A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey - Softcover

Meiburg, Jonathan

 
9781101911549: A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101911549 ISBN 13: 9781101911549
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet's deep past in their family history.

“Deftly intertwine[s] natural history and human history, with insights and lessons that go far beyond the subject birds.”—David Sibley, author of What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Utterly captivating and beautifully written, this book is a hugely entertaining and enlightening exploration of a bird so wickedly smart, curious, and social, it boggles the mind.”—Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Bird Way

In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were "tame and inquisitive . . . quarrelsome and passionate," and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin wondered why these birds were confined to remote 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, Jonathan Meiburg takes up this chase. He takes us through South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana, in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they're very rare. He reveals the wild, fascinating story of their history, origins, and possible futures. And along the way, he draws us into the life and work of William Henry Hudson, the Victorian writer and naturalist who championed caracaras as an unsung wonder of the natural world, and to falconry parks in the English countryside, where captive caracaras perform incredible feats of memory and problem-solving. A Most Remarkable Creature is a hybrid of science writing, travelogue, and biography, as generous and accessible as it is sophisticated, and absolutely riveting.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

In 1997, Jonathan Meiburg received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked his enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Since then, he's written reviews, features, and interviews for print and online publications including The Believer, The Talkhouse, and The Appendix on subjects ranging from a hidden exhibit hall at the American Museum of Natural History to the last long-form interview with author Peter Matthiessen. But he's best known as the leader of the band Shearwater, whose albums and performances have often been praised by NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Pitchfork. He lives in central Texas.

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1
 
An Unanswered Question
 
It’s the turning of the Earth that spins the winds around Antarc­tica. The same force that curls hurricanes into deadly spirals gath­ers cold gales descending from the South Pole, where ice entombs entire mountain ranges, and launches them into a west-flowing moat of air that piles the seas into waves seven stories tall, shutting out the warmer world to the north. There’s nothing to oppose them: sail a boat forever along the sixty-third parallel and you’d never see anything but black-and-white water, the spouts of whales, and the careening shapes of albatrosses skidding down the air on eleven-foot wings, a churning world that’s our planet’s most enduring scene.
 
But this endless polar cyclone frays along its northern border, where rogue winds peel off into the great oceanic basins—Indian, Pacific, Atlantic—and Atlantic-bound gusts first strike the green world in the fjords and islands of Tierra del Fuego, where the Andes march into the sea. The winds fling plumes of wet sand against glacially sculpted cliffs and prune dripping forests of evergreen beeches into bizarre shapes—forests that are, in a way, the winds’ making, since their fierce chill forces warm air traveling south from the Amazon to drop its hoarded water. Tierra del Fuego’s wooded slopes and valleys are carpeted in mosses, ferns, and sundew, its trees draped in pale wisps of old-man’s beard; and where its forests meet the sea, flightless sea ducks and giant otters shelter in a labyrinth of coves, inlets, and cobbled beaches that seem freshly carved from the bedrock of the world.
 
Charles Darwin saw these southernmost forests in the early months of his adventure aboard HMS Beagle and thought their grandeur rivaled the tropical woodlands that blew his mind in Brazil. But “in these still solitudes,” he noted, “death, instead of life, is the predominant spirit.” Without ants or termites to mill them down, Tierra del Fuego’s dead trees stand and lie beside the living for years, and crow-sized woodpeck­ers knock splinters from their trunks with the dull thunk of hatchets. Even now, when you can fly the length of Darwin’s five-year odyssey in two days, Tierra del Fuego’s fog-bound channels are seldom visited, largely inaccessible, and since the demise of the Amerindians who lived there for thousands of years, unpeopled. Ships occasionally use them to shelter from the mighty Pacific swells, but almost no one lingers.
 
Nor do the winds. Soaring over the low crests of the southern Andes, they beat north and east to glance off the unclimbed peaks of Isla de los Estados, where Jules Verne imagined a lighthouse at the end of the world, and bend the dry grasses on the plains of Patagonia. Then they go to sea again, dragging a train of whitecaps to soften and die in the tropics. But as they leave the high latitudes, they graze a last spot of land—a cluster of treeless, wasp-waisted islands in the northwest cor­ner of the Falkland archipelago called the Jasons. And it’s here, in the lee of fallen boulders and tufts of grass, that a hidden marvel huddles out of the wind’s reach: one of the strangest and most wonderful ani­mals on earth.
 
It didn’t stay hidden from Darwin, but it took him by surprise in a place he was impatient to leave. The Beagle and its companion, HMS Adventure, called in at the Falklands twice before threading through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific, and Darwin thought the islands’ brown, undulating moorlands looked “desolate and wretched,” espe­cially compared to the Brazilian forests where it was “not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.” The Falklands’ monoto­nous landscape, broken only by a few low mountains and ridges of gra­nitic quartz, suggested none of these feelings. “I can very plainly see,” he confided in a letter to his sister, “there will not be much pleasure or contentment, till we get out of these detestable latitudes & are carrying on all sail to the land where Bananas grow.”
 
It can be hard to picture Darwin as anything but a white-bearded ancient with a thousand-yard stare, but when the Beagle left England he was only twenty-two, a rich kid with an assured future as a coun­try priest. He’d been invited aboard as much to keep the ship’s mel­ancholy young captain company as to advance the cause of science, and his unpaid role as a naturalist was incidental to the ship’s official mission of mapping the treacherous coasts at the southern tip of South America. Darwin’s only real qualification was an undistinguished bachelor’s degree from Cambridge, where he often devoted more time to the upper-class pastimes of riding and shooting than to his studies, and even his best reference conceded he was not “finished”; he was simply an amiable and wealthy young man with a growing interest in rocks and insects, a yen for adventure, and a quality his uncle fondly described as an “enlarged curiosity.”
 
The Beagle’s five-year voyage, Darwin knew, would let him indulge this curiosity in places few naturalists had ever seen; and after convinc­ing his reluctant father to pay his way, young Charles resolved to wring all he could from these years of freedom—even on cold, barren islands that left him pining for the tropics. Riding and shooting, as it happened, were useful skills in the Falklands, whose human population consisted of a single British officer and the remnants of a failed Argentine penal colony. Among the former prisoners were a contingent of gauchos, the legendary horsemen of the Pampas, who liked to chase feral cattle across the islands’ waterlogged peatlands, and Darwin convinced a pair of them to take him along on one of their excursions.
 
For five days, they rode at a gallop through blinding squalls of snow and ice, dodging fierce bulls who weren’t pleased to see them, sleep­ing on the bare ground, roasting their suppers of wild beef on fires stoked with bones instead of wood. Darwin’s horse slipped and fell in hidden pockets of thick black mud, soaking him through, and by the sixth morning he could hardly wait to get back to his cramped cabin aboard the Beagle. But the ride gave him new mysteries to ponder—and chief among them was the astonishing tameness of the Falklands’ wild­life. Grazing flocks of native geese barely flinched as Darwin and the gauchos thundered past, and even the legendarily cryptic birds called snipe—seen only in the distance, if at all, in England—let him come almost close enough to touch them. Other animals were bolder still: an inquisitive songbird probed at his shoes with its thin, curved beak, and
the wolfish foxes unique to the islands were so tame that the gauchos could kill them by holding out a piece of meat in one hand and a knife in the other. These gullible carnivores, known locally as warrahs, “have been observed to enter a tent,” Darwin wrote, “and actually pull some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman.” He suspected—correctly—that their fearlessness would soon lead to their extinction.
 
But a third animal, a handsome bird of prey that resembled a cross between a hawk and a raven, seemed to have an enlarged curiosity of its own. It had an orange face, a silver-gray beak, and glossy black plum­age, and it massed in noisy gangs at the islands’ only settlement to beg for scraps of kitchen garbage. Unlike the wary hawks and falcons Dar­win knew in England, these...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101911549
ISBN 13 
9781101911549
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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