Bernd heinrichs why we run

The raven project had expanded, and as interest in corvid cleverness mounted, it continued to expand as others including another post-doc, Thomas Bugnyar, came from Austria and followed up with studies in my then also second, Vermont, aviary.

Ravens, the long thought fabulous birds, were becoming ever more interesting and fabulous as during the next years even more new questions were emerging. Especially the revealing of their startling intelligence, or insight, which I had not before ever thought possible to be empirically revealed. All of this new information both from recent studies and from the old and new literature on them needed to be tied together. The result was this book, meant as current behavioral science of ravens in context of ancient myth and old observations, and accessible to a wide audience.

From the book jacket: "In Why We Run, biologist, award-winning nature writer, and ultramarathoner Bernd Heinrich explores a new perspective on human evolution by examining the phenomenon of ultraendurance and makes surprising discoveries about the physical, spiritual -- and primal -- drive to win.

At once lyrical and scientific, Why We Run shows Heinrich's signature blend of biology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, infused with his passion to discover how and why we can achieve superhuman abilities. This book was thought of twenty years before I wrote it. I was 40 years old, but the circumstances for it reach back to when I was Running had at various times been an important part of my life.

It gained me recognition by teachers who encourage me to go to college. It was a source of rebellion against my uncompromising father who considered it a waste of time. In my Ph. I was a good runner—I won cross-country races and got all the satisfaction and all the recognition for that effort and talent that I deserved. However, I identified myself as a scientist, and felt I had made achievements far beyond my wildest dreams. Here, I had invested my heart and soul, and felt I got almost no recognition, where others got prizes for discoveries I felt were fewer if not lesser.

I realized in the competitive academic world, almost everything was totally based on personal judgments, self-promotion, contacts and sometimes on worse. Two colleagues who had apparently considered me a competitor had I felt got boosted in part from my work as a graduate student—they both got elected to great honors. I decided that for just one half year I would put in as much effort into trying to achieve in running as I routinely put into my science.

I knew that I would here be judged fairly, because nothing in competitive running performance is based on judgment. It is fair. Not being speedy, I tried distance running and managed to get third in the West Valley, California, marathon, finishing 40 seconds shy of a slot in the U.

Olympic marathon trials. I later won the Golden Gate marathon, as a "complete unknown," as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, having speeded up and then caught the already prematurely announced winner at the tape. I had more distance running in me and wondered if could perhaps do better racing a longer distance. To be motivated to start training, I needed a lofty goal, and so after marathon victories achieved by what I had left at the end, I decided to aim for a U.

I told myself that if I got the record, it would at my age then 41 be an achievement worthy of someday writing a book about. The adventure of actually training for three whole months, as I had not been used to training before, proved to be even more dramatic than I had anticipated. I not only won the race I had picked to run—the national championships held in Chicago—but I also set the American record for any age, and set various other records along the way at the mile point.

It was a dream come true, and I used up my momentum in several more races in the next couple of years. Not long after the race I was in Africa and by sheer luck stumbled on a cave painting showing human stick figures running after antelope, and that clinched it for me.

I was elected to the U. Ultrarunning Hall of Fame, of which I am proud, given the contexts that it was largely because of this race.

I finally did write the book, as I had dreamed before and during that run, some two decades earlier. From the book jacket: "From flying squirrels to grizzly bears, and from torpid turtles to insects with antifreeze, the animal kingdom relies on some staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter.

Unlike their human counterparts, who must alter the environment to accommodate physical limitations, animals are adaptable to an amazing range of conditions. Examining everything from food sources in the extremely barren winter landscape to the chemical composition that allows certain creatures to survive, Heinrich's Winter World awakens the largely undiscovered mysteries by which nature sustains herself through winter's harsh, cruel exigencies.

Ultrarunning performance premiums maximizing exercise performance in the context of fuel economy, and although the ultimate exercise capacities are achieved by some insects, we find it hard to identify with them. With birds, it is easier, and I have since a small boy identified with a tiny northern bird, the kinglet, as a marvel from its extraordinary performance of survival in winter. It is an insect-feeder that may stay all winter in the Maine woods, surviving temperatures down to degrees F, while keeping its body temperature above freezing, likely at least near normal bird body temperature of near degrees F.

How does it manage its apparently massive rates of heat production, those required to keep such a tiny body warm? The bird defied the odds, because it is an insectivore. Where do the birds' calories come from since there are not many if any insects about in the north woods in the depths of winter? I had some ideas but no knowledge of the golden-crowned kinglets' options, but I knew for sure was that it must require something more than just extra-ordinary exercise capacity sustained over very long durations.

It epitomized to me the problem of animals' winter survival, in both the constraints and possibilities in their utmost, as problems that have been solved through evolution in likely diverse ways. Berkeley in the entomology department where I confined it to insects. After moving to the University of Vermont's biology department, I included also the vertebrate animals. Here I later added a field component, titled "Winter Ecology," a special course where a small group of students and I stayed at my primitive cabin in the Maine woods during the winter semester break.

Winter World was not necessarily meant as a textbook. It was aimed for a general readership for those interested in some of the amazing things animals do in the winter to survive.

Being hyper-alert to it and these amazing birds from my writing about them, I later saw them in the act, and captured them in a photograph high in a tree in the middle of the night, that proved it. It was my luckiest ever, and still one of my most prized. From the book jacket: "When award-winning writer and biologist Bernd Heinrich became the unwitting—but doting—foster parent of an adorable gosling named Peep, he was drawn into her world.

And so, with a scientist's training and a nature lover's boundless enthusiasm, he set out to understand the travails and triumphs of the Canada geese living in the beaver bog adjacent to his home. In The Geese of Beaver Bog , Heinrich takes his readers through mud, icy waters, and overgrown sedge hummocks to unravel the mysteries behind heated battles, suspicious nest raids, jealous outbursts, and more. With deft insight and infectious good humor, he sheds light on how geese live and why they behave as they do.

Far from staid or predictable, the lives of geese are packed with adventure and full of surprises. Illustrated throughout with Heinrich's trademark sketches and featuring beautiful four-color photographs, The Geese of Beaver Bog is part love story, part science experiment, and wholly delightful. While in Vermont, I lived adjacent to a large beaver-created pond and a closely-associated wetland. There were no geese there in the early s, but it was a haven for red-winged blackbirds and grackles.

They were fun to watch, especially in spring-time. Then one spring, a pair of Canada geese showed up. I was mesmerized by them, especially after finding them making a nest on a sedge tussock. Year after year they came back before the ice had melted, and eventually nested on top of a beaver lodge.

The longer I knew the geese, the more I could recognize as individuals by their often unique white face patches. The resident pair fought off all other geese that came near to the bog.

This behavior seemed extraordinary for me, because the pond and the bog were huge. Why could they not share it? And why did the pair always disappear with the young within a day or two after the eggs hatched?

Why were there many pairs with many young at another, nearby pond? Interesting things were happening, of which I had no clue. This then started my systematic watching.

The geese turned out to be highly emotional, and often endearing birds. Several became almost pets which travelled regularly between their bog and our lawn. Certain individuals tolerated me at their nests, to the point that they tolerated intimacies such as me reaching under their belly to take eggs, examine them, and put them back.

I became fond of them and learned much from their social dealings, and wanted, no needed, to preserve what had become an adventure getting to know and learn from them.

From the book jacket: "Although Gerd Heinrich, a devoted naturalist, specialized in wasps, Bernd Heinrich tried to distance himself from his 'old-fashioned' father, becoming a hybrid: a modern, experimental biologist with a naturalist's sensibilities. In this extraordinary 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 the man, he is today.

From Gerd's days as a soldier in Europe and the family's daring escape from the Red Army in to the rustic Maine farm they came to call home, Heinrich relates it all in his trademark style, making science accessible and awe-inspiring. And always, always, there is in Heinrich's every page, wonderment. If I had written a novel, this would be it, or the source of perhaps several.

It is not written in order to fit a specific subject category. It contains history of WWII, a story of coming to America, one of a difficult but understandable father-son relationship. It is a biography of my father and the changing science of life as well as the life in our century.

But mostly it is an adventure. I retired early from the University of Vermont specifically to research and write this book, and it is one of my most satisfying for what it preserves that was interesting if not also illuminating, that would otherwise have been lost, fallen by the wayside and forgotten. Do hummingbirds know what they're up against before they migrate over the Gulf of Mexico? Why do some trees stop growing taller even when three months of warm weather remain?

With awe and unmatched expertise, Bernd Heinrich's Summer World never stops exploring the beautifully complex interactions of animals and plants with nature, giving extraordinary depth to the relationships between habitat and the warming of the earth.

Heinrich is a gem! His is a voice that is unique and he offers to his readers a vision of the world that is a joy to contemplate. Winter is generally a time of shutting and slowing down of life and summer is a time of plenty and often frenzy, a big contrast. It includes the shutting down in the fall, the waking up process in spring, and hopefully a taste of interesting but eclectic in-between. Despite an attractive cover, the book is unattractively produced, with hideous, hard-to-read type on poor paper with fuzzy illustrations, except for a fair centerfold.

I am still laughing. From the book jacket: "Why are the eggs of the marsh wren deep brown, the winter wren's nearly white, and the gray catbird's a brilliant blue? And what in the DNA of a penduline tit makes the male weave a domed nest of fibers and the female line it with feathers, while the bird-of-paradise male builds no nest at all, and his bower-bird counterpart constructs an elaborate dwelling? One of the world's great naturalists and nature writers, Heinrich shows us how the sensual beauty of birds can open our eyes to a hidden evolutionary process.

REVIEWS 5 of 5 stars on Amazon : "Heinrich fans and anyone interested in birds will find his latest book thoroughly rewarding; a volume to turn to again and again. I found this one to contain a bit more than I wanted to read about birds and their nests and eggs and behavior, but just when I would tire of reading it, Heinrich would describe another amazing bit of bird knowledge.

We see them as if gussied up in all colors of the rainbow. They are marked with all manner of spots, blotches and squiggles. We see them in museum displays, one egg next to another, and all different, like Easter eggs fancied up with paint jobs. Bird's egg coloration is advertised as artistry, as if it were cheap decorations for the sake of false beauty. Yet the real beauty of eggs' markings is in their meaning that can only be seen in the ecological context of nature at large.

They contain a color code that has been honed by natural selection over the millions of years of birds' evolution, and still going on in the present day.

This is a story, and it is a huge and fascinating one that adds vastly to the beauty of birds. The main reason to be interested in science is for the stories, and stories come from coherence of facts. As in art, random blotches of paint are merely incoherent nonsense, unless they become interpreted to become a story.

This, the nexus of science and art, is in the beauty in the coherence of facts. I wanted to publish a book of my photographs and drawings of them, with perhaps a caption of explanations for each.

I approached Harvard University Press to discuss this project, and they were receptive to my idea, except for one thing - they wanted not just a picture book, but text also. I accented, and suggested centering the text on the evolution of parenting strategies, since eggs and their color codes are central to several important parenting behaviors. Happily, Harvard University Press agreed, and as promised prominently displayed and beautifully presented not only the text but also a fair sample of my photographs and watercolors.

From the book jacket: "How does the animal world deal with death? And what ecological and spiritual lessons can we learn from examining this? Life Everlasting is the fruit of those investigations, illuminating what happens to animals great and small after death. Been there, done that.

That is, until Jason Mazurowski, a student, friend, and ultramarathoner, casually told me about one. It seemed fateful if I were to be back, to complete the circle and run my last ultramarathon at nearly the same time, distance, and place. And so it was that I stepped up to the starting line of the Brownsville 50k at 8 am on Sunday, September 29, , the tag identifying me as number pinned onto my shirt.

That was by far the largest number I had ever worn, and I realized that this could be unlike any ultramarathon I had ever run. There were registered runners, of whom were women. In my previous races there had been perhaps 30 to 40 participants, and they had almost always been mostly men. Race to enjoy the scenery? What is this? In less than a mile we were laboring up a steep hill along a narrow dirt path with steep drop-offs to one side and winding in tight loops and switchbacks; it was the roughest trail I could imagine, even for hiking.

As we wound through the woods, over bare roots and among loose rocks and boulders, there were degree uphills and downhills. We had to watch every step.

The switchbacks were so tight that at one point a runner behind me called me back because he thought I was heading in the wrong direction. So I went back, but it then turned out I had been right the first time and had done the same distance twice. The same course was simultaneously occupied by a separate mile trail race, plus a third race, a mile bicycle race. Sharing the path with bicycles racing down upon you from above and behind required stepping off to avoid collisions.

Perhaps there had been instructions, which I had of course not read. Clearly, finishing time was irrelevant. This was no race against the clock, and I gladly stepped off the trail entirely every time, to let them all pass. As the runners and bikers careened on, I more crawled than ran up and down along the mountainsides, down the steep winding slopes and over stone walls of abandoned farms. It was unlike anything I had ever done or even imagined. It was more like my slightly later, barely possible deer hunt, but this one with assured beer instead of a deer promised at the end.

Unlike in any deer chase, there were pleasant and welcome compensations, as local people had provided aid stations along the way. A party atmosphere prevailed, and all sorts of food and drink were offered, including pickle juice—a new one to me. A memoir of Bernd Heinrich which goes into great detail his life spent racing: road races, marathon races, mile runs, 24 hour runs. He set some records for his age group.

He also talks about his accomplishments in his specialty field in science. He has run all his life as a high school trackster, in college and during his adult life.

If you enjoy reading about racing at any long distance, you will love the book Oct 16, Megan rated it liked it. This is part memoir, part biology textbook.

The author has run his entire life and is also a biologist. Now, as an 80 year old, he still runs. Oct 03, Teegan rated it it was ok. Rambly and not always cohesive. Aug 21, Jacinta rated it liked it Shelves: , own , biography-history , running. Not really what I expected at all, but a delightful memoir switching back and forth between biological discoveries and running experiences.

Aug 14, Jim Lyons rated it really liked it. More than I needed of the running memories, BUT the beginning and end were very interesting comparing life and aging "across nature".

Sep 01, Chip Redihan rated it really liked it Shelves: An enjoyable read. I would have liked more running anecdotes but that just means I will read Heinrichs other books. Jul 24, Jean F. West rated it really liked it. Not exactly what I was expecting but I enjoyed it. Robert rated it really liked it Jul 28, Dan Thompson rated it really liked it Aug 30, Brendan Glover rated it really liked it Sep 19, Brian Nelson rated it really liked it Jul 15, Bill Hastings rated it liked it Oct 04, Valentin Puscasu rated it liked it Sep 11, Shawn rated it really liked it Aug 05, Beth Oppenheim rated it liked it Aug 14, Faith Ottenhoff rated it really liked it Aug 21, Warren rated it it was ok Jul 26, Patty rated it it was ok Sep 25, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. Biography Memoir. About Bernd Heinrich. Bernd Heinrich. Many of his books focus on the natural world just outside the cabin door. Heinrich has won numerous awards for his writing and is a world class ultra-marathon runner. He spends much of the year at a rustic cabin that he built himself in the woods near Weld, Maine. Heinrich is able to see what he sees and write what he does because he has been immersed in nature since childhood.

His early years were spent in rough lodging in a forest in northern Germany where Heinrich had daily, intimate contact with the woods and its inhabitants. In Maine as a teen, he likewise spent long hours roaming outdoors, watching birds and insects and squirrels live their lives. A Naturalist at Large testifies to his belief that knowing the science behind whats happening in nature deepens and amplifies the pleasure of being outside with our kin who share the earth with us.

Sections U. Science Technology Business U. Book: Essay collection is naturalist Bernd Heinrich at his finest. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news.

The Associated Press.