Winter World - Softcover

Heinrich, Bernd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060957379 ISBN 13: 9780060957377

Publisher: HarpPeren, 2003

Synopsis

From award-winning writer and biologist Bernd Heinrich, an intimate, accessible and eloquent illumination of animal survival in Winter.

From flying squirrels to grizzly bears, torpid turtles to insects with antifreeze, the animal kingdom relies on some staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter. Unlike their human counterparts, who must alter their environment to accommodate our physical limitations, animals are adaptable to an amazing range of conditions--i.e., radical changes in a creature's physiology take place to match the demands of the environment. Winter provides an especially remarkable situation, because of how drastically it affects the most elemental component of all life: water.

Examining everything from food sources in the extremely barren winter landscape to the chemical composition that allows certain creatures to survive, Heinrich's Winter World awakens the largely undiscovered mysteries by which nature sustains herself through the harsh, cruel exigencies of winters

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: HarpPeren
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060957379
• ISBN 13: 9780060957377
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368