As an award-winning author of nonfiction books for kids, I’m passionate about discovering titles by other authors that introduce a topic innovatively and engagingly. I obtained a B.S. in Biology, with an emphasis in Ecology, from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I received the 2023 Stephen Fraser Encouragement Award and a 2023 finalist for the Russel Freedman Award. I feel that it’s important to plant seeds of curiosity and encourage children to look at the world around them through a different lens. I love reading books that present complicated ideas in a way that young readers (and adults!) can understand.
This book took hold of my heart and has yet to let go. I was immediately sucked in with the engaging narrative, which was thoughtfully blended with facts to highlight the current crisis surrounding the population of Southern Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest.
I felt like I was getting to know each of the featured orcas personally, which made me care about their struggles even more. This book is perfect for orca lovers and anyone interested in marine science.
Meet the playful and beloved Southern Resident orcas and the people working to save them from extinction using tactics that vary from medicine and laws to drones and dogs
The endangered Southern Resident orcas whistle and click their way around the waters of the Pacific Northwest in three small family groups while facing boat noise, pollution, and scarce food. Superpod introduces young readers to the experts who are training scat-sniffing dogs, inventing ways to treat sick orcas, quieting the waters, studying whales from the air, and speaking out. Author Nora Nickum also discusses her own work on laws to protect…
I have written about the environment as a journalist since 2005, for magazines and newspapers including National Geographic,The New York Times, and Outside. For my last book, I wanted to write about animals as individuals—not just as units in a species, the way they are often thought of by conservationists. Diving into research about animal selfhood was an amazing journey. It helped shape my book, but it also changed the way I see the world around me—and who and what I think of as “people”!
I was absolutely riveted by this short but powerful book chronicling the fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking history of animal escapes from zoos, circuses, and other forms of captivity. Hribal makes the case that these stories of animal “resistance” are evidence that wild animals value their autonomy and I, for one, was very much convinced.
A Siberian tiger at the San Francisco Zoo leaps a 12-foot high wall and mauls three visitors who had been tormenting her, killing one. A circus elephant tramples and gores a sadistic trainer, who had repeatedly fed her lit cigarettes. A pair of orangutans at the San Diego Zoo steal a crowbar and screwdriver and break-out of their enclosure. An orca at Sea World snatches his trainer into the pool and holds her underwater until she drowns. What's going on here? Are these mere accidents? Simply cases of animals acting on instinct? That's what the zoos and animal theme parks…
For me, writing space opera was obvious because it's what I like to read. There's so much scope for human and non-human societies out there, complete with the history of how they were created, and the inevitable cut-and-thrust of politics. If the book also has a love story– where do I pay my money? I do like the science in my science fiction to be convincing, though. My background as a computer programmer helps with that and I'm often grateful for my history degree when coming up with convincing empires and events.
What drew me into this story was the leviathans, a local species on a watery moon. I'm a sucker for whales and these beasts reminded me of orcas. The heroine, a marine biologist, is in danger for reasons unknown. A ranger with a connection to the leviathans helps her to escape and that's just the start of a fascinating adventure in a very different environment. Once again, the romance evolves in a natural way and does not overshadow the rest of the plot.
About WAVE RIDER: Book 5 in the Verdant String Series
Isolated . . . Verdant String scientist, Anja Farucci, is frightened. Her calls for help from her remote coastal research station have been going unanswered and strange things are happening with the leviathan pod she's studying. She's only been on Fynian for four months, but she knows the three day trip to Fynian's only city, Rinc, is her best option for finding out what is going on.
Stranded . . . Cal is a wave rider, and if anyone understands leviathans, it's him, but when Kada, a young leviathan, grabs…
I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
I rarely find a book that captures the inner lives of wild animals and the strange, poignant ways they still can shape our human world. For many years, I fished in the waters Eva Saulitis writes of. I know the orca family she describes. Her writing is profoundly moving. I couldn't put it down.
Science entwines with matters of the human heart as a whale researcher chronicles the lives of an endangered family of orcas
Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn deeply into the lives of a single extended family of endangered orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound. Over the course of a decades-long career spent observing and studying these whales, and eventually coming to know them as individuals, she has, sadly, witnessed the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989—after which not a single calf has been…
As an avid trail-runner and mountain-biker who’s done a ton of outdoorsy things, from sailboat racing on the Chesapeake Bay to rockclimbing to backpacking in the Pacific Northwest, I’m convinced that nothing gets you closer to someone’s experience than a well-told first-person account. The best personal narratives make you feel the cold, glow with the exhilaration, and burn with ambition to go, to do, to see for yourself — and can even make you look at the world, and yourself, in a new way. These books, different as they are, have all done those things for me.
This late-90s account of Modzelewski’s time among the islands of the Inside Passage north of Vancouver is a little bit out there, figuratively as well as literally; the symbolism can be a wee bit heavy at times (“inside passage” — get it?). But the life he portrays, the incredible beauty and power of this part of the world, the characters he describes so indelibly, make this a book that I’ve gone back to again and again.
Inspired by Robinson Crusoe and Jack London, Michael Modzelewski, jettisoned all baggage accompanying life in the comfortable middle class and set out to find raw, unharnessed wilderness. He found it on Blackfish Sound ("Blackfish" is the Kwakiutl Indian word for the killer whale) in the Inside Passage, the rugged coastline between Seattle and Alaska.
Leaving his home in Aspen, which had become a false Shangri-La for him, Modzelewski settled on a desolate island in the Inside Passage, a place which "after seducing you with beauty would shake you with fear. An unpredictable place that kept you always prepared, honed to…
