A Year in the Maine Woods

For the last few weeks, I sat at a desk in front of a computer for eight hours each day. It wasn't much different than any other few weeks of the year. Late at night I lay in bed and read this book until my eyes began to flutter shut. I guess it was my hope that during the eight hours I was asleep I could roam the woods in my dreams and, like Heinrich Bernd, stalk kinglets in the dead of winter and climb trees to watch the ravens come in for their evening roost. Some people might be tempted to label Bernd as a curmudgeon, or at the very least, an eccentric. Certainly, his regular requests of local farmers and butchers for dead calves and spoiled meat to feed the ravens he's observing lead to some pointed questions that attempt to get at show more just what this guy is up to and why. Bernd doesn't avoid people; in fact, he quite regularly has visitors up to his cabin in the woods. But he does spend a lot of time alone. He chops wood. He builds a foundation for his cabin. And he looks at and listens to the natural world around him. What he finds are some pretty amazing things. It's not a particularly easy life that Bernd portrays in his journaling, but it reads much richer than this comfortable and monochromatic urban existence that I'm living at the moment. show less

I would love to spend a year in the Maine woods in a cabin just like this one. Since I haven't yet found the time or wherewithal to do that, then this book is the next best thing. Bernd Heinrich is an entomologist and ornithologist who writes with an enviable, engaging style. His traveling companion, from Burlington, Vermont to his cabin in Rumford, Maine is a baby raven named Jack, and we follow Jack's growth and bird shenanigans and eventual return to the wild throughout the year.

I particularly enjoyed Heinrich's drawings in the book. For example, he goes on a "bud hunt" in mid December: "Yesterday I found the handsome purple buds on an edlerberry (Sambucus) bush, which I drew in watercolor. I like the way they look. Maybe I should show more draw those of other forest trees and bushes to go with these. And so I went on a bud hunt, gathering many varied budded twigs. Today I will paint some of them, thinking about the leaves and flowers of next spring's growth packaged fully formed already when the old leaves were shed two months ago. The buds are of exquisite design, but to see them truly I have to draw them, and to draw them I have to see them."

Heinrich's year, as well as the book, is filled with such slow, deliberate observation, from everything to counting flies to hunting moose. At times when my own life is spinning too fast around me, it's a comfort to pick up this book and read a chapter or two. show less

I’ve been a fan of Bernd Heinrich for several years now. I’ve read a lot of his work and have enjoyed everything I’ve had the good fortune to get my hands on. A Year in the Maine Woods was no exception; it is a lovely, relaxing, informative book. Reading it lead to an overwhelming sense of well-being mixed with an urgent longing to go out into the forest and explore on my own.

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I really enjoyed this book. His observations of the natural world around him with scientific knowledge and descriptions was so engaging. He is definitely not the tree naturalist that you expect. A toughened outdoorsman and long-distance runner, we grew up in Germany and then in the states. He has added some rough sketches throughout the book that are highly informative. I highly recommend this book, and I've already started on another collection of essays by him.

Enjoyable. Man in the woods for a year by himself - these kind of books interest me. I wish authors like this could see creation as it is and not some random collision of atoms. It would seem the world would be even more wonderful instead of meaningless chaos.

Journal style describing his year living alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. An astute observer of all things natural but obtuse in the area of human affairs. I enjoyed reading about the simple experiments he designed to develop a deeper understanding of what he was seeing. His deviation into describing the nature of love in moths and other philosophical ramblings from an uncritical Darwinian perspective to me appeared shallow.

I don't know why I found this book to be such a slog. I've enjoyed three other of Heinrich's books. But this one I was just happy to finish.