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queenluaA Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey by Jonathan Meiburg
I thought I knew what I was getting into with this book. I've seen photos of caracaras before, particularly of the crested variety (the only kind we get in North America), and I knew they were big ol' majestic hawk-lookin' mofos.
Turns out, however, while still pictures make caracaras look like majestic high-flying stoics, in motion they're more akin to... thieving little monkeys. Shoe-eating, campsite-destroying, highly social, very noisy, endlessly curious buggers. Obnoxious little shits, in short. And oh gosh did this book make me love them.
The opening chapters are the strongest, focusing on the striated caracara, which is the cleverest and therefore the brattiest of all the known species of caracara. They live exclusively on the Falklan Islands, an obscure island set of teeny islands between Argentina and Antartica which I'd previously known nothing about. (A throwaway reference to "the Falklands War" sent me on an evening-long wikipedia dive and, wow it is a trip!) The book weaves together the author's own experiences surveying and studying these birds, with the stories of the islands' people, with Darwin's early (though quite sparse!) accounts of the bird, with the diaries of an early 1800s sea captain who got marooned on the Falklands and had to contend with the caracaras (1) trying to eat his shoes while he slept, (2) digging up the eggs he'd buried several feet deep in the sand to save for food, (3) flying off with the club he'd used to bludgeon seals (!!!), (4) dismantling his tent, etc... and effortlessly, the story ranges from there to Britain, where an eccentric millionaire dubbed "the penguin king" raised some of those caracaras in captivity at a truly batshit sounding park called Birdland... then we wind up in the memoirs of an Argentinian naturalist who loved the caracaras on his farm growing up... It's fun, it's enthralling; I was delighted.
Just as Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk was half-memoir and half-tribute-to-T.H. White, Meiburg's narrative is half-tribute-to-aforementioned-Argentinian-naturalist, a Mr. William Henry Hudson, whose life story and writing make for excellent reading—here's a choice anecdote.
There's also a really lovely overview of the Great American Exchange, a phenomenon I've somehow never heard of, despite it being a pretty fundamental force in shaping evolution on both continents...! Basically, North America and South America were separate until quite recently in geologic time (some 40 million years ago), and the collision of the two continents had dramatic effects in both places—in particular, South American mammals went extinct at a much higher rate than North American mammals, for reasons that are incompletely understood but thoroughly-hypotheized-about—but it also explains the smaller mystery of "why aren't there any crows in South America" and "wait if caracaras are related to falcons, why are they so smart when falcons are so dumb" in terms of, y'know, evolutionary pressures and such.
I do think the book's middle drags a bit—there's a big section on the red-throated caracara that, while interesting, felt so totally disjoint from the rest of the book's narratives that it just failed to capture my interest as strongly, and there's a couple chapters that felt a little too repetitious in what they were covering. But overall, this book's a damn fun ride and a surprisingly breezy read if you're interested in birds or natural history.
I thought I knew what I was getting into with this book. I've seen photos of caracaras before, particularly of the crested variety (the only kind we get in North America), and I knew they were big ol' majestic hawk-lookin' mofos.
Turns out, however, while still pictures make caracaras look like majestic high-flying stoics, in motion they're more akin to... thieving little monkeys. Shoe-eating, campsite-destroying, highly social, very noisy, endlessly curious buggers. Obnoxious little shits, in short. And oh gosh did this book make me love them.
The opening chapters are the strongest, focusing on the striated caracara, which is the cleverest and therefore the brattiest of all the known species of caracara. They live exclusively on the Falklan Islands, an obscure island set of teeny islands between Argentina and Antartica which I'd previously known nothing about. (A throwaway reference to "the Falklands War" sent me on an evening-long wikipedia dive and, wow it is a trip!) The book weaves together the author's own experiences surveying and studying these birds, with the stories of the islands' people, with Darwin's early (though quite sparse!) accounts of the bird, with the diaries of an early 1800s sea captain who got marooned on the Falklands and had to contend with the caracaras (1) trying to eat his shoes while he slept, (2) digging up the eggs he'd buried several feet deep in the sand to save for food, (3) flying off with the club he'd used to bludgeon seals (!!!), (4) dismantling his tent, etc... and effortlessly, the story ranges from there to Britain, where an eccentric millionaire dubbed "the penguin king" raised some of those caracaras in captivity at a truly batshit sounding park called Birdland... then we wind up in the memoirs of an Argentinian naturalist who loved the caracaras on his farm growing up... It's fun, it's enthralling; I was delighted.
Just as Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk was half-memoir and half-tribute-to-T.H. White, Meiburg's narrative is half-tribute-to-aforementioned-Argentinian-naturalist, a Mr. William Henry Hudson, whose life story and writing make for excellent reading—here's a choice anecdote.
There's also a really lovely overview of the Great American Exchange, a phenomenon I've somehow never heard of, despite it being a pretty fundamental force in shaping evolution on both continents...! Basically, North America and South America were separate until quite recently in geologic time (some 40 million years ago), and the collision of the two continents had dramatic effects in both places—in particular, South American mammals went extinct at a much higher rate than North American mammals, for reasons that are incompletely understood but thoroughly-hypotheized-about—but it also explains the smaller mystery of "why aren't there any crows in South America" and "wait if caracaras are related to falcons, why are they so smart when falcons are so dumb" in terms of, y'know, evolutionary pressures and such.
I do think the book's middle drags a bit—there's a big section on the red-throated caracara that, while interesting, felt so totally disjoint from the rest of the book's narratives that it just failed to capture my interest as strongly, and there's a couple chapters that felt a little too repetitious in what they were covering. But overall, this book's a damn fun ride and a surprisingly breezy read if you're interested in birds or natural history.
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Date: 2021-12-10 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-10 10:54 am (UTC)