The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology (P.S.) [Paperback]

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.