Summer World: A Season of Bounty
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Product Description
How can cicadas survive—and thrive—at temperatures pushing 115°F? 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 perfectly complex interactions of animals and plants with scenery, giving extraordinary depth to the relationships between habitat and the warming of the planet.
Amazon.com Review
Book Description
In Summer World: A Season of Gift, Bernd Heinrich brings us the same bottomless set aside of marvel and reverence for the teeming animal life of backwoods New England that he brought us in Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. Now he is focusing on the animal kingdom in the extremes of the warmer months, with all its feeding, nesting, fighting, and mating.
Whether presenting disquisitions on ant wars, the predatory characteristics of wasps, the mating rituals of woodpeckers, or describing an encounter with a road full of wood frogs, Summer World never stops observing the perfectly complex interactions of animals and plants with scenery, giving extraordinary depth to the relationships between habitat and the warming of the planet. How can cicadas survive—and thrive—at temperatures pushing 115°F? 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, Heinrich explores hundreds of questions like these.
Exquisitely illustrated with dozens of the leader’s own drawings, Summer World is Bernd Heinrich’s most engaging book to date, a fascinating work from one of our very best science writers.
On Summer World: An Amazon Exclusive Essay by Bernd Heinrich
Summer, as I experience it, is not just one time. In terms of living, it is a time of courting, birthing, foraging and feeding, avoiding being eaten, growing, and finally preparing for winter. Furthermore, unlike in winter or life under severe desert conditions, nothing is static. Most of us live in a world where timing is everything. Here in Vermont and Maine where I live, there is about a week to prepare the soil, another to plant the peas, another to place in the tomato plants. There is a week where the bees pollinate the apple trees and a week for us to harvest the fruit, and another to dig the potatoes. All scenery is on a forceful schedule. The wood frogs mate in mid-April, the robins return late April, the blueberries bruise in May, and the geese migrate north the second week in October. Summer as we know it is not a uniform struggle against excessive heat and lack of water. It is as a replacement for a continually shifting schedule of living where the lives of one species adjust to persons of others.
So, as I set out to write Summer World, my focus changed. One potential approach was to chat about various topics such as mating, nesting, feeding and predator avoidance. As a replacement for, it seemed possibly more engaging to concentrate on conspicuous aspects of the lives of common, every-day animals and plants that we tend to take for granted but that are marvelous because of their hidden agendas and concealed complexities.
It seems to me that we are in a perpetual crisis mode where attention is rightly all ears on what is incorrect with the world, although too small appreciation is agreed to what is right with it. Scenery is permanently right. It permanently bats last; it is the final arbiter of all things that concern every living thing. So I all ears on the first thing I saw that captured my attention: mating wood frogs. This species breeds in large crowds that gather for a one- to several-day orgy in nearly every temporary small pool, of which there are more that a dozen within my neighborhood. It was a joy to watch the frogs’ antics, and I tried to trick them to find out what they respond to, and to then contemplate and figure out their various stratagems. The frogs were weird, comical and counter-intuitive. The loud males were not only competing fiercely to catch any female they could but also unknowingly, I presume, cooperating in attracting them. Nothing that they did was obvious to me lacking first delving into their detailed life histories.
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This engaging look at scenery in Vermont and Maine during the summer will have even couch potatoes searching their national for fauna and flora as Bernd Heinrich makes it fun to investigate the birds, bees, and beasts including humans. He and Crackle the grackle tackle local science with passion though I would avoid visiting the nearby wasp nest with a weapon of mass destruction the toilet paper hole-stuffer. The leader entreats readers to sing on a tree dais with birds, watch caterpillars dine on quick food while marveling how human are aviary-like migratory either by being snowbirds living in the south in winter or by making an inside climate. Obviously Mr. Heinrich is concerned with the impact on the ecosystem of not just global warming and hoping to get some activation by getting people up and out with an enjoyable entertaining trip outside. This is fun as fans of all ages will dance in their backyard with the stars of scenery in this super insightful look at the SUMMER WORLD of northern New England.
Harriet Klausner
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
An entertaining, yet educational account of Maine summers from a naturalist’s point of view. This book stimulates one to review scenery with a more appreciative and discerning eye. Waratah Communications.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
SUMMER WORLD: A SEASON OF BOUNTY is for any lending library strong in natural history in all-purpose and New England wildlife in particular. It observes the interactions of animals and plants with scenery, discussing the relationships between habitat and global warming and considering different growth patterns of animals, birds, plants and insects. The leader’s own line drawings compliment a gentle consideration perfect for all-purpose-interest libraries.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I learned a lot from this book about the adaptive abilities of trees, ants, caterpillars and spiders over time. Who knew all this was going on! Learning about the Welwitschia plant which lives in the desert, stays hydrated and has two lifelong leaves that may grow for more than 1,000 years was just one of the gifts from reading Heinrich’s book.
I am inspired to become more attentive to the bugs, birds and plants when walking in the woods or meadow or just relaxing in my yard and to reflect about the lives they lead and to watch and learn.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The book goes like a right tale of parts of scenery.
Wood frogs: Their rituals(awake for only few months a year and still thriving) seem weird. The leader doesnt just stop at this observation. He goes about setting up small experiments to prove or dispute the possible explanations.
Bald-Faced Hornet Nests: Hornet paper, a Talisman to ward off all evil predators from a vireo’s nest.
The Blues: Why ants dont eat blue butterflies?
Mud Daubers and Behavior: Can you imagine being born in an encasement with food provided?
Cunning Diners: Rolled leaf caterpillars and dried leaves with still a bit of green at a spot
The sketches and pictures add to the magic.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5