A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey
By Jonathan Meiburg (’17) | Penguin Random House | March 30, 2021
From the publisher: In 1833, a young Charles Darwin was astonished by a strange animal he met in the Falkland Islands: a handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcon that was “tame and inquisitive,” “quarrelsome and passionate,” and so insatiably curious that it stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin met many unusual creatures in his five-year voyage, but no others showed an interest in studying him—and he wondered why these birds were confined to islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story. But he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it.
Almost two hundred years later, Meiburg picks up where Darwin left off. These rare and unusual birds—now called striated caracaras—still exist, and “A Most Remarkable Creature” reveals the wild and fascinating story of their history, origins, and possible futures in a series of travels throughout South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana. Along the way, Meiburg draws us into the life and work of W.H. Hudson, a Victorian writer and naturalist who championed caracaras as unsung wonders of the natural world, and takes us to falconry parks in England, where captive caracaras perform incredible feats of memory, problem-solving, and friendship. “A Most Remarkable Creature” is much more than a book about birds: it’s a quest for moments of first contact between humans and animals, science and religion, and the mismatched continents Europeans mistakenly called the New World.