Mr. Natural
WHEN the ice melts and the trees bud in the temperate forest, the female ichneumon wasp surveys the land in search of caterpillars. When she finds one, she lands on its back and inserts a delicate tube as sharp as a needle beneath the oblivious little bug’s skin. Later in the spring, when the caterpillar by rights should have become a butterfly or a moth, some 700 wasps hatch instead from its empty carcass, its innards having been devoured by the hungry grubs as they grew. Of this, one of the more grisly reproductive strategies in the entomological world, Charles Darwin once remarked, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would designedly have created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding on the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice.”
In Bernd Heinrich’s gripping memoir, “The Snoring Bird,” the ichneumon serves as both through-line and metaphor: The pursuit of it occupied his father, Gerd Heinrich, through two world wars and expulsion from his homeland; his love for the tiny creatures defined his life. He was collecting and cataloging them even as his eyesight began to fail at age 75, when he wrote to his son, “All I am still longing to do is to be in the woods somewhere during the summer, and hunt my fascinating insects.” He regarded them objectively, without imposing on them ethics irrelevant to their survival. It is not unlike the equanimity with which Bernd Heinrich regards his father’s extraordinarily dramatic and difficult life.
Heinrich did not follow his father into ichneumon research. Instead, the biologist, professor and author has a charismatic population of ravens to thank for his success -- curious, tame, socialist creatures he wrote about in his wonderful 1989 book, “Ravens in Winter.” He has the ravens to thank for “The Snoring Bird” too. After reading “Ravens in Winter,” a woman named Eva Ziesche wrote to tell him about her pet raven. She turned out to be a handwriting expert at the Prussian State Library, and Heinrich sent her a package of indecipherable letters written to his father by Berlin zoologist Erwin Stresemann. She wrote back to say that the library had “two thick files of correspondences from Gerd Heinrich to Erwin Stresemann, dated from February 1926 through November 1963!” She had no trouble deciphering the other half.
“The Snoring Bird” is the result of that correspondence, blended with Heinrich’s childhood memories and family writings, including his father’s out-of-print memoir, “Der Vogel Schnarch,” also named after that bird with a call like a human snore -- the rare flightless rail, which the American Museum of Natural History once sent Gerd on an expedition to find. Bernd’s “Snoring Bird” is a posthumous celebration of a man cut off by war from his destiny. It is sometimes the story of a hero, but never of a saint: Gerd Heinrich emerges, in his later years, as an opinionated, duty-bound Prussian who might have lived more contentedly had a dollop of humility tempered his lofty self-image. But, like the ichneumon (the son implies), Gerd Heinrich had -- also by necessity -- adapted to his circumstances.
Gerd’s story, as his son tells it, begins on the eve of World War I, on a country estate in West Prussia called Borowke, a place of enviable efficiency. Crop rotation obviated the need for pesticides; geese fattened up on leftover grain; the skins of sheep slaughtered for their flesh became upholstery. Landowners and staff lived entirely off the land. Despite the death of Gerd’s sister from typhus and his parents’ subsequent estrangement, it was an idyllic existence.
And like all idyllic existences in early 20th century Europe, it would not last long. In 1914, at age 17, Gerd enlisted, joining an elite group of cavalrymen; two years later, he had become a skilled fighter pilot. After Germany went down to crippling defeat, West Prussia became part of Poland, and Gerd had to beg for Polish citizenship to retain his family’s estate.
For more than a decade between the two world wars, Gerd pursued his chosen profession, with his second wife, Anneliese, and her sister -- also Gerd’s lover -- at his side. (Gerd ultimately had children by three different women; judge if you want to -- the author, thrice married himself, does not.) He had been collecting specimens since childhood, and through Stresemann won appointments for expeditions around the world. In the Danube delta, they found ibises and herons; from Persia, they brought home a panther for the Berlin Zoo. Everywhere, they found, collected and cataloged ichneumon wasps.
What might have been a long and happy career lasted until the summer of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Gerd, suspected of being “Polish-friendly,” quickly contacted his old Luftwaffe commander and asked to join the war effort. At 43, “an age when many men would have been deemed too old to fight,” Heinrich writes, “he was forced to go to war to save his life.”
Heinrich writes with unabashed emotion of the Christmases his father spent at military posts with terrified young soldiers; of British prisoners of war, forced into labor at Borowke, who later became family friends; and of his own perilous birth in April 1940 -- to Hilde, a Polish woman his father had not yet married (Germans were forbidden to fraternize with Poles). He also describes how, at the end of the devastating war, a part of the extended Heinrich family -- two women and two children, including the author -- fled the approaching Red Army in blind terror. Later, after Gerd joined them, they crossed into the American sector just before the border closed for good.
After their harrowing escape, the Heinrich clan took refuge in a tiny cabin in a nature preserve near Trittau called the Hahnheide. There, tucked away in the woods without heat or running water, they stayed for six years. “I think children have a proclivity to be interested in the natural world, but often this is thwarted by a lack of exposure,” writes the author, who lived in the cabin from ages 5 to 11. “I had, by force of circumstances, only the natural world as entertainment.” In the Hahnheide, Heinrich became a biologist. He continued in that vein through the family’s immigration to the United States and his college years at the University of Maine. In 1970, he earned a PhD at UCLA, studying “flight energetics and temperature regulation” in sphinx moths; later, he would write about the social order of bumblebees.
Whereas Heinrich’s writing has earned him both fame and academic respect, his father’s painstaking classification of his beautiful ichneumon specimens, done in isolation over a lifetime fraught with obstacles, brought him little more than his own satisfaction. Until, perhaps, now. “The Snoring Bird” manages in the end not only to bring Gerd Heinrich’s ichneumon research into the light but also to show readers why the work of an observant field biologist still matters. The ichneumon wasp, to us so opportunistic and immoral, in fact plays an essential role in controlling a forest’s moth population. Bumblebees distribute power evenly among the workers. Ravens share food with one another. “Beyond its intricate physiological mechanisms,” Heinrich writes, “biology is history.”
