Reviews

Editors’ Choice
Nature Books for Kids

Essay
Father Knows Wasps
Gerd Heinrich cared more about his precious insects than he did for his own family. But he also managed to imbue in his son, Bernd, a love of nature.
By Ted Levin

The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology
By Bernd Heinrich, Harper Collins, 961 pages, $29.95

Bernd Heinrich’s new book, The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology, is a personal odyssey, the author’s quest to understand both his autocratic father, a passionate collector of wasps, and the women that surrounded him. He also illuminates his father’s influence on his own remarkable career as a world-class biologist. A storytelling masterpiece, Heinrich’s book is laced with adventure and gorgeous natural history. “The events that I describe are real,” he writes, “and I feel compelled to say so up front, because some of what you are about to read may seem like fiction.”

As he unravels paternal mysteries, Bernd Heinrich paints a rich and detailed portrait of his “Papa,” one of the last great biological collectors and a bridge to Victorian Era science personified by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Gerd Heinrich, a German raised on an agricultural estate in Poland, was a taxonomist, museum collector, and philanderer who specialized in the classification of ichneumon wasps, a very large family of parasitoids—each species either injects its eggs in or lays them on a host-specific caterpillar or pupa. Upon hatching, the baby wasp devours its host from the inside out like the beast in the film Aliens. His micro-specialty was the wasps of Burma, and his esoteric two-volume Burmesische Ichneumoninae, 40 years in preparation, still remains the definitive account on the subject—one read, the son assumes, by fewer than a dozen people.

“Papa” described 1,479 new species, and “saw the world in terms of ichneumon habitats,” Bernd writes. “He could name hundreds of minute details that distinguish one species from another. He could recall precisely when and where he acquired each of his specimens. He could predict, like no human before or since, the likely places to find an ichneumon.”

Nothing was too good for his beloved wasps. He stored them in airtight, glass-covered boxes imported from Germany. Although “Papa” had no money to spend for his children’s college education, he built a fireproof brick room to store his collection, which cost his savings to construct. “His passion for these wasps had been the single thread of continuity as everything else—his home, his family, his loves—was heaved around by world events beyond his control,” the younger Heinrich writes.

To support himself and his extended family, Gerd Heinrich collected mammal and bird skins for international museums, often in remote locations, where he lived for months or years at a time while a rotating ensemble of woman—mother, wife, concubine—raised his children. He married four times, and of his five offspring, four were born out of wedlock, an uncommon occurrence in the 1930s and 1940s. For four years during this period, Heinrich and his sister, Marianne, boarding at the Good Will Home in rural Maine, knew their parents only through letters postmarked Angola.

His collecting passions took him to Burma, Mexico, Africa, Indonesia, Canada, and throughout Europe and the East Coast of the United States. He was on the losing side of both World Wars, serving reluctantly in the second, during which he collected wasps from the frontlines before deserting to meet his family.

The Snoring Bird is named for a very rare flightless rail, known from a single specimen. After two exhausting years in the jungles of Celebes, Gerd collected the second for the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), as his crew was making preparations to leave. In the 1930s museums competed fiercely for rare specimens, and the AMNH was as covetous as any of them. Early during the Celebes expedition, after catching the almost-as-elusive Wallace’s rail, the elder Heinrich was “solidly confident that before me no European has ever seen this rail alive, for that requires such a degree of toughening and such demands on oneself as I cannot so easily attribute to others.”

Years later his son tracked down the snoring bird in a drawer in the AMNH. Bernd Heinrich’s own “snoring bird” is his family’s trajectory across the years and an ocean at the time biology transformed, moving from the field to the laboratory. The Heinrichs fled the family estate when the Red Army annexed Poland. After a cross-country escape involving horses, a wagon, a sleigh, a confiscated automobile, a tank, a rickety plane, and a train, the family landed in a nature reserve in a German forest near the Polish border, and survived for five years in an abandoned cottage eating, among other things, the bodies of rodents, whose skins Gerd collected for American institutions.

Before fleeing Poland, Gerd buried the unfinished manuscript for Burmesische Ichneumoninae. With it was the most precious of his Oriental wasp collection, more than 500 specimens, the very first of a particular species known to science. All this was put underground in a pair of watertight metal boxes, one inside the other, several feet below the surface of a swamp. Scrupulously, he made the site look untampered with, and then mapped the location. After the Heinrichs had long since settled in Maine, Polish scientists rescued the collection intact.

Gerd lived to see his son become a distinguished scientist, though not a taxonomist. Bernd Heinrich, a physiological ecologist, is the best-selling author of Ravens in Winter and Mind of the Raven. He also set the U.S. record for the 100-kilometer run and, proving the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, sired four children with three different women, all of whom he had married.

Despite his father’s long absences and parental disinterest, Bernd Heinrich never betrays any lingering resentment or anger toward his father. Instead, he remembers “Papa,” who died in 1984, as, among other things, a man who rolled naked in stinging nettles to conquer discomfort, fell in love “at the drop of a hat,” and “never gave an inch.”

As a boy, Heinrich had little interest in ichneumons. “Worst of all were the summertime outings, when he would take me on a long car ride to some godforsaken swamp where we would be eaten alive by black flies and mosquitoes as we searched for one of his special wasps,” the son recalls. But if it were not for these wasps, Bernd would not have had any contact with his father and most likely would not have carved out his own illustrious career as a naturalist. The summer trips are one of the few hints of animus the son exhi-bits toward the father. That Heinrich otherwise depicts his father as unrelentingly self-absorbed without plumbing his own feelings about “Papa” is this book’s only shortcoming.

Freelance writer Ted Levin lives in Vermont.

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Editor's Choice

Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery
By Jim Motavalli, Da Capo Press, 352 pages, $26.95

Ninety-five years ago a self-taught artist and part-time newspaper illustrator named Joseph Knowles stripped down to his skivvies and walked barefoot into the Maine wilderness while Boston Post reporters and photographers looked on. After two months he emerged hairy and smelly, wearing the skin of a bear he supposedly trapped himself, and was soon feted in Boston by a crowd of 200,000 and an impromptu parade. Not long after, however, Knowles’s exploit was exposed as a grand newspaper ruse. Jim Motavalli’s fascinating Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery skillfully reconstructs the legend of “Nature Man” through public records, newspapers, and photographs while bringing to light the inflated heroics of larger-than-life American wilderness men such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Chastened, Knowles twice more entered the deep woods to revive his reputation, without much success, before retiring near the Pacific shore. As for why Americans seem so taken with back-to-nature tales, Motavalli, the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine, asserts that adventures away from the daily grind are particularly gripping. “As [Knowles] entered the American home via its daily newspapers, he popularized the school of the woods as much as did any of his contemporaries,” Motavalli writes. “Who among us would not have been enthralled and inspired by one of his vaudeville turns? Who among us wouldn’t want to see him in his bearskin even now?”—Shawn Query
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The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
By Craig Childs Little, Brown and Company, 322 pages, $24.99

In an era when many of us spend too much time indoors, when kids are suffering from “nature deficit disorder,” and when fewer and fewer people are venturing into the backcountry, Craig Childs’s new book, The Animal Dialogues, hits you in the gut with pure, crystalline stories of his encounters with animals. We’ve all had them: intimate, fleeting moments that last seconds but are burned into our minds forever. In the hands of a lesser writer, a collection like this might fall apart. But Childs, who has written several books on the Southwest, is a master. He writes of seeing a grizzly 10 yards from his tent in Alaska, of being stalked by a mountain lion at a watering hole in Arizona, and of watching a peregrine falcon take flight off a cliff in Utah. Each chapter is riveting, beautifully crafted. Childs brings to them a depth of knowledge that sets each meeting on the tip of an iceberg of time. A day is “teetering on the fulcrum between winter and spring”; small clouds are “snagged on the mountains”; the cougar “moves out from under the shadows so that both of us are in the same sunlight. We make clear, rigid eye contact. It begins walking straight toward me.” Throughout the book, the author captures that magic we’ve all felt in our animal encounters without cheapening or romanticizing them. “I will tell you this about the animal spirit: it will tear you in two as quickly as it will bring you wholeness. It is not a thing of value or judgment. It’s a thing of purity, and it will not take issue with either death or ecstasy.” In every story Childs reminds us why we fell in love with the wild in the first place, and why we still care so much about it.—Frank Bures
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Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living
By Graham Hill and Meaghan O’Neill, Villard Books, 240 pages, $15

Replacing your incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents is all fine and good, but there are many cheaper and easier ways to reduce your ecological footprint. From the experts who give you green tips and news at TreeHugger.com INSERT TEXT LINK, a popular environmental blog, comes Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living, one of the most complete yet concise guides available that lays out how you can change everyday habits to benefit the environment and your health. Much of what the authors write is common sense. For example, the “Eating Your Way Green” chapter suggests bringing your lunch to work to be healthier and save money. Hill and O’Neill also intersperse fun statistics and debunk “eco-myths” about resource consumption. Leaving your computer in sleep mode overnight does not, for instance, save more energy than turning it off and on with each use. This quick read is packed with information about everything from household cleaners (including recipes to make your own and recommendations for all-natural brands) to eco-fashion (use hemp, bamboo, and organic cotton when you can get it). Clearly, the authors think the time is right for such a handy guide: “You are part of a critical mass that is shaping the new wave of do-it-yourself environmentalism into a grass-roots social movement that has little to do with baggy hemp pants and tofu and everything to do with intelligent modern living.” This casual tone helps lighten the often daunting subject matter and motivates the reader to make these simple yet positive changes.—Shawn Query
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