One day while I was by the brook catching trout, I heard a loud humming of insects above me in the gnarled spreading branches of an old willow tree. It was a beautiful warm spring day, and the sky was bright blue. The tree was covered with yellow pussy willows. Woolly black and rust-colored bumblebees were buzzing here and there. Willow warblers and pied flycatchers were hawking flies. The combination of sights, smells, and sounds gave me a delicious, light-headed feeling. Many years later during my Ph. D. oral exam at UCLA, I was asked why I wanted to study biology. I answered that it was because of what I saw and felt that spring morning in the Hahnheide. Of course, this was an inadequate answer, but I didn’t have a better one. How could I explain the Hahnheide and all that led to it, to a group of five no-nonsense professors? Some things cannot be explained in three sentences.
—Berndt Heinrich in A Patch of Fireweed