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The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology

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Bernd Heinrich is a very good writer. I have enjoyed his work ever since I turned up "In a Patch of Fireweed" quite a few years ago. However, I think his current book "The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology" is his best book yet. This takes the reader into the heart and soul of Bernd's often eccentric, but never dull, family, especially his father Gerd. Gerd comes across (like most complicated personalities) as often difficult to understand. He is meticulous in all his endeavors, especially in his love of the wasps in the family Ichneumonidae (concentrated in the subfamily Ichneumoninae). At the same time he cannot escape the realities imposed on him by two World Wars and his association with the German Army as a cavalry soldier, pilot and Luftwaffe officer. A generally decent person (except sometimes in his relationship with women, including his daughters), he nevertheless obeys orders to shoot partisans during World War I. He justified the action as duty, but Bernd did not understand it. The story of Gerd's continued interests in natural science despite more adversity than most people experience except in modern third world countries, his adventures in tropical lands and his sheer survival is gripping. The family's escape from Borowke in Poland to the Hahnheide Forest in northern Germany is amazing. But, as Bernd notes, they were the lucky ones! I was so captured by the narrative that I simply could not stop reading!

It has been pointed out to me that some of the historic events in this book are mis-reported. I have no doubt that this is true, especially since anything autobiographical even in part is colored by the author's impressions (Gerald Durrell's delightful books on his life on the island of Corfu are a case in point, as many details have been moved around, improved and altered to promote a certain story line.) In some few cases such works may contain false information designed to deceive. I have no reason to believe that Heinrich has done this, but I am no expert in the history of the period. I can thus only give the potential reader my impression, and that impression is very favorable in so far as the biology, style and development of the story line goes. I will leave the reader to decide the accuracy of the history reported by Heinrich. The main criticism one could make is that he may not warn the reader, as Durrell does to some extent, of possible historical inaccuracy.

While Bernd never became the systematist his father was (much to Gerd's sorrow), he did become a world-renowned biologist, noted for studies on physiology and behavior. He also became a wonderful writer, with the ability to instill the wonder around him into his readers.

Natural scientists are both blessed and cursed. They are blessed (as I have often been) by the ability to find something of interest in any habitat, be it tropical forest or abandoned city lot. We are never bored! The curse is that few people who are not bitten by the same bug ever understand the fascination we feel with such things as tiny wasps, spiders, vascular plants or one-celled organisms (to name a few). Perhaps the readers of this book, which I hope are many, can glimpse a bit of the reason for our seeming madness.

In September, 1959, in utter disregard of the strictures of the Cold War, one Gerd Heinrich - then living in Maine - posted a letter to the Warsaw Institute of Zoology. The note was accompanied by a map of a location in the Polish countryside. What the map would restore to light was the key to a lifetime's work. Attempting to complete a manuscript on wasps, Heinrich needed the "type specimens" collected over decades of work in locations around the world. In his quest, Gerd had scoured Europe, Persia, Africa and eastern Asia. He brought along wives, lovers, and children. Bernd Heinrich, of bumblebee and raven fame, here wonderfully recounts his father's many adventures and accomplishments. As well as a few of his own.

An attic cleanup confronted Bernd Heinrich with papers and journals - records of his father's complex personal history. Gerd Heinrich's home was a 1300 hectare estate in northwestern Poland - Borowke. Of German heritage, he would endure the many shifts of loyalties that location would suffer. He lacked formal academic education, although he'd done well in secondary school. However, he brought a sense of dedication to collecting and identifying specimens many establishment scientists would envy. His speciality was the ichneumon wasp, that creature that led Charles Darwin away from the notion of a "loving God". Ichneumons, which total more than ten thousand species, lay their eggs in living caterpillars. They are "parasitoid" - they don't live off caterpillars as prey.

Gerd's collection excursions were long and arduous. He spent two years in Celebese seeking a bird specimen, but gathered up wasp samples while doing so. His work was interrupted by two wars, in both of which he served with distinction. Along the way, he also gathered wives - the first of which was briefer than the "marriage" of himself as a pilot with his observer in the early Luftwaffe. Between the wars he managed Borowke and married again. Bernd, however, was the product of a love match, later legalised by circumstances. The driving circumstance was World War II and the need to give Bernd proper status as a German boy. The invasion of Reich territory by the Soviet Army led Gerd to bury the most important specimens, leading to the letter to the Polish Academy many years later. Then, he arranged for wives - past and present - and his children to flee to the West and sanctuary.

Bernd's own story begins with that flight and resettlement in a forest hut in Hahnheide, near Hamberg. For Bernd, Hahnheide was "a child's paradise" - a forest inhabited by a wealth of creatures, including many types of birds. Birds became "my ichneumon wasps", as his corvid books ably demonstrate. The family, although severed by the flight, all managed to reach the US, where life never achieved that known at Borowke. Bernd and his sister were sent to a "school for deprived children" - hardly a pleasant education - while his father and mother continued the quest for wasps. During these latter years, Bernd learns of yet another half-sister, again the result of one of Gerd's liaisons. Ultimately, while birds may have been "my ichneumon wasps", it was insects that gave Bernd a quest of his own. He worked out an incredibly complex mechanism of heat control in moths. He later studied bumblebees to provide new insights in the workings of coevolution between insects and plants.

No work of fiction can stand successfully against this account of human ingenuity, dedication and accomplishment. Gerd's influence on his son is beyond measure, and Bernd reviews the many [but never enough!] exchanges the two had over the years. "Duty" was a major foundation of Gerd's personality, yet the move to the US ultimately brought on a clash over just what that meant. "Discipline" was an equally potent force, and what Bernd learned from his father carried him through his own research programme - and cost him two wives of his own in the bargain. Bernd Heinrich lays this all out with welcome candour, conveyed to the rest of us in engaging style. There are few "family" histories that match this epic for capturing and holding the reader's attention. It is a stunning accomplishment. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Scientific memoirs are often more than just accounts of the writer's professional expertise. They explain where the writer came from, why the writer became a scientist and how his science fits into the historical context.
In the case of The Snoring Bird, however, readers will find all of this and more. Heinrich's memoir reads at times like a movie script. It's a miracle the man is still alive, given his escape from Communist-overrun East Germany at the end of World War II.
The tale of how he ended up in rural Maine, of all places, wearing an "I Like Ike" button during the 1950s, creates a book that even readers with little interest in ornithology will find worth reading.

Bernd Heinrich is a very well known scientist, one whose work spans the fields of natural history, ecology, physiology and animal behavior. He is also a fine nature writer with a multitude of well-received books to his credit. As such, he is uniquely qualified to have written a book about the major changes in biology that have occurred over the last century.

However, there is much more that makes this book fascinating. The history of biology that serves as a major theme in this book also parallels the history of his family, and it is through weaving the story of 20th century biology with his family story and modern world history that Heinrich has produced an excellent book well worth reading for the multiple strands that are woven into it.

His father, Gerd, an old style systematic biologist/naturalist, is a collector and expert on the taxonomy of parasitic wasps. He combines his passion for this type of biology with his role as the head of a German family living on their ancestral estate in an area that had become a region of Poland following WWI.

Gerd is in many ways typical of his generation. He is formed by the old Prussian values, honor, duty, doing things right, with a tendency of being rigid. Socially, he seems quite at home in his role as master of the estate and pater familias. In addition to his adventures as a WWI aviator, he has a history of being quite the ladies man. He can be selfish, or sometimes quite humane or even noble.

Most importantly, he is a collector of nature who really has a passion for the subject. He is an accomplished traveler, whose collecting for major museums has taken him to places far away from the European world of his family and upbringing. He is rigid and duty bound, but also a free spirit in a way, for good and for bad.

The first part of the book provides this essential background for the reader. Both from the comments that Heinrich makes and the sleuthing that he did into family history, the book makes an interesting read for those interested in a world now long gone.

Bernd, born into a world that is being irrevocably altered by the rise of totalitarianism, is the heir to his father and a long tradition. As a small child he is torn away from his ancestral home by events beyond the family control. These include not just the arrival of the Nazis, but also of the Red Army from which the family flees and eventually settles in a forest cabin in the northwest of Germany, just as the Iron Curtain falls on Europe.

The portion of the book dealing with the flight from the Red Army and the years spent trying to survive famine and a war-torn Germany is gripping, and in a way sets the stage for the rest of the book. Particularly interesting are the events of history and their effects on the family, as well as Bernd's experiences living in the forest. Here he first forms his attachment to the world of plants and animals by absorbing the world around him and the knowledge passed on from his father.

Eventually the family moves to Maine and lives on a old farm. The father, now totally out of his cultural and scientific element, struggles to provide for his family and to continue with his passion for his style of biology. Bernd grows into an odd German-Polish-Maine-woodsman with a passion and talent for not only modern physiological ecology but also for distance running. As he matures in his own life and career, he sometimes comes into conflict with his father, personally and professionally, as their worlds move apart.

Toward the close of the book, Bernd begins to come full circle. He matures and has his own life experiences. He is better able to understand his own roots, scientifically and family-wise, and to come to a mature understanding of his father, both as a scientist and a person.

I found the final chapters where he revisits the old estate in Poland and his father's scientific work to be very interesting. He also has a touching closing, where he looks at his father as a person and talks of his habits, virtues and foibles. One gets the sense that he is able to both admire the virtues and forgive the vices of the man who was his father and a major influence on his life.

One might be critical of the author, or of various members of the Heinrich family, but one does come away with a picture of them as real human beings, with virtues and vices. This is not a tell-all or some sort of feel-good confessional story.

Instead, it is a view of trends in 20th century biology and a family who have been intimately involved with nature during an historically turbulent period. I found it to be a fascinating read, and highly recommend it.

Heinrich's riveting family story encompasses two world wars, a hair-raising escape from the Red Army, biological fieldwork on several continents, tumultuous family dynamics, cultural upheaval and personal triumph and disappointment. For starters.

An eloquent naturalist ("Winter World," "Mind of the Raven," "The Geese of Beaver Bog" and nine others), Heinrich brings his organizational and storytelling skills to bear on his father's long and eventful life and shows how his own path was shaped by the man's strong personality and example.

Gerd Heinrich was born in 1896, heir to a German agricultural estate in Poland, his beloved Borowke. He was brilliant, resourceful and confident, qualities that preserved his life as a Luftwaffe pilot during WWI. He was also a patriarch of the old school, that is, self-centered and autocratic, but with a strong sense of family.

Married three times he "fell in love at the drop of a hat." Shortly after Bernd's younger sister was born in 1941 he wrote their mother, Hilde, that he had "just met a beautiful woman and I'd be a fool to leave her alone." Gerd's second wife, Anneliese (whom he had set aside first for her younger sister, Lotte, and then for Hilde) told her, " `You should be happy for him.' "

But Hilde was not complacent and their relationship remained stormy, as Gerd did not reform. He only married her because he wanted to take his son, Bernd, to America after the war and Hilde "went berserk." Hilde also made herself indispensable in his work.

Gerd was a naturalist, also of the old school. He lacked formal training but was (and probably still is, though he died in 1984) the world's foremost authority on ichneumon wasps. Parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in caterpillars (like the tomato hornworm), there are thousands of species worldwide. Gerd's lifework was to collect, classify, name and label every species he could.

Even in those days, not many would pay for ichneumon collecting. So Gerd traveled all over the world collecting for museums and zoos. Most of his specimens were stuffed birds and small mammals, though he did once bring back a live, tame young panther on a train through Russia.

Gerd would prepare himself by memorizing local species, then track and shoot the samples wanted. He didn't, however, have the patience for taxidermy. That was Hilde's job. As it had been Anneliese's and Lotte's before her. Gerd preferred women on his expeditions, finding them more pliant.

Then war came again. A reluctant officer, Gerd's distaste and dread emerge along with his ingrained sense of duty and patriotism - qualities that will arise later in prescient arguments with his son over volunteering for the Vietnam War.

Although Gerd left detailed plans for his family's escape from Borowke at war's chaotic end, they almost left it too late and barely manage to join him before the Red Army overran them. Bernd distills a book's worth of narrow escapes, unexpected benefactors, quick thinking and sheer luck into a handful of intense pages.

Not only planes, trains and automobiles, but horse-drawn hay wagons, military trucks, and shoe leather got them west. After several idyllic (for Bernd) years in a cabin in the woods, the family immigrated to America. Gerd had been told there would be a job and publication of his ichneumon work.

But the struggles continued. While Bernd loved the Maine woods as he had loved the woods in Germany and absorbed new species like a sponge, his father found it more difficult to attract collecting commissions. Though offered several jobs, he did not want to become a "wage slave" doing boring indoor work.

And here father and son begin to truly diverge. Bernd's love of nature and the outdoors took a modern path. He was interested in ecosystems, behavior and evolution while his father remained fixed on collecting and classifying. He embraced his new country while his father found the culture too focused on moneymaking and academic credentials.

And Gerd's self-centeredness led him to take Hilde on several collecting expeditions, putting Bernd and his younger sister in an orphanage school for six and eight years respectively. Bernd's respect for authority earned him high marks for conduct during these years, but he had odd moments of rebellion, one of which cost him his long-awaited graduation.

Midway through college his father invited Bernd to be a member of his "last" expedition. Though it meant sacrificing the University experience he most wanted at that moment, Bernd went, providing himself with a breathtaking adventure as well as a unique experience.

The old man got older after that and the son increasingly went his own way - though he is his father's son - not only in his sometimes extreme dedication to goals but also in his personal life. At age 67, Bernd is on his third marriage and has children about the same age as his first grandchildren.

A rich and exciting book, shaped from recollections, notes, numerous letters and journals and thoughtful reflections, full of outsize personalities, dramatic events and fascinating science, this is a tour-de-force.

This was an interesting and well-written book for nature lovers; the historical element blends well also. But I think the author could have put the minutiae of his research and dissertation in an appendix. This really threw me off and I had a difficult time wanting to finish the book, though I did.

Bernd Heinrich, naturalist extraordinaire, has given us another interesting book, this time framed around his father's and his lives observing and trying to make sense of nature. The father's path was like that of Wallace and Bates, a half a century or more earlier, collecting to make a living. For Vater Heinrich collecting birds and mammals for rich men, established scientists and museums was means to gather and classify his beloved wasps. Aside from his womanizing, Vater Heinrich's manner of life was Prussian and Sohn Bernd suffers from his father's self assurance that he was always right. By some mystery not revealed to the reader papa has a way with women and leaves a trail of old lovers and children behind. Most of the women he gets to do his bidding: caring for his offspring, his estate in Prussia, occasionally supporting him in new conquests and accompanying him on his collecting expeditions where he infects them with his love of living out of doors. Der Sohn too loops his three wife's into his natural history and separates from two of them along with his offspring when they want to live differently.
While it might be nice to know more about the psychology of the family, and a little more of the political contexts with which the family had to deal, the discussions of nature, and the changes in biology are very good. The author has a wonderful way of making accessible his physiological-ecological problem solving. Like his books on Ravens and Winter, Heinrich shows us the wonders of closely observing the nature which surrounds us and to which we have become so blind. In the end his father faces old age, and death, with a kind of disappointment for a productive life that the scientific community never adequately recognized. Charles Fisher author of "Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

Have been a fan of many of Heinrich's works. While I found this interesting from a curiosity perspective, it was a grind for me to get through some of it. Skipped the last 50 pages about his father (war stories)and then skipped another 30 or so pages about BH's career. Tighter editting and a tighter focus on father/son relationship would have made this a winner.

The Snoring Bird is immediately and continuously absorbing, amusing, fascinating and satisfying from the first page to the last. I often shook my head in astonishment at the amazing series of events that kept the Heinrichs alive through two wars, and dangerous expeditions. Bernd has a light touch with his writing that guides the reader painlessly through minefields of insect taxonomy, family stories and epic journeys. Clearly he doesn't know what to think about his father, who nourished him, neglected him, saved him, damaged him--it's an incomprehensible mix that can't ever be sorted out. His mother is not as difficult for him to sort out, somehow. She didn't have the central role to play in his life. My only gripe comes fairly early on, with Bernd's seemingly off-hand discussion of Wallace and Darwin, and the priority for discovering the mechanism of evolution. Experts on both have devoted many pages of much more nuanced discussion than he gives it. I took it as a possible clue to his personality, and it caused me to lose some confidence in him. But it was mostly restored by his wonderful account, which only flags near the end, which is typical of people too. As his father reaches old age there is just not a lot of excitement like when he was a WWI pilot, or doing crazy things with bears and panthers. Bernd's understated way of writing about very painful events may not be very good for one's psychological health, but it makes the text much less of a harrowing experience for the reader, who can only guess at the incredible pain he went through with parents like this. So, this is one of the best books I have ever read. It's phenomenal in its scope across two generations, wealth of how life was in Germany during the two wars, what science is, how naturalist think, what life was like for a child immigrant, what it's like to live with a narcissist--or whatever he was, I'm not sure.

This is one of my top ten books of all time.I loved every inch of it. The science, the history, the beauty, and the story. Not usually a history buff, I gained an indepth view of what life was like in Germany and Poland during the first half of the 20th century. I doubt many of us had such an underestanding of what life could be like without this part of the story. But more than that, I was intrigued about the father - son relationship, good and bad, and how even in the worse of times there is an important bond that comes through in the end.

I also hope this book inspires the reader to get outside and get back in touch with nature. I attempted to accomplish this in "The Chesapeake Watershed:A sense of place and a call to action" but Bernd is the master. The Chesapeake Watershed: A Sense of Place and a Call to Action