Bernd Heinrich Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Bernd Heinrich
Bernd Heinrich was born in Bad Polzin, Germany on April 19, 1940 and is the son of Gerd Heinrich, an Ichneumon expert.

He is a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont in the biology department. He is the writer of a number of books about biology and nature writing. Heinrich has made some major contributions to the study of insect physiology and behavior, along with bird behavior.

Along with his many scientific publications, he’s also written more than a dozen highly praised books, mainly related to his research examining the behavioral, physiological, and ecological adaptations of plants and animals to their physical environments. He’s also written books which include more of his own personal reflections on nature.

He studied at UCLA and the University of Maine. From UCLA he earned his PhD in the year 1970. The next year, he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley where he became a professor of entomology. Between 1976 and 1977 he was a Guggenheim and Harvard Fellow. In the year 1980 he took a position as a professor of biology/zoology at the University of Vermont. From 1988 to 1989 he was a von Humboldt Fellow.

Bernd’s won many awards for his writing and was a world class ultra-marathon runner and is a full-time off the grid in a hand-built cabin (which he mainly built by himself) the western mountains in Maine.

His research for years was on comparative physiological ecology of insects, which led to the behavior of bumblebees, pollination, and ecology. It later shifted to the social behavior of ravens. He’s pursued a variety of topics which presented interesting questions through contact within the woods in Western Maine.

“Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2009. Heinrich involves readers in his quest to get into the mind of the raven. However as animals can only be spied upon by getting up close, Bernd adopts ravens, thereby becoming a “raven dad”, as well as observing them in their own natural habitat. He studies their daily routines, and is able to paint a vivid picture of the world of the raven. At the book’s core is his respect and love for these engaging and complex, and through his keen analysis and observation, we wind up becoming their intimates as well.

His own passion for ravens has led him all around the world for this research. “Mind of the Raven” follows his exotic journey, which took him from Baffin Island in the high Arctic to Montana from New England to Germany. He offers dazzling accounts of exactly how science works in the field, filtered through the eyes of one passionate nature observer. Every new insight and discovery into a raven’s behavior is thrilling to read about, at once scientific and lyrical.

“Life Everlasting” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2012. A good friend of Bernd’s wrote him and asked if he could have a “green burial” on Bernd’s hunting camp in Maine, it inspired this acclaimed biologist to investigate a subject which had long fascinated him. How exactly does the animal world even deal with the flip side of the life cycle? And what could the lessons, spiritual to ecological, imparted by a closer look at how the animal world renews itself?

Heinrich focuses his entirely unique gaze on the fascinating doings of creatures that many of us would just turn away from: like field mouse burials carried out by carrion beetles, or the communication strategies of ravens (who are the “premier northern undertakers”). Along with the “inadvertent teamwork” among large cats and wolves, bald eagles and nuthatches, weasels and foxes in the cold-weather dispersal of prey. Bernd reveals also where and how humans still play our important and ancient role as scavengers, thereby turning not dust to dust, but life to life.

“Ravens in Winter” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2014. Why do ravens, who are typically understood to be solitary creatures, share food between one another during the winter? On the surface, there did not appear to be any evolutionary or biological imperative behind the raven’s willingness to share. The more that Bernd observed all of their habits, the stranger the bird’s behavior ended up becoming.

What began as just mere curiosity became an impassioned research project, and “Ravens in Winter”, the first bit of research of its kind, explores the fascinating biological puzzle of the raven’s quite unconventional social habits.

“Racing the Clock: Running Across a Lifetime” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2021. A much loved and award winning biologist turns his gaze onto himself, using his long distance running to illuminate the changes to a human’s body over the course of a lifetime.

Part scientific investigation, part memoir, this is the book that Bernd has been waiting his whole life to write. An accomplished and dedicated marathon (and ultra-marathon) runner that won his first marathon when he was thirty-nine, he looks deeply at aging, running, and the body, while exploring the unresolved relationship between diet, age, metabolism, and exercise.

Why do some bodies age differently than others do? How much real control do we even have over that process and what effect, if any, does being active have? Bringing to bear some of the research from his whole career and in the spirit of his other classic “Why We Run”, he probes the questions about how we use energy and continue to adapt to our circumstances and mutable surroundings. Beyond that, he examines just how our bodies will change as we age however also how we can work with, if not overcome, many of these changes, as well as what all of this tells about evolution and the mechanisms of happiness, life, and health.

“Racing the Clock” offers some surprising and fascinating conclusions, all as it brings the reader along on Bernd Heinrich’s compelling journey to what he says is going to be his final race: a fifty-kilometer race at the age of eighty.