Tom Mustill, Priyanka Kumar & Sy Montgomery: A Conversation

Priyanka Kumar’s essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, on HuffPost, and other publications. Kumar also wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar. She opens Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions) with a simple but defining declaration: “Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” Growing up in northern India, Kumar took her immersion in nature for granted. But after moving to North America as a teenager, she became increasingly distanced from the natural world. But in her twenties, while living in Los Angeles and working on films, she began to rediscover her place in the landscape by watching birds. Tracing her movements across the American West, this collection of essays brings the avian world to life. She is not just a list keeper, counting and cataloging species – she writes about the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness and the ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and in her stories, they “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.”

Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and author of 31 nonfiction books for adults and children, including The Hummingbirds’ Gift; The Soul of an Octopus, and the memoir The Good Good Pig, which was a New York Times bestseller. After spending a day at falconer Nancy Cowan’s farm, home to a dozen magnificent birds of prey, Montgomery started a deep love affair with hawks. Cowan allowed her to work with Jazz, a feisty, 4-year-old female Harris’s hawk with a wingspan of more than 4 feet. Jazz – not a pet but a fierce predator – was willing to work with a human to hunt. When Jazz swept down and landed on Montgomery’s leather-gloved fist, she fell under the hawk’s spell. Over the next few years, she spent time with these creatures, getting to know their abilities and instincts. They are deeply emotional, quick to anger and frustration, and can hold a grudge for years. But they are also loyal and keenly aware of their surroundings. The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty (Atria Books), illustrated with 16 pages of color photographs, reveals the wondrous world of hawks and what they can teach us about nature, life, and love.

Tom Mustill is a naturalist turned filmmaker and writer. His collaborations with Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough have won dozens of international awards; been presented at the U.N. and at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26); gone viral (70M+ views); and been shared by heads of state, the WHO, and Guns ‘N’ Roses. Having survived a humpback whale crashing into his kayak, Mustill turned to his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker to investigate human-whale interactions around the world. In the process, he met two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to use artificial intelligence – originally designed to translate human languages – to discover patterns in the conversations of animals and decode them. As he embarked on a journey into animal eavesdropping technologies, Mustill found that technologies developed to explore our languages are being focused on nature. From 17th-century Dutch inventors to the cutting edge work of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication (Grand Central Publishing) examines the attempt at decoding animal communications. Whales, with their giant brains, strong voices, and long, highly social lives, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human-animal interaction be?