Mr. Natural

WHEN the ice melts and the trees bud in the temperate forest, the female ichneumon wasp surveys the land in search of caterpillars. When she finds one, she lands on its back and inserts a delicate tube as sharp as a needle beneath the oblivious little bug's skin. Later in the spring, when the caterpillar by rights should have become a butterfly or a moth, some 700 wasps hatch instead from its empty carcass, its innards having been devoured by the hungry grubs as they grew. Of this, one of the more grisly reproductive strategies in the entomological world, Charles Darwin once remarked, "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would designedly have created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding on the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice."

In Bernd Heinrich's gripping memoir, "The Snoring Bird," the ichneumon serves as both through-line and metaphor: The pursuit of it occupied his father, Gerd Heinrich, through two world wars and expulsion from his homeland; his love for the tiny creatures defined his life. He was collecting and cataloging them even as his eyesight began to fail at age 75, when he wrote to his son, "All I am still longing to do is to be in the woods somewhere during the summer, and hunt my fascinating insects." He regarded them objectively, without imposing on them ethics irrelevant to their survival. It is not unlike the equanimity with which Bernd Heinrich regards his father's extraordinarily dramatic and difficult life.

Heinrich did not follow his father into ichneumon research. Instead, the biologist, professor and author has a charismatic population of ravens to thank for his success -- curious, tame, socialist creatures he wrote about in his wonderful 1989 book, "Ravens in Winter." He has the ravens to thank for "The Snoring Bird" too. After reading "Ravens in Winter," a woman named Eva Ziesche wrote to tell him about her pet raven. She turned out to be a handwriting expert at the Prussian State Library, and Heinrich sent her a package of indecipherable letters written to his father by Berlin zoologist Erwin Stresemann. She wrote back to say that the library had "two thick files of correspondences from Gerd Heinrich to Erwin Stresemann, dated from February 1926 through November 1963!" She had no trouble deciphering the other half.