Audiobook8 hours
Summer World: A Season of Bounty
Written by Bernd Heinrich
Narrated by Mel Foster
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
As the snow melts and the spring approaches, the animal kingdom awakens. In Summer World, Bernd Heinrich, the bestselling author of Winter World, brings us an up-close and personal view of that awakening and rebirth.
Almost all life on the surface of the earth derives its energy from the sun, either directly through photosynthesis or indirectly by consuming plants, making summer the time when nature is most active-feeding, fighting, mating, and nesting. From frogs, wasps, and caterpillars to hummingbirds and woodpeckers, Heinrich explores these animals' adaptations for surviving and procreating during the short window of summer, and he delights in the seemingly infinite feats of animal inventiveness he discovers there.
Infused with his inexhaustible enchantment with nature, Summer World encourages a sense of wonder and discovery for the natural world and its busiest season.
Almost all life on the surface of the earth derives its energy from the sun, either directly through photosynthesis or indirectly by consuming plants, making summer the time when nature is most active-feeding, fighting, mating, and nesting. From frogs, wasps, and caterpillars to hummingbirds and woodpeckers, Heinrich explores these animals' adaptations for surviving and procreating during the short window of summer, and he delights in the seemingly infinite feats of animal inventiveness he discovers there.
Infused with his inexhaustible enchantment with nature, Summer World encourages a sense of wonder and discovery for the natural world and its busiest season.
Author
Bernd Heinrich
BERND HEINRICH is an acclaimed scientist and the author of numerous books, including the best-selling Winter World, Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, The Homing Instinct, and One Wild Bird at a Time. Among Heinrich's many honors is the 2013 PEN New England Award in nonfiction for Life Everlasting. He resides in Maine.
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Reviews for Summer World
Rating: 4.218181794545455 out of 5 stars
4/5
55 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/510 May 2011
I enjoyed this book a great deal for the gentle rhythm of observing nature through the summer months and the insights which at some points were hilarious.
Take wood frogs. The problem was to work out why the lads all make such a hell of a racket and then when not as many girls turn up they jump on the ones that do. Why didn't just one call and see if he could attract a single mate?
The answer is that one frog could make a sound that would carry (say) a mile around him but female frogs are not common and just one might have heard him and might have decided to visit him, or might not. But if ten frogs call the area is expanded a hundredfold and many more female frogs might hear the call and as they are more attracted to what seems like a party rather than one single male, they are much more likely to go. So the male frogs think that they have a better chance of scoring if they give a party than if they just howl out on their lonesome.
Seems that frat boys work exactly the same way. Girls walking past places that look like they might have a party are much more attracted to the one where there is loud music rather than the one that sounds 'dead'. Not sophisticated behaviour at all by these university lads but an inheritance from their reptile brains.
I love evolutionary biology because it reveals such points as this - when we think we know it all, turns out we have no idea.... - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The best thing about Bernd Heinrich is he always teaches me something I didn't know. There is a plethora of fascinating information here about nature in summer. From wood frogs to mud daubers to beatles nothing escapes Heinrich's eye. The only real drawback is his disjointed presentation of information. Many of the entries look like they were randomly selected from journal entries over 20+ years. But it is still worth the effort to gain the knowledge he provides.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed this book--it's the first nature book I've ever been inspired to read. (It was the author's hand drawn illustrations on the cover that drew me to it.) Each chapter discusses a different aspect of summer--one you probably hadn't thought to notice. From ant wars to the habits of trees and their leaves, Bernd Heinrich covers a wide variety of topics. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on mating wood frogs, nesting phoebes and deaths and resurrections, although I found enlightenment and education in every species discussed. (I didn't know I could be so entranced by insects!)One drawback to this book, in my opinion, is that it seems to be in need of some editing. I sometimes found it confusing and difficult to discern exactly what the author was talking about, since he tends to skip back and forth and throw in ideas that aren't necessarily related to the subject at hand.All in all though, a very satisfying read. It has definitely made me more aware of my surroundings and the immediacy of acting to preserve our planet's ecosystem. I can see myself picking this book up in future summers, rereading favorite bits, just to feel more in touch with the season and life itself.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary: Summer is the season of life, the season of awakening and hatching and growing and reproducing. Every species that experiences summer (and even those tropical and desert species that experience nothing but summer) has evolved a unique way to cope with the challenges of the season, and to make its way in life and make copies of itself for the next generation. Covering species from trees to beetles, from birds to wasps, from frogs to lichens, Heinrich takes us on a tour of summer, and how its inhabitants go about the all-important business of life in their unique and varied ways.Review: To get my biases out in the open: I am a scientist. More specifically, I am a biologist who studies the hows and whys of how animals and plants make a living during the reproductive season - exactly what this book is about. I'm also very familiar with many of the species that Heinrich describes, having spent many summers conducting fieldwork in a forest very similar in ecology and species composition to the one outside his back door. I love natural history - it's a large part of the reason I'm in the field I'm in. Stories about birds and frogs and wasps doing what they do are just fundamentally cooler (and easier to grasp, particularly to laypeople) than stories about gene regulation and protein metabolism. However, I've been trained to look at these types of nature stories through the lens of hard science.I did my best to read this book with an open mind, to try to see it from the point-of-view of a non-scientist, and not from my eggheaded elitist ivory tower. But I can't. I can't turn it off. And, reading the book without having read the author blurb first, I was somewhat surprised to discover that Heinrich was a biology professor - I had assumed that he was an author first and naturalist second. The book reads as series of "look at this neat thing that I noticed", punctuated by home "experiments" to test their causes. Maybe because it's an ARC, but there is a surprising scarcity of primary literature cited in the text, and the "Selected References" section doesn't contain a whole lot of works later than 1990. Not that I was expecting this to be chock-full of in-text citations, and not that there wasn't plenty of high-quality science published in the first half of last century, but the answers to at least some of the conundrums he poses could have been found within fifteen minutes on Google Scholar, so it's rather dissatisfying when the text just shrugs and goes "Weird, huh?" instead of providing the reader with a conclusive, scientific answer.Similarly, there's a level of factual error that would be really difficult to justify were this a scientific publication, or even something that counted as popular science writing, instead of the more nebulous category of "nature writing." Heinrich can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that the distance sound travels doesn't scale linearly with amplitude (if you can hear one calling frog from a mile away, you will NOT be able to hear 100 calling frogs from 100 miles away), or for talking of a female bird developing her "ovaries" (most species of birds only develop one side of their reproductive tract), but someone really should have caught the fact that Groundhog Day is not on February 1st. Again, these are not huge errors from a layperson's point of view, plus they may be due to the fact that I read an ARC, and they'll hopefully get caught in the editing process, but the fact that they're there at all made me somewhat uneasy about the rigorousness of the science in the rest of the book.But perhaps I'm being oversensitive here. For the most part Heinrich covers a wide variety of topics, and presents the reader with lots of fascinating tidbits about how plants and animals go about doing the things they do. The book is also filled with Heinrich's own illustrations and field sketches (and I believe the finished edition will have a color insert as well), which are lovely, and add not only visual interest but also explanation to the stories he's describing. He also uses tidbits of natural history storytelling to make several interesting and cogent points on life and death, morality and religion, conservation, and humankind's place with respect to the rest of the community of Life. The best thing I can say about the book is that Heinrich writes with a clear sense of wonder and respect for the tiny miracles of life that take place all around us, and which most of us never notice. Wait, no, that's the second best thing. The best thing was that his sense of wonder inspired me to get up and get outside, and to start paying more attention to these miracles for myself - and what more could we really ask for from our nature books?So, basically, ignore me and my eggheaded grumping about the scientific literature. This book is geared for the lay audience, not for me, and if it inspires even a handful of that audience to be more curious about the lives of the creatures with which they share their world (and I suspect it will), then it will have done its job well. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: This book is very approachable and easy to read, even for those who normally stay far away from science writing. It would be best, I think, not to be read straight through, but to be browsed a chapter at a time, preferably while sitting on one's porch on a nice spring or summer evening.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What is the strange phenomena behind one group of ants kidnapping another? How does the unique tube shaped nest of the mud dauber promote and sustain its survival needs? What are the secret motives behind the wood frog's mating call? How does one species of butterfly not only manage not to get attacked and consumed by ants, but also gain entry to their secret lair as a guest? What is the story behind "invisible" caterpillars? In Summer World, author Bernd Heinrich answers all of these questions and probes into many other unusual animal and plant behaviors. Written as a chronicle over a period of years, the author shares his experiences of the changing landscapes of Maine and Vermont, deftly interpreting the astonishing and astounding world that most of us never get to see. Among his fascinating accounts we not only learn about the amazing animal behaviors being undertaken, but of the surrounding flora and of its own entrancing struggle for survival and reproduction. Heinrich does an amazing job of capturing the hows and whys of the forest and swamp that he studies, and with an infectious sense of wonder, fills his pages with accounts of his experimentation and exploration. The book, filled with drawings and photographs of his subjects, is a superb specimen of nature writing, and its absorbing and striking insights into the world of the plants and animals show that the change of season is something to be continually admired and appreciated.I absolutely loved this book. While I was reading I became so excited about it that I was constantly trapping family and friends to read bits out loud to them. I would say this book is akin to a National Geographic show, full of interesting and strange tidbits of animal and plant behavior. I wasn't exactly sure what to make of this book when I first began reading because, for a time, Heinrich went into much descriptiveness about the physiology of plants and trees and quite honestly, I felt I might have gotten in over my head. I was a little worried that the book would be too dry and factual and not very entertaining, but boy was I wrong! When he began to get into the sections on frog behavior and mating habits, I was glued to the page, and as subsequent passages passed he delved further and further into the remarkable and strange behavior of birds, caterpillars, ants, and many other creatures. He even relates his joy when the first Pheobe (a small bird that makes its nests on and around human habitats) of the season is spotted one early morning. That's the thing about this book, it's evident that Heinrich loves what he does and how these plants and animals fit into our world. His joy over the bird was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how devoted he is towards the nature that surrounds him. I liked that you could feel his enthusiasm and wonder throughout the book; he was consistently surprised and amazed at the economy and cleverness of the nature that surrounded him.I also liked the author's way of making the material easy to understand and presenting it in bite-sized sections for easier comprehension. I thought some of the most endearing parts of the book were the sections where Heinrich, in seeking to understand the systems and functions of the nature around him, conducted impromptu experiments that sometimes did not go as planned. In particular, the incident with the wasps was very funny and unexpected. I think Heinrich has a great sense of respect for the all the various creatures that he studies, and his inquisitiveness and commitment towards them is something that I admire deeply. Though the book is divided into chapters that focus on one particular animal or plant, I liked the fact that sometimes a random creature would surprise me in an otherwise animal specific chapter. Heinrich also touches a bit on the evolution of the human species, the dangers of pollution to fragile ecosystems and the unpredictability of animal extinctions. This is the type of book that slowly unfolds on you, drawing you deeper and deeper into its intricacies and wonders, until before you know it, you are turning the final pages.I found much to enjoy in this book and thought that Heinrich used his unique writing and research skills to bring all the wonder of the outdoors to his readers in a functional and convivial way.There were constant surprises to pick out of this book, and it has a style that can be enjoyed over and over through consecutive readings. Heinrich also wrote another book that is a companion to this book. It is called Winter World, and I can't wait to get my hands on it! If you are a nature lover, this book is definitely for you. I would also recommend it to anyone who is looking for a light yet engrossing read. An Awesome book.