fascintating were her travels in remote, poorly known Laos, one of the most enigmatic nations in the world. A poor nation but rich in diversity - Laos posseses 240 ethnic groups and four ethnolinguistic families, ethnic minorities making up 70 percent of the population, and over 13,000 genetic varieties of rice are cultivated in the country, with only India, one hundred times the land area, having more - to me the book was worthwhile alone for educating me about this country. The book provides similiar interesting details on Cambodia and Thailand as well.

In closing I recommend this book highly. Does Montgomery get her bear(s)? Find out by reading the book. As often in science, the answers often lead to still more questions, and the book admitedly does not have a final, definitive answer on all the qestions raised. However, I think you will be greatly satisfied upon reading this great book.

Sy Montgomery has written another of her enchanting books about animals. Who would ever believe that trying to chase down the geneology of a bear could lead to such excitement? It's trite to say,"It's a thrill a minute!" but that is the feeling as Sy tears across Cambodia where nobody goes because the whole damn place is covered with land mines. One good thing comes from this in that people have stopped denuding the forest in order to keep both legs on their bodies. Sy tells us that one in 236 Cambodians is an amputee from the land mines. If you were fortunate enough to hear Sy review her book at various venues around the country, you got to see fascinating and sometimes gruesome slides as she takes us on her magic carpet. Sy is magical when she starts writing about her beloved natural world, as thousands know from reading her columns in the Boston Globe.

If you didn't make it to Sy's book review, you will be delighted to know that the slides are included in the beautifully illustrated book.

Here is a writer who is meticulous in the accuracy of her writing but still thrills us with her enthusiasm for the subject. If you only read one book this year, it has to be SEARCH FOR THE GOLDEN MOON BEAR. It's a shame that I can't give it more than Five Stars. What the heck, I give it Six Stars. So shoot me Amazon.com!

As a fellow "naturalist-author," I've long been an admirer of Sy Montgomery's work - no matter which jungle this diminutive, intrepid, high-spirited lady is leading a reader through. She's introduced me to great apes in Africa, man-eating tigers in India, pink dolphins in the Amazon. Her latest "Search for the Golden Moon Bear" is, I think, her most ambitious and perilous quest yet.
It's also Sy's most heart-wrenching. For these marvelous, previously-unknown creatures of Southeast Asia are visible, for the most part, only in cages where they've been penned. Sy's pursuit of the golden moon bear is in the company of scientist Gary Galbreath. I don't want to give away her many adventures, but suffice that Cambodia and Laos today remain places not to be visited by the faint of heart.
Which is one thing Sy Montgomery can never be accused of being. Her descriptive prose of animals and landscapes is right up there with the best of contemporary nature writers. Her latest book is also an eloquent plea for conservation of the endangered species whose various organs and body parts are tragically finding their way into dozens of "traditional medicine" marketplaces. As she writes of the golden moon bear, "You look into her eyes as you would look at the stars, their light crossing eons, alien, eternal and mute."
If you read only one wildlife adventure book this season, make it this one!

This book takes us on a journey through flooded rivers of the Amazonian rainforest. Along the way, Sy Montgomery makes a poignant plea for waters and trees, fantastic creatures and human inhabitants. She describes the dolphins' world as an enchantment, known by local inhabitants as El Encante, in which - beware! - botos, or pink dolphins, fall in love with humans. They lead the humans to their world, and the humans never come back. The symbolism of this story has great relevance. We need to allow ourselves to be drawn to the animals' world and ways of living, if we are to cease harmful activities that devastate their worlds. Why not change out of enchantment, rather than guilt or fear! Yet, this is no mere idealistic portrait. We see the Amazon as it really is, poisonous-spined and enormous-jawed critters dropping in on the author and her companions at every turn. Despite any problems, out of a larger sense of connectedness with life, they keep going, revealing also the endearing aspects of relationship. I loved the images of her clasping the endangered baby boto to her breast. And imagine the ecstasy of swimming in the exhaled bubbles of many dolphins! Until reading this book, I was unaware of the horrendous treatment of indigenous peoples in modern times, in service of and often slavery of the rubber industry and gold mining. How could anyone conceive of a gold ring as precious, knowing the human misery such processes have caused? Also, we see through her commentary of this very unique part of the world and different culture, other creative possibilities for managing ecosystems. I highly recommend this fascinating read.

For everyone who cares about dolphins, who enjoys superb natural history writing, who is fascinated by and dreamed of travelling the Amazon - this book is both delightful and insightful. It is also a fast-paced, witty, and racy adventure-travel story that I found entertaining from start to finish. Journey of the Pink Dolphins is not only about a compelling scientific quest but also reports the myths about pink dolphins that the human inhabitants repeat if not believe. The result is a luminous tribute both to the wisdom and lyricism of local Amazon peoples and to this amazing species of freshwater dolphin. Lots of great photos in both color and black and white, along with its easy-to-read style make this book an inspired gift choice for young adult readers as well as one's friends.

Sy Montgomery's Journey of the Pink Dolphins is by far the best book I have read during 2000. It's a unique combination of lyrical writing, high adventure, fascinating characters (cetacean and human), environmental significance, and factual information about the Amazon's past and present. The author was determined to both learn about, and experience the company of, these mysterious freshwater whales. Her quest, ultimately successful, necessitated a rigorous set of travels through the watery world of the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon River Basin. Participating in this journey via the author's engaging prose is most enjoyable. I highly recommend this book!