San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bird-loving Austin musician winging it.
Jonathan Meiburg hardly hid his interest in birds. His Austin-based indierock band was named Shearwater after a sea bird, and he released albums with titles such as “Winged Life” and “Rook.” Even “Palo Santo” — named for a wild tree found in Central and South America — can be viewed as a perch.
Then there were the interviews with obvious music-centric sites like Pitchfork, sure, but also with publications and sites including the Birdist, Scientific American and Ornithology Exchange, suggesting rara avis in the popularmusic sphere: a successful touring musician whose nonmusical pursuits were far more formal than a hobby to nurture between making albums and playing shows.
“People get puzzled and aren’t sure what to do with people who do more than one thing,” he says. “Which is too bad because nobody asks Brian May questions about astrophysics. They only ask about playing in Queen.”
“A Most Remarkable Creature” has turned more conversations to Meiburg’s study of birds, research that goes back more than 20 years. The creature in the book’s title is the striated caracara or the Johnny Rook, “a crow on a falcon chassis,” Meiburg says for a thumbnail physical description. The book’s subtitle refers to them as “the world’s smartest birds of prey.” But Meiburg sees limitations in such categorization. He became fascinated with the caracara — there are nine species of the bird — because it exhibits so few behavioral tendencies of its relatives. “A Most Remarkable Creature” describes a bird both curious and playful — sometimes thieving — and also quite adaptable.
Meiburg was introduced to the bird in 1997 when he was in the Falkland Islands as part of a yearlong fellowship that took him to several remote places around the world.
“Observing striated caracaras in 1997 in the Falklands was like looking through a keyhole,” he says. “What I saw unfolded into this grand, mindblowing story for me. Learning more about this species. But also understanding what had happened to planet Earth over a long period of time. I could see these birds and every other living thing that was part of this long journey.”
Meiburg, in this case, is talking about creatures and land across millions of years. But among the joys of “A Most Remarkable Creature” are the ways he braids together different journeys: that of a South American land mass; that of the caracara; that of long deceased naturalists such as Charles Darwin (who called the caracara “quarrelsome and passionate”) and William Henry Hudson, whom Meiburg refers to as a sort of avatar; and that of Meiburg himself, though he frames himself largely as observer.
“One way to look at it is that multicellular life developed 600 million years ago, and the Sun won’t swallow the Earth, but it might make it uninhabitable in 150 million years,” he says. “So it’s a little like life’s last act now. And I didn’t see myself as the protagonist of this story, which was a thing I dreaded. I just happen to have a seat in the bleachers for this unbelievably grand and ornate and poorly seen drama that has been unfolding for so long. I feel lucky to have been able to see any part of it.”
Among the many bright and interesting characters — past and present — who populate the book is paleontologist Julia Clarke. Meiburg is with Clarke and her students in southern Chile as they observe a carancho — a crested caracara — dining. “The carancho lifted its chin and called, karruk-karruk, then bent to tear into the cow’s head, just as its ancestors had done at the carcasses of ground sloths and glyptodonts. Meat is meat.”
Meiburg in conversation reiterates a point Clarke makes in the book: that our sense of feeling the world is known hinders a healthy sense of discovery.
“People cling to certainties,” Meiburg says. “The brain likes to know what the causes of things are, even if they’re wrong. It doesn’t matter what it is, you just need to find one.”
So “A Most Remarkable Creature” leans toward a sense of wonder. Without resorting to anthropomorphism, Meiburg is nevertheless drawn to the birds’ behavior, which differs greatly from the remoteness exhibited by most birds of prey.
“There’s this attraction to other living things, especially something new,” he says. “Which can be a dangerous approach in many ways; curiosity killed the cat, after all. But curiosity can also be powerful. You see it in the caracaras in their varying approaches to life. To be in the presence of them is to feel you’re in the presence of an intelligent thing looking at the world that way.” In 19th-century naturalist and ornithologist Hudson, he found a spiritual counterpart whose enthusiasm as presented by Meiburg comes across as boundless, right down to a joyful little reference Hudson made to an insect and something touching “a chord in his grasshopper heart.”
“He might play a flute or a whistle and sing and dance, so I can imagine him doing that in front of a grasshopper,” Meiburg says, laughing. “He was willing to reach beyond himself and his understanding. Those are the qualities I admired most in him.”
Not surprisingly for a musician, Meiburg follows that flute. He follows the sounds of the birds. Years of research and years of study yielded a book as curious as the caracaras, one that leaves room for discovery: biographical, biological and geological.
As for music, Meiburg has been studying different data from the past year. He’s halfway through a new Shearwater record and has plans also to record with Loma, a band he started more recently. Crowdfunding has more than covered the cost of the new Shearwater album.
“Patreon pays the bills,” he says. “Not handsomely, but it does, and I’m grateful for that. You can have an audience of
500 to 1,000 people who can sustain your work, and that’s enough. I’d need people to listen to these songs 20 million times on Spotify to make the same. It’s easier for me to convince 800 people than 20 million. Not everybody can work in volume.”
His pandemic revelation is that touring, which is taxing and often comes without reward, will look very different for him in the future.
“You start to wonder if playing for 12 people in Boise (Idaho) on a Monday night is the best way to do this,” he says. “The last Loma tour left us deeply in debt. I’d rather spend the money where there’s another album at the end instead of playing for five people in Sheffield, England, when the Stones are next door.”
He’s found a virtual book tour more agreeable. “Nobody expects you to do a different set,” he says. “You don’t have to perform tasks like driving a van, unloading a van. I’ve enjoyed it.”
Essentially, Meiburg continues to exist doing the things he loves — travel-based study and making music — but with a greater degree of adaptability to ensure he can continue both.