by By Bernd Heinrich
Ecco, 2007
“Nature is a magic show of the highest order,” writes Bernd Heinrich in The Snoring Bird, his very seductive personal narrative. “I can hardly think of a greater grandeur and satisfaction than the process of finding out, and ultimately understanding, how life really works.”
In this, his 13th book, Heinrich captures multiple genres – biography, autobiography, twentieth-century history – and the evolving history of biology and its impact on his immediate family. In lyrical prose, he tells of his wanderings through the woods, beginning with his earliest years on Borowke, his family’s decades-old farming estate in rural Poland, to the forests of Germany, Africa, Indonesia, and Maine.
The Heinrich family’s affluent life on their Polish farm ended in the aftermath of World War II. Fleeing the advancing Russian army, the Heinrichs would live for five hardscrabble years in a small hut in the forest of Hahnheide, Germany, until they were able to emigrate to the U.S.
Heinrich was 11 when his family arrived in America. Their life as refugees did not dim the young Heinrich’s excitement at “the prospect of new beginnings in the land of hummingbirds, rattlesnakes, Indians, and skyscrapers.” Hayfields, old barns, and the outdoor world were places masked in mystery and full of biological discoveries, from insects to snakes, both of which he collected with enthusiasm (the snakes kept in a terrarium at the foot of his bed).
Gerd, Heinrich’s father, was an ardent, prolific letter writer, continually in contact with naturalist colleagues as he pleaded for financial support for expeditions that would take him and Bernd’s mother away from their children for years at a time. Bernd’s later discovery of a trove of his father’s papers in the hayloft of his mother’s barn lead to the dynamic portrait of his father painted in this book.
Gerd Heinrich was a man of chaotic whims, self-centered, obsessed by his worldwide search for and classification of ichneumons, a large family of wasps. On his expeditions, he also provided museums with specimens of plants and animals, especially birds, which his taxidermist wife and her sister prepared for shipment.
The detailed delineation of Gerd’s preoccupied focus on his biologic studies and writings became part of his son’s early, alert, questioning mind. Although he often disagreed with his father, the instinct towards exactness in biologic studies became part of his own research. He would mature, investigating and writing intense personal books on such diverse subjects as insects, bumblebees, geese, ravens, trees, and running – another of his infatuations.
When home, Gerd Heinrich was an avid storyteller, relating to his children the joys of finding a new species or the dangers of daily life working in the tropics, “a world inhabited by entrancing birds and butterflies.” However, “no story,” Bernd tells us, “was as gripping as that of the snoring bird, a species of ground-living jungle rail in Indonesia that had been thought to be extinct.” Heinrich takes his title from his father’s 1932 treatise on this bird.
This is, after all, the story of Gerd Heinrich, the charismatic, self-absorbed, often heartless philanderer, who nevertheless emerges in this portrait as magnificent in his single-minded toughness. “Despite my resistance to him,” Bernd writes, “he instilled in me the mind and values of a naturalist: to be open to all possibilities, to be a close and careful observer, to discipline my interpretations with facts, and to work hard at my passions so that they might bear fruit.”