Life Everlasting

The Animal Way of Death

By: Bernd Heinrich

Narrated by: Rick Adamson

Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

From one of the finest naturalist/writers of our time, a fascinating investigation of Nature’s inspiring death-to-life cycle

When a good friend with a severe illness wrote, asking if he might have his “green burial” at Bernd Heinrich’s hunting camp in Maine, it inspired the acclaimed biologist to investigate a subject that had long fascinated him. How exactly does the animal world deal with the flip side of the life cycle? And what are the lessons, ecological to spiritual, raised by a close look at how the animal world renews itself?

Heinrich focuses his wholly original gaze on the fascinating doings of creatures most of us would otherwise turn away from—field mouse burials conducted by carrion beetles; the communication strategies of ravens, “the premier northern undertakers”; and the “inadvertent teamwork” among wolves and large cats, foxes and weasels, bald eagles and nuthatches in cold-weather dispersal of prey. Heinrich reveals, too, how and where humans still play our ancient and important role as scavengers, thereby turning—not dust to dust—but life to life.

©2020 Bernd Heinrich (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Fascinating book about new life coming from old.

If you love nature you will love this book. A series of studies on decomposition and the creatures that assist it.

Deceived .

Surprised it had nothing to do with animals way of dying. Only about animals being eaten after they die.

Narrator is boring.