A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey
(Knopf, $30)
“To call this a bird book would be like calling Moby-Dick a whaling manual,” said Sam Hodges in The Dallas Morning News. Musician and naturalist Jonathan Meiburg first encountered a striated caracara 25 years ago in the Falkland Islands, and he has been obsessed with the species and its family ever since. These curious raptors don’t shy from human contact. A striated caracara, or Johnny rook, as it’s also known, will toy with the zippers of your backpack or look you straight in the eye. Johnny rooks have been slaughtered for being nuisances, but Meiburg links himself to their past admirers while pursuing a larger goal. Caracaras, he writes, “have surprising stories to tell us about the history of life, about how evolution can fashion a mind like ours from different materials.”
Meiburg’s quest to understand caracaras becomes “a lively mashup of evolutionary biology, travelogue, and biography,” said Paul Kvinta in Outside. We learn that Charles Darwin was annoyed by Johnny rooks when they dove and stole a hat from one of his crew. A different 19th-century naturalist, William Henry Hudson, wrote far more favorably about caracaras, but his work was snubbed by ornithologists. As Meiburg weaves together his many tales, “he lingers too long in spots.” But his evocative writing “more than makes up for it,” and the caracaras themselves never disappoint. In Guyana, the red-throated caracara has learned how to raid wasp nests without getting stung. At a sanctuary in the U.K., one striated caracara wins every time she has to locate the hidden prize in a shell game.
Sadly, caracaras are endangered, said Christoph Irmscher in The Wall Street Journal. Though Meiburg believes that Johnny rooks may not survive in the Falklands, his wider forecast “offers us a silver lining.” Crested caracaras, which were once also largely confined to South America, have been recently spotted in Florida and near New York City. “Who’s to say that someday soon you might not look up and suddenly see hovering above you—hold on to your hat!—a caracara, desirous to make your acquaintance.”