Bernd Heinrich Quotes (1940-)

“Birds are extraordinary creatures by almost any measure. But they are especially impressive when we are so brash as to compare them to ourselves in their astonishingly diverse ways of becoming parents and of parenting. We need three or four decades to accomplish what birds of many species routinely accomplish in less than a month—court, mate, build a nest, lay from one to about twenty eggs, incubate them, and then feed and protect them to adulthood. In some cases birds also provider their offspring's education. They may have to migrate tens of thousands of miles just to start the nesting season.”

“Cats may scrape leaves and grass over dead prey to conceal it, and some wasps drag drugged but living insects into previously constructed homes so the wasp larvae can safely feed on fresh meat. But to my knowledge, only one group of animals, beetles belonging to the group Nicrophorus, regularly moves carcasses to a suitable place and then deliberately buries them. Unlike humans, who generally bury only our own species and those pets who have become surrogate humans, these beetles bury a great diversity of birds and mammals but never their own kind. They bury dead animals as a food source for their larvae, and the burying is a central part of their mating and reproductive strategy.”

“When I was a teenage boy in western Maine, I read the books of Jack London, books about a world of rugged people and hardy animals at home in the frozen woods of the north. Dreaming of that world, I ventured out into the forest on snowshoes, and if it was in the middle of a storm, all the better. Deep in the forest I would dig a shallow pit in the snow and using the papery bark peeled from a nearby birch tree and dead twigs broken from a red spruce, I'd start a crackling fire. The splendor of sparks shooting up into the dark sky, the acrid smoke rising through the falling snowflakes, and hare or porcupine meat roasting on a stick over the flames, all enhanced the winter romance.”

“In my nostalgia for summers past and anticipation of summers to come, I think of swimming, basking in the sun while wiggling into warm sand at the beach, and reveling in the sights, sounds, and smells of flowers, bees, and birds. I think of the dances on balmy nights as we swung and do-si-doed our partners and sweated to fiddle music at the town hall; and of bass fishing on Bog Stream, where we canoed past floating lily pads and big white water lily blossoms. I think of the school year coming to a close.
For me, summer used to begin on the first day of school vacation, the season of long days.”

“Moose are attracted to the vigorously growing hardwood underbrush that follows natural blowdowns and logging operations, including clear-cuts. People who favor massive clear-cutting often claim that moose thrive in clear-cuts. But what they usually don't mention is that in some clear-cuts they get rid of the moose browse that would normally grow there. They use helicopters to spray herbicides that kill the regenerating young hardwood trees to culture unpalatable and sterile pine and spruce plantations.”

“Mating and pair choice are not tightly coupled in most birds. In so-called polygynous and polyandrous species there is no apparent male-female bonding. There is instead relatively indiscriminate mating on the part of one sex coupled with often intense discriminating on the other. At the other extreme are apparently permanently bonded couples who mate only in a vary narrow time window (at or slightly before the time of egg laying), during which they may also mate with neighbors, depending on opportunity. In many birds who have successive broods through a season, such as song sparrows, for example, a female may be monogamous in the first brood but mate with several males (probably carefully chosen, that is not "promiscuous") in the second, even as she remains with the same original mate to rear their clutch.”