Flashes of Panic

I haven’t been reading as much since we started CMI, so finishing a decent book is half triumph (I found the time to plow through it!), half disappointment (now I need to find time to get traction on another one.)

Last night I finished Bernd Heinrich’s pseudo-memoir, The Snoring Bird actually much more a biography of his father than a memoir. Heinrich occupies about a foot and a half of my bookshelf, since I read his A Year in the Maine Woods shortly after graduating from college. He found his way into science by pursuing his own curiosity and questions, and he’s made his way as a writer, I think, by bringing readers along the same trail of questions (but without, of course, requiring them to follow every single false trail he did when tracking his own answers.)

The Snoring Bird is the story of Heinrich’s father, who was a soldier on the losing end of two World Wars, but also a leading scientist in an obscure niche of biology (the taxonomy of a certain order of parasitic wasps) and a well-known “collector” of specimens for museums when that sort of thing was still done. It also tells the incredible story of the family’s flight from western Poland across Germany ahead of the advancing Red Army, and their eventual emigration to the USA.

On finishing the book, I was motivated to pull out another Heinrich I’ve had on the “to read” pile for a while, The Thermal Warriors. This one is a lot closer to Heinrich’s own professional work, including actual equations for the heat generated by a flying insect. (Most of his other books tend to shy away from including equations in the text.) It’s similar to The Snoring Bird in that it introduces a fascinating subject and leads you through it, but different in that the subject is somewhat less personal.

But with the perspective of The Snoring Bird, knowing what led Heinrich into his field and how he found his own way in biology, there’s a new background to his discussion of wasps and bumblebees. His investigation of insect energy economies (and, eventually, raven intelligence, long distance running, and other topics) was part of the tides that bore biology away from his father, who completed his life’s work in relative obscurity, struggling to find peer-reviewed journals which would publish type descriptions of wasp species.