Once Animal Dads was a success, I started thinking about other ways to do this, so I wrote books like Beaks about bird beaks. I wrote a book called Animals Asleep about all the different ways animals sleep. My two new books, Teeth and Wings, are also those kind of whimsical books.
If you read through those, they’re really just collections of interesting critters I’ve seen on my travels or doing research for other books. I still do a lot of travel — I travel to other places as well to do research — and it’s just kind of become a routine for me. And one that’s very satisfying because being out in the field not only gives you a real gut impression for what things are like that helps you write, as you know.
It also gives you unique information that you can’t find anywhere else. I mean, slogging through a tropical rain forest with a scientist, or going in a deep-sea submersible to the ocean bottom with a scientist you’re going to get perspectives from not only the environment but the scientist that you just won’t get.
Often the scientists’ human sides really come out when they’re out in that field because every scientist I know is much happier in the field than they are back in the lab, but most of them have to spend most of their lives in the lab. Once they’re out in the field, it’s like ecological release and they’re happier and they’re telling stories and they’re showing you all kinds of really cool stuff that they might not think about just sitting in their office.
