Book: The Soul of the Octopus

The other book I bought yesterday is a collection of apocryphal stories about how smart octopuses are.  They're escape artists, they use tools, they recognize people and form attachments to them (or aversions to them), they can disassemble and reassemble all manner of things.  And every aquarium with an octopus has tales of finding a wet trail on the floor in the morning, with fish missing from tanks across the lobby. Sometimes the octopuses even lock their own cages again on returning.

Sy Montgomery has written several books on natural history.  I may have to look for the others.

I'm reading "Birdology" by Sy Montgomery, all about how birds are descended from dinosaurs and smart and resilient and long-lived for their size and totally foreign to the way mammals view the world. Their eyes have three types of rods and cones and two focal points instead of one and they can sense the earth's magnetic fields.

Sy's writing reminds me quite a bit of Mary Roach, whose books Stiff, Gulp, Bonk, Packing for Mars, etc are similarly popular science for lay readers.