Finding joy in snowy woods

The phrase “nature writing” is a narrowing one, and it tends to irritate the art’s practitioners. It suggests something limited and quaint, and slightly anachronistic, like scrimshaw carved on a whale’s tooth. It also belies both the wildness and variety of nature itself, as well as the wide range of human responses to it.

People -- including people who write about the natural world -- go to nature for a variety of reasons. There are those who go into the wild to prove themselves, for therapy, for a respite from the hurrying world, and there are aesthetes who go for reasons similar to the motives of visitors to an art museum.

For Bernd Heinrich, the author of “Winter World,” nature is a place of wonder and adventure. It is also, primarily, a lab. It is where he goes to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about how animals and plants adapt and survive in the world. If this sounds like a kind of elevated version of a show on the Nature Channel, it is because sometimes it is. As a reader who likes a little more of the personal and spiritual mixed into the granola of nature writing, I found myself occasionally wishing for less of a comprehensive list of the winter survival techniques of animals -- hibernation, self-induced torpors, food hoarding -- and more of a relating of these facts to some overall meaning.

Inevitably, Heinrich is compared to Henry David Thoreau -- a comparison that any nature writer seems to elicit from critics -- but this is accurate only in a limited sense: to the later Thoreau who recorded the minutiae and phenology of his place in his journal, not to the Thoreau who wrote “Walden.” In “Walden,” Thoreau’s central question was “how to live?” As a biologist, in “Winter World,” Heinrich’s central question is “how do golden-crowned kinglets live?”

To judge Heinrich by overly literary standards, however, is to miss the point. The point of “Winter World” -- and an example of the varied possibilities of the environmental genre -- isn’t to offer elevated sentences like Thoreau’s but to offer vital learning. Though not a lyric writer in the tradition of Peter Matthiessen or John Hay, Heinrich, through his accumulated details, has an overall lyric effect, not just of elevation but also of fascination. In the end, the facts create a poetry of accretion and do a fine job of re-creating a miraculous and multifarious world of survival.

We soon find ourselves in the midst of a thrilling detective story as Heinrich tramps through the snowy Maine woods trying to learn how the tiny kinglets, weighing only 5 grams, can survive a night at 30 below. The pleasure of “Winter World” is in following the author’s mind as he puts questions to himself and us, bringing up theories and then testing those theories on the 300 acres of his Maine retreat. “What insects could there possibly be in winter?” he asks when trying to unlock the mystery of the kinglets’ diet. No sooner has he asked the question than he is out in the woods banging trees with a club, collecting the tiny caterpillars that prove to be the key. In fact Heinrich is in awe of the world’s interconnectedness, and a particularly happy quality of Heinrich’s mind is its agile yoking of the local and global. His consideration, for instance, of how the kinglets survive the night leads to a theory about dinosaurs and the evolution of insulating feathers.

Heinrich explains that human beings deal with winter by creating a microenvironment like “an artificial tropics”: “And with good reason, too, as we’re adapted to a tropical environment and maintain it around ourselves all year long, through our housing and our clothing.” But the human way is just one strategy in dealing with winter. “Winter World” presents, among other things, a great list of the variety of responses to the cold months: from the communal huddling of flying squirrels to the underwater foraging of beavers to the near-death of snapping turtles that essentially hold their breath for four months in the mud below the ice.

At its best, the book celebrates Heinrich’s love affair with the winter animals and their tenacity. He introduces us to the “subnivian” tunnels of voles, shrews and mice, the well-insulated and relatively warm space between snow and soil where these little animals survive by chewing on the bark at the bottoms of trees. We find ourselves thinking that winter is a good time to be a vole, until we read about the hunters that follow the slightest scratching sound and plunge through layers of snow: dive-bombing owls and coyotes that hop in the air before crashing down.

Though he conscientiously keeps personal details from intruding, Heinrich’s final description of the kinglet smacks a little of self-portrait. He writes of the bird’s “undampened enthusiasm and raw drive” and its “infectious hyperenthusiasm.” He continues: “Presumably it could not contemplate its fate, regret about mistakes, or fret over lost opportunities. It does not worry about the future, or about life and death.” A description of the bird, yes, but also a middle-aged self-pep talk? Whatever the case, we feel the same drive and enthusiasm propelling the author as he charges through the lyric lab that his Maine woods has become. If he is more Mr. Science than Thoreau, then he is Mr. Science with a deep sense of delight and empathy, reveling in this secret world that no one else seems to see. It is in this regard, despite his acknowledgment of man’s uncanny ability to screw up everything from the global temperature to the roosting caves of bats, that I found this an almost singularly optimistic book.

Finally, there is another secret aspect of this fine book’s appeal. Honest readers of so-called nature writing will admit that they come to the genre not just for the earnest and healthful pleasures of education and wonder, but also for something simpler: the guilty pleasure of romance. This of course is not the busting bodice variety of romance but the romance of retreat: from Thoreau’s archetypal retreat at Walden to Robinson Jeffers’ hand-built house of stone overlooking the Pacific at Big Sur to Wendell Berry by his river in Kentucky.

We can now add Bernd Heinrich’s Maine cabin to the list. It is no accident that Heinrich often refers to Jack London or that he mentions his love of building snow caves as a child. His homemade cabin, without electricity, is a place where water is brought from a well or melted from snow, where he and the students he takes there to study “have been known to fry our own voles.”

The Thoreauvian tradition is a wide one, and Bernd Heinrich, though a science writer, is also a wonderful nature writer. He is a scientist who, in his not-so-secret heart, still likes building snow caves and revels in the pure pleasure of learning. He is also the sort of scientist who, wanting to find out more about how beavers live, dives into the water and climbs up the tunnel into an abandoned den. It is one of the joys of “Winter World” that he invites us to dive along with him. *