A restless naturalist on an intellectual race


By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff, 5/20/2001


INESBURG, Vt. - Bernd Heinrich is the sort of man who is disappointed that it took him all of 7 hours and 28 minutes to run 50 miles on a recent Sunday.


Heinrich, by the way, is 61 years old.


He is the sort of scientist who got bored, a number of years back, with his position as a tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a world authority on how insects regulate their body temperatures. He dropped it all because he wanted to return to New England and find something new to study - which turned out to be the intelligence of ravens.


Now a professor at the University of Vermont and an athlete who holds ultramarathon records, Heinrich has combined his love of the natural world and his love of running to produce a new book, ''Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life.''


The roaming, bound-by-no-discipline book is much more than an explication of what runners can learn from - say, bees' habit of regurgitating their stomach contents and spreading the liquid over themselves to stay cool - although it is that.


It is a meditation on humanity. It is the work of a mind that is restless in the most profound sense, the mind of a man who has never been satisfied, who has always been running toward something new.


In the book, Heinrich uses ''chasing antelope'' as a metaphor for achievement. Humans, he said, can outrun the fastest animals on earth because having a long-term goal in mind gives us the ultimate endurance.


''We evolved as endurance predators; we had to out-sprint the antelope, and that takes the vision to pursue,'' Heinrich said, gazing out the window of his home office at the ravens he keeps in an aviary. ''Catching prey is a long-distance dream in your mind. We don't want the easy kill. The chase itself is the reward.''


The part about the chase as its own reward, especially, resonates as a statement about Heinrich's own eclectic life.


While most scientists specialize, Heinrich has leapt through fields of study - from cell physiology to bumblebees, to owls and ravens, and now on to beavers and geese. He also has pursued victory in sneakers, having set three US ultramarathon records, and still holding masters (over 40) world records in 50-mile and 100-kilometer marathons.


Heinrich, a small man with bushy eyebrows and dirt under his fingernails, will run - not walk - to the beaver bog he is studying just across the dirt road from his modest Vermont home. (He has done much of his ultramarathon training at his other home, a rustic camp on 600 acres of Maine wilderness.)


Early in his life, Heinrich discovered ''the joy of running after tiger beetles through warm sand on bare, tough-soled feet,'' he wrote.


The backdrop was less idyllic. Over three harrowing months, 4-year-old Bernd and his family had fled from their home near Gdansk, Germany, (now Poland) to escape advancing Russian troops. Near the end of the war, they came to rest when they found an abandoned, one-room hut in the Hahnheide Forest.


Running sometimes helped the boy speed up the return trip from school or from retrieving birds that his father, an amateur scientist, hunted to sell as museum specimens. It was also in that forest that Heinrich, who collected beetles and birds' eggs as his family foraged for food, became obsessed with the creatures teeming around him.


''A lot of people might think of it as a deprived childhood. I feel just the opposite,'' Heinrich said. ''I see people in the suburbs as very deprived. They don't get to touch nature.''


Which is why he is thrilled to see his son, Eliot, 4, carting around a salamander, and his daughter, Lena, 11/2, sticking worms in her mouth. ''She'll learn soon enough what tastes good and what doesn't,'' he said. (He has two older children from previous marriages.)


In 1951, Heinrich's family came to the United States, to a farm in Maine. But his parents had little means to earn a living, and they soon took off for Mexico and Africa to collect birds as museum specimens, leaving Heinrich and his younger sister at the Good Will Farm and School in Hinckley, Maine, an institution for homeless children.


Heinrich's years there were difficult. He said he had a house mother who tortured him mercilessly - decades later, just discussing the topic brings tears to his eyes. He was small and awkward, and often mocked for his interest in bugs and birds.


But at 19, he not only joined the cross-country team, but started winning races. ''After that, I was no longer derisively called Nature Boy. I was instead `an animal,' which of course we all are. However, that sounded much better. In fact, it felt great,'' he wrote.


Running inspired Heinrich, who wasn't a good student in high school, to go to the University of Maine, where he ran when he wasn't convalescing. (It's hard to keep count of the number of injuries that Heinrich surmounted, with doctors telling him each time that his racing career was over.)


''I owe a lot to running,'' Heinrich said. ''It's probably the only reason I went to college.''


A serious running injury in college kept him from serving in Vietnam. ''If it weren't for running, I probably would have been killed in Vietnam,'' he said.


Also during college, he took every biology course in the curriculum. That, however, did little to please his self-educated father, a tough parent who dismissed ''modern biology'' as useless. Even when he was young, Heinrich remembers, his father had only criticism for the animal drawings the boy toiled over.


Still, Heinrich seems reluctant to condemn his upbringing. ''Sometimes people get praised too much for too little. They get satisfied,'' he said. ''I was never satisfied.''


That included his science. Even though Heinrich had done pioneering work in insect thermo-regulation, he dropped the topic when it no longer seemed sufficiently mysterious. Some of his fellow Berkeley scientists, he says, told him he was crazy.


''I got bored with insects. I could predict too much,'' Heinrich said. ''After you've been doing the same thing for years, it's not fun anymore unless you make big discoveries.''


Heinrich's nomadic career amazes colleagues. ''Normally, you must focus on something and milk it to death,'' said Brent Ybarrondo, a former doctorate student of Heinrich's and now chairman of biology at Adams State College in Colorado. ''There can't be many biologists in the world that have the kind of diversity in their backgrounds or publications that Bernd does.''


Heinrich sees himself more and more as a naturalist. And his popular-oriented writings have developed him something of a following. The shelf of books he has penned includes titles like ''Bumblebee Economics,'' ''A Year in the Maine Woods,'' and ''One Man's Owl.''


These days, he spends much of his time watching the beaver bog, tracking goose mating patterns and anything else that catches his eye. He figures his observations of the bog will converge and somehow form the material for a book. He's not sure yet how everything will fit together, but calls it all part of the hunt.


''We can visualize far ahead. We see our quarry even as it recedes over the hills and into the mists,'' Heinrich wrote in ''Racing the Antelope.'' ''It is the pull that allows us to reach into the future, whether it is to kill a mammoth or an antelope, or to write a book, or to achieve record time in a race.''


This story ran on page 01 of the Boston Globe on 5/20/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.