SUMMER WORLD: A SEASON OF BOUNTY (253 pp., Harper Collins, 2009)

From the book jacket: "How can cicadas survive—and thrive—at temperatures pushing 115°F? Do hummingbirds know what they're up against before they migrate over the Gulf of Mexico? Why do some trees stop growing taller even when three months of warm weather remain? With awe and unmatched expertise, Bernd Heinrich's Summer World never stops exploring the beautifully complex interactions of animals and plants with nature, giving extraordinary depth to the relationships between habitat and the warming of the earth." 

REVIEWS (5 of 5 stars on Amazon): "This engaging look at nature in Vermont and Maine during the summer will have even couch potatoes searching their neighborhood for fauna and flora."—Harriet Klausner

"A beautiful read that fulfills a dream of pure reading pleasure based on lively research and scholarship. Heinrich is a gem!"–Rebecca Richard

"A writer of rare sensitivity to the natural world combined with an extraordinary knowledge of biology and botany. His is a voice that is unique and he offers to his readers a vision of the world that is a joy to contemplate."–Michela Caudill

BERND HEINRICH WRITES ABOUT SUMMER WORLD:

I’m not sure now how or why I came to write this book, except that I had written Winter World, and so this one had a kind of inevitability attached to it. Winter is generally a time of shutting and slowing down of life and summer is a time of plenty and often frenzy, a big contrast. It includes the shutting down in the fall, the waking up process in spring, and hopefully a taste of interesting but eclectic in-between. Despite an attractive cover, the book is unattractively produced, with hideous, hard-to-read type on poor paper with fuzzy illustrations, except for a fair centerfold. I am still laughing.