Heinrich - The snoring bird : my familys journey through a century of biology

The Snoring Bird

From Bernd Heinrich, the bestselling author of Winter World, comes the remarkable story of his fathers life, his familys past, and how the forces of history and nature have shaped his own life. Although Bernd Heinrichs father, Gerd, a devoted naturalist, specialized in wasps, Bernd tried to distance himself from his old-fashioned father, becoming a hybrid: a modern, experimental biologist with a naturalists sensibilities.

In this remarkable memoir, the award-winning author shares the ways in which his relationship with his father, combined with his unique childhood, molded him into the scientist, and man, he is today. From Gerds days as a soldier in Europe to the familys daring escape from the Red Army in 194$ to the rustic Maine farm they came to call home, Heinrich relates it all in his trademark style, making science accessible and awe-inspiring.

To Ulla

I THANK MARY LECROY FOR SHOWING ME THE SNORING BIRD SPECI men, Aramidopsis plateni, in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and for giving me a list of Papas publications on birds. Erich Diller, Stefan Schmidt, and Johannes Schuberth I thank for sending electronic images and information about Papas ichneumons maintained in the Bavarian State Museum, Munich. Nuria Selva, Adam Wajrak, and Wieslaw Bogdanowicz and the Institute of Zoology in Warsaw, Poland, offered generous help in making available to me pictures of Papas collection in Warsaw and the map that allowed the recovery of the buried collection, as well as help in translations from the Polish. I thank Randolf and Mechtild Menzel for their hospitality in Berlin. I am deeply indebted to the Handschriftenabteilung of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz of the State Library of Berlin for its gift of my fathers correspondence with Erwin Stresemann, and specifically to the late Eva Ziesche and subsequently Iris Lorenz of that same organization. They all helped in deciphering the handwriting of correspondence. Copies of this correspondence, as well as the personal letters, will be archived in the Special Collections of the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont in Burlington. I thank Violetta Tomaszewska and Malgorzata Adamczewska of the Zoological Museum of the Polish Academy of Sciences of Warsaw, Poland, for their help in procuring images of specimens from the part of my fathers ichneumon collection that is still in Poland now. My mother, Christiane Buchinger-Marks, Christel Lehmann, and Rolf Grantsau provided family photographs and memorabilia, and I thankalso Hermen Steinert-Starke for permission to quote from the personal family memoirs of her late sister Beate Richter-Starke. Ralph du Roi Droege of Trittau, Germany, provided information and German translations. Dieter Radke told me his experiences and gave me kind permission to read his private memoir. Thank you to Alice Calaprice for taped interviews with my mother. Elva Paulson gave me letters by my father and information regarding how American ornithologists came to the aid of their German colleagues after the war. Sylke Frahnert of the Museum fur Naturkunde, Berlin, and Jared Diamond and K. David Bishop and Paul Sweet provided information and images of Papas birds from Sulawesi. David Willard of the Field Museum in Chicago provided pictures ofCossypha heinrichi and other Angolan birds. Gary Volker provided information on Heinrichia. I thank Kristof Zyskowski at Yale University for help on Papas birds from Tanzania and Sulawesi, and John Strazanak and David B. Wahl for providing unpublished information of ichneumons and J. Curt Stager for information on African paleoclimates.

I also here take the opportunitypossibly the only one Ill ever haveof expressing my appreciation for the unsurpassed kindness and generosity of the Mainers my family met when we first arrived as immigrants in America. They helped us to build a new life and inspired me in almost everything I have to say in this book. Particular thanks go to the families of Floyd and Leona Adams, Phil and Myrtle Potter, and the Curriers, Gilmores, Ellriches, Brooks, and the Fretz family from Indiana neighbors and friends all. The Good Will Home Association of Hinckley, Maine, where I lived and studied for six years, helped me to grow up and gave me enough stories for a lifetime. I owe it and the many dedicated teachers and role models there a great debt of gratitude. I thank my college teachers and academic colleagues, especially my master of science adviser and inspiring mentor at the University ofMaine, the late James R. Cook, and his family. I also thank George Bartholomew and Franz Engelmann, my PhD advisers at UCLA, and Robert Colby and Coach Edmund Styrna.

My agent, Sandra Dijkstra, helped launch this project and Dan Halpern at Ecco had the faith to make it real. Ghena Glijansky, Lisa Chase, and Susan Gamer gave many suggestions, and improved it with their thoughtful and insightful editing, and Emily Takoudes and David Korals expertise and patience, which saw it through the final trying process to production. Last but not least, I thank my wife, Rachel Smolker, for her enthusiastic encouragement, and indeed her urging me to write this story, her years of patience while I was tussling with it, and her many valuable suggestions that guided it

Contents

WHEN WE CAME TO THIS GREAT COUNTRY IN 1951, MY FATHER, GERD, was already a mature man and an accomplished naturalist. Much of his life had passed. But that past was ever-present. Papa and our mother, Hildegarde (Mamusha, as we called her), talked often about their lives in Poland and Germany in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. They had many stories to tell.

During our first winter in Maine, there was no television, no radio, no electricity. To save on kerosene, we would blow out our lamp early on most nights. After it was dark, my sister Marianne and I would snuggle together in bed, warmed by a couple of bricks heated on the kitchen stove and placed under the covers at our feet, as Papa told us stories. We were old enough to have vivid memories of our very recent fairy-tale existence in a northern German forest, where our family had been refugees, but we were also young enough to be excited by the prospect of new beginnings in the land ofhummingbirds, rattlesnakes, Indians, and skyscrapers.

Still, we were rapt as Papa talked about the Old World; about Poland, where we had lived; and of far-off lands in the tropics (the scene of his own youthful adventures) inhabited by entrancing birds and butterflies. My father was a naturalist, and no story was as gripping as that of the Snoring Bird, a species of ground-living jungle rail from Indonesia that had been thought to be extinct. The title of this book is a direct heist from Papas Der Vogel Schnarch (The Snoring Bird), published in 1932, in which he recounts his experiences searching the jungle, at the behest of Dr. Leonard Sanford of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for the Snoring Bird. I am sad to say that Papas book has drifted into obscurity; it became unavailable shortly after it was published, and the publishing house (Dieter Reimer, Berlin) cannot issue a reprint, because it no longer existsthe publishing house was presumably bombed into oblivion during the war. But the title is still excellent, and so is his inscription in the copy of this book that he gave to me. Translated into English, it says: To Bernd Heinrich, zugeeignet [adapted] for the memory of the pioneer time of the discovery of the worlds animal variety, and for his father, who took part in it, 24 XII, 1972. I here take him up on his thought. Papa spent two very strenuous years in his quest for the secretive snoring bird in Celebes (now Sulawesi) while also hunting for his beloved ichneumon waspsstrange and exotic creatures that became something like family icons for us, as they had, in many ways, determined the trajectory of our lives as he pursued them at great cost over several continents.