Animal Attraction Lures a Female Naturalist From Outback to Amazonia

Author and naturalist Sy Montgomery is a business traveler, but not the kind with a briefcase and a Palm Pilot. Her business is studying the more remarkable members of the animal kingdom in their far-flung wilderness habitats. These have included silverback gorillas in Congo (formerly Zaire), man-eating tigers in West Bengal, India, and, most recently, pink river dolphins, which she sought in the flooded jungles of South America and described in her new book, “Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest” (Simon & Schuster, $26).

To observe these exotic creatures, you must be willing to go places where you can’t count on hot running water or clean sheets. You may find a boa constrictor in your room or giant cockroaches in the sink. But none of this fazes Montgomery, who is 42, small and excitable. She likes snakes, spiders and vampire bats, as I learned recently when I had dinner in Los Angeles with her.

Here are some of the things we talked about.

Question: What is “Sy” short for?

Answer: I won’t tell you because it’s too horrible. But I will tell you what my father almost named me: Sabre Hawk. He was a general.

Q. Where did you grow up?

A. On military bases all over.

Q. How did you become a nature writer?

A. I was always drawn to the “other” and noticed very early that humans are just one of the species, not necessarily the most interesting. The travel came from that because to get to the “other” I had to travel. In the ‘80s, my dad gave me a gift of a trip to Australia. I’d always wanted to go there because of the marsupials. I joined an Earthwatch expedition because I didn’t want to just sightsee.

Q. I went on one of Earthwatch’s trips to study leatherback sea turtles in Costa Rica last winter. What did you study in Australia?

A. The southern hairy-nosed wombat, with Pamela Parker, research director of the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago. I bonded with the land and with her, and when I left, she told me that if I wanted to come back to study anything, for as long as I wanted, she’d make it possible.

So I went home, quit my job, got a tent, set it up in the Outback and started studying emus, those big flightless birds. Pretty soon I realized that I loved them, even though they are more closely related to dinosaurs than to me. I never dreamed I’d be able to follow them so closely.

Q. Getting close to animals is a repeated theme for you. At the end of your Amazon journey, you got to swim with the dolphins. I hope you didn’t try to get close to the tigers too.

A. No, but one did swim after our boat in an area where they eat 300 people a year.

Q. Are there any animals you don’t like?

A. Chiggers!

Q. What about the living conditions? I thought they’d be awful in the Amazon, but your book makes some of the lodges you stayed in sound quite comfortable.

A. If you go to Peru, stay at the Amazonia Expeditions lodge near the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve. It’s on stilts over the Tahuayo River, a tributary of the Amazon. The jungle throbs all night long, and they don’t run the generator constantly, so there’s no mechanical noise. We had clean sheets, mosquito netting, showers with cold water, flush toilets (that don’t pollute the river) and wonderful food--fish, pancakes, they even baked a cake when we left.

Another thing: The rainy season is a great time to go. The rivers are flooded, so you travel everywhere by canoe, and there’s no one else there.

Q. I know logging and oil prospecting are endangering the Amazon, but what about eco-tourism?

A. I was dismayed to learn that eco-tourism sometimes creates more problems than it solves. The people who work at the lodges aren’t employed full time. So when tourists aren’t there, they work for a logging company or hunt instead of returning to cities like Iquitos [Peru] where they’re from.

Q. Isn’t that small potatoes compared with logging and oil?

A. It’s just that eco-tourism isn’t the solution. The problem in Peru is big corporations raiding the forest. The local people who depend on its resources can be natural stewards of the forest, as they are at the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Reserve, which is supported by the Rainforest Conservation Fund. It’s a charity, but every year the RCF runs trips for members into the reserve.

Q. Where are you going next?

A. Southeast Asia, for moon bears. They’re really big Asiatic black bears, with huge manes like lions.

Q. You always travel with a mission, not just to sightsee.

A. Yes, but even though I travel for a reason, things don’t always go according to plan. That’s the magic, and you have to let it take you.

Amazonia Expeditions, 10305 Riverburn Drive, Tampa, FL 33647; telephone (800) 262-9669, Internet https://www.perujungle.com.

Earthwatch Institute, P.O. Box 75, Maynard, MA 01754-0075; tel. (800) 776-0188, fax (978) 461-2332, Internet https://www.earthwatch.org.

Rainforest Conservation Fund, 2038 N. Clark St., Suite 233, Chicago, IL 60614; tel. (312) 829-6964, Internet https://www.rainforestconservation.org.