Slithering snakes, long-legged spiders, and endangered apes entice readers

When I was a kid, my image of a scientist was a nerd who wore a lab coat, worked indoors, and spent all day looking through a microscope. Any discoveries he made did not rank high on my excitement meter. Mercifully, my childhood preconceptions have been blown to smithereens.

A number of eye-opening blasts have come from publishers like Houghton, whose Scientists in the Field series, with its riveting writing and great photography, is getting the word out that scientists are fascinating enough to inspire anyone who wants a good read—or a good booktalk.

Sy Montgomery’s The Snake Scientist (2001) and The Tarantula Scientist (2004) both have photographs by the amazing Nic Bishop. The Snake Scientist takes the reader 50 miles north of Winnipeg, Canada, to the Narcisse Wildlife Management Area, where thousands of garter snakes wake up every spring after sleeping underground for eight months. The male quickly forms a ball around a female in an attempt to mate with her. Scientists are still not sure what’s going on in this incredible process (how do those males even know which snake is female?).

There are more snakes in this wildlife refuge than anywhere on earth. You can pick up as many as 30 of the harmless critters in a single handful! How many of your booktalk listeners would enjoy a visit to the site to handle snakes, witness the “river of writhing reptiles,” and meet the great snake scientist, Bob Mason, himself?

The Tarantula Scientist is Sam Marshall, whose focus is the much-feared and misunderstood tarantula. These spiders give most people the creeps because of their hairy, unsettling appearance and size (the Goliath birdeater, for example, has a leg spread of 12 inches). But tarantulas only attack things they want to eat, and they don’t want to eat us. Instead, these creatures protect themselves from humans with their barbed and bristly hair, which is irritating to anyone it lands on. Tarantulas have been around for more than 150 million years and can live as long as 30 years.

Marshall collects a few hundred of the creepy crawlers during his annual trips to French Guiana and takes them back to Ohio, where he and his students study them. They love this hands-on, or legs-on, approach.

Pamela S. Turner’s Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes (2005) is the story of some of the scientists and staff who take care of the gorillas in Rwanda’s National Volcano Park (Parc National des Volcans). Less than 700 mountain gorillas exist in the world, and only in this tiny region of Africa. Without the scientists’ help, however, their numbers would dwindle even further. Gorillas fall victim to poachers and to snares set for legal game animals, like antelopes. If the snares are too tight, gorillas can be fatally injured. An unexpected positive byproduct is that tourists who come to see the animals inject cash into the local economy. Pair this book with Jane Goodall’s Rickie and Henry (Putnam, 2004), which tells the true story of a baby gorilla who was stolen by poachers. Afterward, share Ted and Betsy Lewin’s Gorilla Walk (HarperCollins, 1999), the story of two children’s book creators who trekked to Rwanda to see these apes.

In Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropics (Houghton, 2004), the intrepid author, Sy Montgomery, tells how she helped biologist Gary Galbreath search for a new species of bear in Cambodia. The elusive bear’s hair follicles contain DNA, which offer genetic information about where this beautiful creature came from. Montgomery brought along some peculiar bait: marshmallows and sweetened condensed milk. Bears, like many booktalk listeners, love sweet food.

Who would have thought that a scientist’s life could be so thrilling and fun at the same time? I’ll never look at a science book, or a marshmallow, the same way again.