Summer World: A Season of Bounty (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: using leaf damage, summer world, wood frogs, New England, Namib Desert, South Africa (more...)

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Book Description

In Summer World: A Season of Bounty, Bernd Heinrich brings us the same bottomless reserve of wonder and reverence for the teeming animal life of backwoods New England that he brought us in Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. Now he is focusing on the animal kingdom in the extremes of the warmer months, with all its feeding, nesting, fighting, and mating.

Whether presenting disquisitions on ant wars, the predatory characteristics of wasps, the mating rituals of woodpeckers, or describing an encounter with a road full of wood frogs, Summer World never stops observing the beautifully complex interactions of animals and plants with nature, giving extraordinary depth to the relationships between habitat and the warming of the earth. How can cicadas survive—and thrive—at temperatures pushing 115°F? Do hummingbirds know what they're up against before they migrate over the Gulf of Mexico? Why do some trees stop growing taller even when three months of warm weather remain? With awe and unmatched expertise, Heinrich explores hundreds of questions like these.

Exquisitely illustrated with dozens of the author's own drawings, Summer World is Bernd Heinrich's most engaging book to date, a fascinating work from one of our very best science writers.

On Summer World: An Amazon Exclusive Essay by Bernd Heinrich

Summer, as I experience it, is not just one time. In terms of living, it is a time of courting, birthing, foraging and feeding, avoiding being eaten, growing, and lastly preparing for winter. Furthermore, unlike in winter or life under severe desert conditions, nothing is static. Most of us live in a world where timing is everything. Here in Vermont and Maine where I live, there is about a week to prepare the soil, another to plant the peas, another to put in the tomato plants. There is a week where the bees pollinate the apple trees and a week for us to harvest the fruit, and another to dig the potatoes. All nature is on a tight schedule. The wood frogs mate in mid-April, the robins return late April, the blueberries bloom in May, and the geese migrate north the second week in October. Summer as we know it is not a uniform struggle against excessive heat and lack of water. It is instead a continually shifting schedule of living where the lives of one species adjust to those of others.

So, as I set out to write Summer World, my focus changed. One potential approach was to discuss various topics such as mating, nesting, feeding and predator avoidance. Instead, it seemed possibly more engaging to concentrate on conspicuous aspects of the lives of common, every-day animals and plants that we tend to take for granted but that are marvelous because of their hidden agendas and concealed complexities.

It seems to me that we are in a perpetual crisis mode where attention is rightly focused on what is wrong with the world, although too little appreciation is given to what is right with it. Nature is always right. It always bats last; it is the final arbiter of all things that concern every living thing. So I focused on the first thing I saw that captured my attention: mating wood frogs. This species breeds in large crowds that gather for a one- to several-day orgy in almost every temporary little pool, of which there are more that a dozen within my neighborhood. It was a joy to watch the frogs’ antics, and I tried to trick them to find out what they respond to, and to then contemplate and figure out their various stratagems. The frogs were strange, comical and counter-intuitive. The noisy males were not only competing fiercely to catch any female they could but also unknowingly, I presume, cooperating in attracting them. Nothing that they did was obvious to me without first delving into their detailed life histories.

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From Publishers Weekly

In his pursuit of actively observing his camp in the forests of western Maine and the woods, beaver bog and gardens around his Vermont home, Heinrich (The Trees in My Forest) delights with the surprising activities of local flora and fauna—and his own scientific antics: with a pet grackle named Crackle, he raids wasp nests to see what the red-eyed vireo will do with the paper and builds platforms in trees to find out who visits the sapsucker lick (hummingbirds, hawks and warblers). For entertainment, he recommends, There is a solution that beats... a television set with 100 channels, by a mile: watching ants and other critters. The book features such mysteries as the significance of the mating habits of wood frogs and the eating patterns of caterpillars, but Heinrich also takes time to observe Homo sapiens, remarking that, like birds, we live in a perpetual summer, not by strenuous biannual migrations but by creating and retreating into 'climate bubbles,' reminding readers that they need clear vision and also a spiritual imperative so that we will focus on the ultimate ecology, not the proximate economy. (Apr.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060742178
• ISBN-13: 978-0060742171
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,181 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FASCINATING CHRONICLE OF NATURE'S BEAUTY SEEN THRU SUMMER'S PRISM, April 10, 2009

By	RBSProds "rbsprods" (Deep in the heart of Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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Five MESMERIZING Stars!! Award-winning naturalist Bernd Heinrich "Summer World" ("A Season of Bounty") is teeming with keen, fascinating observations on fauna and flora and the interconnections within Nature at the height of summer. He follows up his book on Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (P.S.) by primarily focusing on this very special season with reflections and investigations near his own home and cabin with regard to the different species of plant and animal life. Then he branches out around the world in specific cases. Professor Heinrich begins in winter and then spring: awaiting the arrival of the blue jays, with beavers secure in lodges, & frogs in near-lifeless suspended animation. Then he takes us from "Awakening" in his neck of the woods and in general: with essays on geese, the "rowdy" convocations of the wood frog, early-arriving red-winged blackbirds and phoebes, soaring woodcocks, sneaky cowbirds, and so on, all the way to "The Last Peep" of summer.

Reading this book, one can only be impressed by the professor's powers of observation, his 'hands on' approach, and his ability to make what are often dry subjects into 'poetic descriptions'. On one hand, he can get technical and reach back 150,000 years as man emerges; or 80 million years into the Cretaceous period; or to distant solar systems to speculate on life-ready planets; or discuss the effect of the inclination of the earth, the solstices, photo-periods, and biological clocks. On the other hand, he gets into some engrossing discussions about moths; butterflies; eggs; larvae; pupae; ants; bees; birds; complex trees, the environment, evolution, and the true heralding of summer's end: photoperiod and a key type of acid. Some of the word pictures and thoughts are awesome such as some ants "bodyguarding" catepillars, Apache cicadas using the desert paloverde tree as a drinking fountain, and the almost unbelievable 17 hour non-stop, top-speed flight of some hummingbirds across the Gulf of Mexico. He is great at describing specific animals getting the next generation of a species born, prepared, and independent before fall and winter close in. This is a totally impressive nature book by a man so 'into Nature' that he actually uses an electronic thermometer to measure the body temperature of bees. This book is one huge learning experience that should intrigue lovers of nature and may cause one to look a lot closer at what is happening around the neighborhood and the world with far more understanding and empathy. My Highest Recommendation! Five NATURAL Stars! (This review is based on a Kindle download, with 41 figures.)

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Reading Meditation, April 21, 2009

By	litaddiction (Chicago) - See all my reviews

SUMMER WORLD is a 230-page walk in the Maine and Vermont woods with professor and naturalist Bernd Heinrich.

It's a stroll, really, with lingering stops to observe the warm-weather behavior of birds, insects, and plants -- and the sky, considering the sun's impact on seasonal life. Heinrich's voice is gentle, his sense of wonder and curiosity prompting a pursuit of species and field experiments that take the reader beyond the informative What to the intriguing Why in nature. I did sometimes find myself wanting more definitive science to complement his hypotheses and wonderings ... and wanting a more diverse range of species, including some mammals.

Heinrich's short, self-contained chapters beg to be read outdoors, several at a sitting and paired with a beverage. The illustrations are lovely even in my advance-reading copy, and I couldn't resist visiting a bookstore to see the published volume. What a surprise to find that the whole book (text and illustrations) is printed in a nature-ish soft-green ink! (Take a look at the "First Pages" via Amazon's Look Inside feature.) A center insert contains full-color drawings and photographs on glossy paper, and an index and bibliography (for most chapters) support further exploration by the reader.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In awe of nature, July 18, 2009

By	Himri "Himri" (Tempe, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

The book goes like a true story of parts of nature.

Wood frogs: Their rituals(awake for only few months a year and still thriving) seem weird. The author doesnt just stop at this observation. He goes about setting up little experiments to prove or dispute the possible explanations.

Bald-Faced Hornet Nests: Hornet paper, a Talisman to ward off all evil predators from a vireo's nest.

The Blues: Why ants dont eat blue butterflies?

Mud Daubers and Behavior: Can you imagine being born in an encasement with food provided?

Artful Diners: Rolled leaf caterpillars and dried leaves with still a bit of green at a spot

The sketches and pictures add to the magic.