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

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.

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

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

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 w

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.