To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica. She has worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba. She has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and--for her newest book, Journey of the Pink Dolphins--swum with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon.

Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest will be published by Simon and Schuster in March 2000. It is the true story of the author's quest to follow an enigmatic, little-studied species of freshwater dolphin into the heart of the Amazon. Her research required four separate expeditions. Each was a journey not only into the world's greatest jungle, but also a trip back into time, and a foray into a mythical, enchanted world where people say the dolphins can turn into people and dance with the men and women on land.

For her book Spell of the Tiger, Montgomery avoided being eaten by her study subjects while living in a mud hut among the most deadly man-eaters in the world. Her work with the tigers and people was the subject of a National Geographic "Explorer" TV documentary filmed in West Bengal. Montgomery also developed and scripted the Chris-award winning documentary "Mother Bear Man" for National Geographic, a film profiling the lives of three orphaned bear cubs and their unlikely mother--Ben Kilham, gunsmith, hunter, and animal rehabilitator, who raised the cubs as a mother bear would: by spending nine hours a day in the woods with them.

The author of six nonfiction books (five for adults and one for children), Montgomery also writes a nature column for The Boston Globe, contributes reports and commentaries for National Public Radio's "Living on Earth" and writes for magazines in the US and abroad. Drawing on the six months she spent living in a tent on a wombat preserve studying emus in South Australia, she contributed a chapter to The Nature of Nature: New Essays by America's Finest Writers on Nature. (Published by Harcourt Brace in 1994, the book was a fundraiser for Share Our Strength, an anti-poverty organization.) Montgomery lectures on conservation topics at museums, zoos and universities, and is a devoted co-swineherd at the Mansfield-Montgomery one-shoat piggery.

As tributaries braid into a single river, Journey of the Pink Dolphins weaves ancient myth and modern science into one woman's search for these clusive creatures. With their melonlike foreheads and tubular snouts, pink dolphins look eerily familiar, like people in watery beginnings. No one knows for certain what gives the dolphins their distinctive coloring they may glow pink with exertion, or with age, or their color might change with the temperature of the water. With their flexible bodies--stretching to eight feet long and weighing up to four hundred pounds--and finely tuned echolocation abilities, the pink dolphins perform their water ballet on handlike, five-fingered flippers, in a habitat no other dolphin could colonize.

Since these mysterious creatures appear mostly at dusk and dawn, and their migration patterns are unknown, Sy Montgomery's Amazon quest encompasses four separate journeys. In the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo region, she follows the pink dolphins to the spirit realm, where shamans commune with the powers of the plants and visit the Encante. With paleontologist Gary Galbreath, she follows them back in time, tracing the history of the species. At Mamiraua, the pink dolphins illuminate the Amazon's present-day conservation dilemma. And in a final, glorious burst, Montgomery follows the dolphins back, down, deep, to the watery womb of the world, touching the very soul of the Amazon.