Boston Flora

Tag: Sy Montgomery

  • Thursday, June 30, 6:45 pm – 8:15 pm – The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty, Online

    Everyone loves Sy Montgomery, New England based author of such books at The Soul of the Octopus. Join Smithsonian Associates online on June 30 for a very special Zoom evening with her.

    When author and naturalist Sy Montgomery spent a day at falconer Nancy Cowan’s New England farm, home to a dozen magnificent birds of prey, it was the start of a deep love affair. That’s when she met Jazz, a feisty, four-year-old female Harris’s hawk with a wingspan of more than four feet. Not a pet, Jazz was a fierce predator with talons that could pierce skin and bone, and yet she was willing to work with a human to hunt.

    Montgomery fell under the magnetic spell of the hawk, and over the next few years she spent more time with these creatures, getting to know their extraordinary abilities and instincts. Deeply emotional animals, hawks are quick to show anger and frustration and can hold a grudge for years. But they are also loyal and intensely aware of their surroundings. In a fascinating program highlighted by splendid color photos, Montgomery recalls her time in the world of hawks and shares what they can teach us about nature, life, and love. $20 for Smithsonian Associates members, $25 for nonmembers. Register at https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/hawks-way

    Photo: Tianne Strombeck

  • Thursday, March 30, 7:00 pm – Sheds

    Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, will host author Howard Mansfield on Thursday, March 30 at 7 pm, who will speak on his book Sheds and sign copies as well. A shed is the shortest line between need and shelter. Drawing on material from his recent book Dwelling in Possibility, Mansfield explores the different types of sheds found around New England and beyond: covered bridges, barns, work sheds, worship sheds (meeting houses), extended farmhouses, bob houses for ice fishing. In lyrical style and supported by photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, Mansfield shows the connection between the design of these structures and their roles in our lives. Sheds are like our lives not the grandest building or the most graceful. Sheds are ordinary and in that they are exalted.

    Anyone who has ever traveled the back roads of America will enjoy this beautifully photographed exploration of simple, useful structures.

    Howard Mansfield writes about history, architecture, and preservation. Author of The Same Ax, Twice, The Bones of the Earth, In the Memory House, Turn and Jump, and Dwelling in Possibility, he lives in New Hampshire with his wife, the writer Sy Montgomery.

  • Wednesday, December 9, 7:00 pm – The Octopus Scientists

    At Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge on Wednesday, December 9 at 7 pm, science writer Sy Montgomery and wildlife photographer Keith Ellenbogen discuss their latest adventure, in the intriguing world of the octopus.

    With three hearts and blue blood, its gelatinous body unconstrained by jointed limbs or gravity, the octopus seems to be an alien, an inhabitant of another world. It’s baggy, boneless body sprouts eight arms covered with thousands of suckers suckers that can taste as well as feel. The octopus also has the powers of a superhero: it can shape-shift, change color, squirt ink, pour itself through the tiniest of openings, or jet away through the sea faster than a swimmer can follow.

    But most intriguing of all, octopuses classed as mollusks, like clams, are remarkably intelligent with quirky personalities. Their book The Octopus Scientists, an inquiry into the mind of an intelligent invertebrate, is also a foray into our own unexplored planet. These thinking, feeling creatures can help readers experience and understand our world (and perhaps even life itself) in a new way.

    “Part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson,” as the Boston Globe describes her, Sy Montgomery is an author, naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and radio commentator who has traveled to some of the world’s most remote wildernesses for her work. She has worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba, been hunted by a tiger in India, swum with pink dolphins in the Amazon, and been undressed by an orangutan in Borneo. She is the author of 13 award-winning books, including her national best-selling memoir, The Good Good Pig. Montgomery lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.

    Keith Ellenbogen is an award-winning underwater photographer with an emphasis on environmental conservation. His images have been published worldwide in newspapers, magazines, and books as well as on TV. He is a Senior Fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), a Fellow with the Explorers Club, and an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY.

  • Thursday, June 17, 7:30 pm – Birdology: From Hens to Hummingbirds – And One Big Living Dinosaur

    In her new book, Birdology, award-winning wildlife author Sy Montgomery explores questions such as: Do hawks show emotion, like anger, sympathy and frustration? Are birds actually living dinosaurs? Is there a secret emotional life to birds that we are only beginning to discover? Montgomery will explore these intriguing questions and others in this lecture and book signing on Thursday, June 17, at 7:30 pm at The Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge. Free with museum admission. For more information, log on to www.hmnh.harvard.edu, or call 617-495-3045.

    http://www.supercoolpets.com/pictures/birdology.jpg