(HOST) As a nature writer and photographer, commentator Ted Levin finds the winter months are a good time to catch up on his reading. And recently he picked up a book that had a lot to say about natural science, the things we collect, and the legacy of fathers.

(LEVIN) Dad died eleven years ago in Brooksville, Florida.

Several years later, just as my wife, Linny, was fighting a losing battle with breast cancer, my mother's health began to fail. To consolidate my medical woes I moved mom to Hanover. I did the packing, sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of her lifetime, deciding what to keep, what to trash, what to sell, what to give away.

I was swift and relentless.

One item I kept - for no immediately apparent reason - was dad's elephant-hide Executive 200 Calling Card File. He had worked in Manhattan, as an executive in a firm that sold men's clothing. Dad was in charge of sales, which involved travel, golf, entertaining, and arithmetic.

The file contained the business cards of mostly Jewish men. One card was for an importer - exporter in Buenos Aires. Another, a tiny card, was written in an alphabet I don't recognize, something Eastern European. Maybe Russian.

I thought of dad the other night as I read Bernd Heinrich's new book The Snoring Bird. Heinrich's father, Gerd, a German living in Poland, was a world class taxonomist and autocrat, who specialized in the classification of Ichneumon wasps, particularly the wasps of Burma, while collecting mammal and bird skins for international museums.

It struck me that my father's elephant-hide file, was rather like Gerd's Oriental wasp collection. It represented a life's work - hard to appreciate by any but the most discriminating observer.

Gerd fathered four children with three different women, was away from home for months (sometimes years) at a time, often in the company of two of his lovers while his mother or his legal wife raised the kids. He was on the losing side of both World Wars, serving reluctantly in the second, where he collected wasps from the frontlines.

Gerd was forced to flee the family estate when the Red Army annexed Poland. The Heinrichs' survived for five years in an abandon cottage in a remote German forest, near the Polish border, eating, among other things, the bodies of wild rodents, whose skins Gerd collected for American institutions.

When he fled Poland, Gerd buried an unfinished manuscript - his life's work - titled The Ichneuminae of Burma. With it was the most precious of his Oriental wasp collection, 500 specimens of the very first of a particular species known to science. He buried all this in a pair of watertight metal boxes, one inside the other, several feet below the surface of a swamp. Scrupulously, he made the site look untampered with, and then mapped the location. Fourteen years later, in 1959, after the Heinrichs settled in Maine, Polish scientists rescued the manuscript and collection intact.

Gerd lived long enough to see his son become a distinguished scientist, though not a taxonomist. Bernd Heinrich became an insect physiologist. After he left Berkeley for UVM, he switched to raven behavior.

The Snoring Bird is named for a very, very rare flightless rail Gerd collected in the Celebes. It's quite an adventure, and it offered me a different way of thinking about my own paternal roots.