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warm-blooded animals

water

dehydration

freezing/melting of

water dwellers, oxygen supply for

water shrew

weasel

weaverbird

West Nile virus

Wheye, D.

Whippoorwill

white-faced hornet

white-footed mouse

white-winged cross bill

bills of

Why We Run: A Natural History (Heinrich)

wild grape

willow

Wilson, Edward O.

winter berries

winterberry

winter moth

winter wren

woodchuck

wood duck

wood frog

woodland jumping mouse

woodpecker

shelter nests

woolly adelgid

woolly bear caterpillar

wren

Wynne-Edwards, V. C.

yellowjacket wasp

yellow rain

yellow-rumped warbler

Zahavi, Amotz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all I thank the keen observers. I thank those who have cared enough about nature to ask questions, explore, experiment, think, analyze, and draw cold-eyed conclusions from empirical evidence. It is they who have created the splendors of nature, some of which I have shamelessly borrowed to write about.

Created? Yes. Nature exists. But the wonders of nature dwell in the minds of sentient beings who are receptive to them. Pressure waves produced by the swoosh of a raven’s wing or the light rays reflected from its burnished feathers are both physical manifestations. They can be measured, but they are neither sounds nor colors until their energy is transposed into action potentials in living neurons, and the action potentials are then transduced into sensations by the brain. Similarly, the splendor we can perceive in a golden-crowned kinglet’s survival of a cold winter night or how a snapping turtle endures while sealed under the thick ice of a pond for six months does not exist until revealed by (and to) a receptive brain.

I once read somewhere that the findings of biology put a “barrier between humanity and nature.” Perhaps the author felt, like many of us do, that science implies detachment. It does to me, but only as a filter that sifts out the splendid nuggets from chaos and those that are revealed from those merely imagined. Far from being a distancing, the science of biology is the opposite. It comes from an intense desire to get to know something intimately: you can’t hope to get closeness with the real thing unless you know its contours.

I also read somewhere that Thoreau “stopped being a thinker” when he became a naturalist. I think that’s getting it the wrong way round. You need facts to think with, and thinking about nature without facts is, really, feeling. Fiction is fiction, no matter how real one tries to make it seem.

ASIDE FROM ALL THE anonymously produced material that I used freely, I also thank the following for their open discussions, criticisms and/or comments that helped me sift out the real from the imagined: Ross T. Bell and Douglas Ferguson (identifying insects), Thomas D. Seeley and Rick Drutches (bees), C. William Kilpatrick (mammals), David S. Barrington (plants), Ellen Thaler and Charles R. Blem (kinglets), F. Daniel Vogt (deer mice), Brian M. Barnes (Arctic hibernators), Kenneth B. Storey (hibernation physiology of insects and frogs), Jack Duman, Olga Kukal, and Richard E. Lee, Jr. (insect hibernation), Gordon R. Ultsch and Carlos E. Crocker (turtle hibernation), and Lincoln B. Brower (monarchs).

Chapters 16 and 24 are adapted from articles appearing previously in Natural History magazine and portions of Chapter 5 were previously published in Audubon.

Kimberly Layfield and Louise O’Hare typed the manuscript, always quickly, efficiently, and without delay. I sincerely thank Daniel Halpern and Lisa Chase, my editors, whose interest and enthusiasm were always encouraging and whose numerous queries and suggestions were invaluable. I thank my wife, Rachel Smolker, for understanding.

And I dedicate this book to “Bart,” George A. Bartholomew, for introducing and teaching me about the wonders of physiological ecology.

About the Author

BERND HEINRICH is the author of Why We Run: A Natural History, the award-winning Mind of the Raven, The Trees in My Forest, A Year in the Maine Woods, Ravens in Winter, One