Recommend

This book took me a long time to read because I initially read twenty or so pages and then put it down for months. The meandering narrative in both the author’s thoughts and described actions are not typically what I like in a book about nature, though I know it’s a common trope. However, I eventually came back to to the book, curious about the topic and, having read more, came to the understanding that this is an intrinsic part of Bernd Heinrich’s process as a biologist. He is an experimenter who has to find and see and test. He describes tasting insects for the sweet antifreeze they produce, or heating up dead birds to measure the rate of heat loss in winter, or stuffing a roadkill chipmunk’s cheek pouch with seeds to see how many could fit. The meandering was not his laziness in writing, it was who he is as a biologist.

Winter World is, not surprisingly, a book about how animals (insects, rodents, squirrels, birds, etc.) survive the winter in freezing cold. It explains how they may build nests or huts, or how they can drop their body temperatures in torpor, or how they may even be effectively dead as they freeze solid, but then thaw and come back to life. The animal adaptations to winter are many, varied, and complex and this book does a great job explaining them.

It is also valuable that the book focuses on the northeastern United States, where the author lives. The reason this is beneficial is because often times authors take continent-wide or world-wide approaches to the natural world, but then the information about any particular area or habitat is diluted. I may not live in Maine, but I found this aspect to be advantageous to focusing my perspective and understanding the concepts.

It is worth noting that while the author starts out very meandering, he eventually moves into a much more traditional and categorical approach, suggesting he did not really have to go about it that way. But even in this later discussion, he still spends significant time talking about experimentation and observation, so he never loses himself

One other minor criticism was his declaration of what all entomologists believe theologically. And while he is certainly more qualified than I am to make such a statement as he is, in fact, an entomologist, talking for the entire group is still a bit too much.