Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Explore How Wildlife Thrives in Harsh Winter Conditions | Perfect for Nature Lovers, Science Educators & Winter Enthusiasts

Heinrich has a real love of the natural world that shines through in his writing. Though 'Winter World' is ostensibly about various interesting physiological mechanisms that allow the creatures - particularly the ones outside of Heinrich's Western Maine cabin or on his Burlington office at UVM - to survive winter, it seemed to be just as much about the process of scientific discovery in its rawest form: 1) author wonders about something he notices, 2) author thinks about how he could find an answer, 3) author's method comes up short, 4) author repeats steps 2 and 4 until he succeeds. In the text, Heinrich has not reached the `succeeds' step in all of his endeavors, and so the reader is invited to think along with him on how the next experiment might be devised to give more insight. The result is a text that serves as much to make the process of discovery fascinating and accessible as it is about the discoveries themselves. As Heinrich notes in his acknowledgments, "Nature exists. But the wonders of nature dwell in the minds of sentient beings who are receptive to them."The stories of animal winter survival are fascinating. Honey bees survive through huddling, winter food storage, and a uniform genome that drives a high degree of cooperation despite the fact that they're so small that they die within seconds of leaving the hive on cold days (Heinrich can tell you exactly how many seconds for a given temperature based on his "prod stick with hive" experimentation). Some amphibians produce proteins that allow them to survive body temperatures below freezing. Black bears simultaneously appear to select certain tissues for down-regulation (typical of hibernation) while up-regulating mammary gland function so that the nursing young can survive the winter; this is made all the more impressive by the fact that the nursing mother drinks and urinates minimally all winter.Woven throughout the rest of his tales, Heinrich reports of his ongoing fascination with the Golden-crowned kinglet. The kinglet weighs little more than two pennies and its metabolic demands are particularly high in the winter because of its small mass (in proportion to its surface area, through which body heat is lost to the environment). Yet the kinglet can be observed feeding and surviving all winter long. So through careful observation, Heinrich identifies the larva that make up the kinglet's winter diet; he collects samples at daybreak and dusk to find out how much energy the kinglet must burn each night. One simple discovery at a time, he shows the reader how he goes about answering the questions of a fascinating creature's ability to `make it' to the next day and the next generation.I read Winter World as an extra credit assignment for a comparative physiology course. It was an excellent introduction to how physiologists approach their work and how animals use different mechanisms to achieve similar goals. The writing is engaging and reminiscent of other recent, excellent non-fiction narratives (i.e. 'Secret Life of Lobsters,' or 'Cod'). For those interested in physiology, naturalists, outdoors-people (particularly New Englanders), or budding scientists, the tales are fascinating and educational and the text is highly recommended.