Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Hardcover

Heinrich, Bernd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060197447 ISBN 13: 9780060197445

Publisher: Ecco, 2003

Synopsis

From flying hot-blooded squirrels and diminutive kinglets to sleeping black bears and torpid turtles to frozen insects and frogs, the animal kingdom relies on staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter. Unlike their human counterparts, who alter the environment to accommodate physicallimitations, most animals are adapted to an amazing range of conditions. In Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, biologist, illustrator, and award-winning author Bernd Heinrich explores his local woods, where he delights in the seemingly infinite feats of animal inventiveness he discovers there.

Because winter drastically affects the mostelemental component of all life -- water -- radical changes in a creature's physiology and behavior must take place to match the demands of the environment. Some creatures survive by developing antifreeze; others must remain in constant motion to maintain their high body temperatures. Even if animals can avoid freezing to death, they must still manage to find food in a time of scarcity, or store it from a time of plenty.

Beautifully illustrated throughout with the author's delicate drawings and infused by his inexhaustible enchantment with nature, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival awakens thewonders and mysteries by which nature sustains herself through winter's harsh, cruel exigencies.

About this title

About the Author:

The author of numerous bestselling and award-winning books, Bernd Heinrich is a professor of biology at the University of Vermont. He divides his time between Vermont and the forests of western Maine.

From AudioFile:

The author explores the adaptations of animals to extreme cold, explaining the important differences between torpor and hibernation. While the work is reminiscent of a series of science lectures, its moderate doses of chemistry, physics, biology, and botany will engage general readers. Heinrich's stories of taking students on wintry expeditions into the field make him sound like a wonderful hands-on teacher. Narrator Mel Foster reads with little emotion and a nearly mechanical tone. His renditions of the many genus and species names don't roll off his tongue with any fluency, giving him little resemblance to a life scientist. Since the author writes in the first person, Foster does not come through well as his surrogate. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060197447
• ISBN 13: 9780060197445
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368