About

Janie Chodosh is a naturalist and writer drawn to the places where close observation, science and story meet. Her work invites readers to look more carefully at the lives of animals—from hummingbirds making astonishing migrations to elephants navigating a crowded and changing world—and to consider what their survival asks of us. 

Janie’s path as a naturalist began in earnest in Yosemite National Park, where she worked as an educator and naturalist, spent time in the mountains, and learned that a field guide, a trail, and a pair of binoculars could open up a lifetime of questions. She studied biology, ecology, natural-resources management, creative writing, and poetry at the University of Michigan, then earned a master’s degree in environmental studies at the University of Montana. Her graduate work brought her to coastal Oaxaca, Mexico, where she developed an environmental-education program centered on Neotropical migratory songbirds. 

Over the years, Janie has worked as a naturalist in Yosemite, a wilderness guide, a trip leader, a public-school teacher, and New Mexico Audubon’s state education director. She teaches ecology and environmental science at Santa Fe Community College and is an educator with Wild Friends, a wildlife-conservation education and civics program at the University of New Mexico. 

Her books include Wild Lives: Leading Conservationists on the Animals and the Planet They Love, with Lori Robinson; The Elephant Doctor of India; and the young-adult science mysteries Death Spiral and Code Red. In her forthcoming book, Travels with Rufous, she follows the extraordinary annual migration of the rufous hummingbird from Mexico to Alaska and back, tracing the bird’s biology, its habitats, and the conservation pressures shaping its future. 

Whether she is writing about a bird in the hand, a forest in transition, or the people working to protect wildlife, Janie is interested in the same enduring question: how might paying attention change the way we live with the rest of the natural world?