A MOST REMARKABLE CREATURE

An entire book devoted to the odd caracara? Yes, and the narrative rarely lags.

Meiburg, a journalist and leader of the band Shearwater, begins with Darwin, whose 1831-1836 voyage around the world has provided evergreen material for natural historians since. During his trek, Darwin visited the Falkland Islands, which, along with the Galápagos, are the only New World lands that Europeans actually discovered because they were never inhabited. There he encountered a handsome, raven-sized bird of prey, the striated caracara, distantly related to the falcon, whose bizarre behavior persuaded him to devote “more ink to their antics in The Voyage of the Beagle than he gave any other bird.” Meiburg’s enthusiasm matches Darwin’s, and readers will share it. Unlike the fresh-meat diet of most birds of prey, caracara eat nearly everything, including insects, carrion, garbage, mucus, feces, and, according to Falkland lore, “cans of engine grease.” Possessing an insatiable curiosity and intelligence, they have no fear of man, a recipe for extinction, which may be their fate. After a vivid description of the bird, its life on the isolated islands, and a torrent of amusing anecdotes, Meiburg steps back to deliver the big picture. Since the 1990s, scientists agree that birds descended directly from dinosaurs and have flourished since the larger creatures went suddenly extinct 65 million years ago. From 700 species identified during the age of dinosaurs, more than 10,000 bird species live today, far outnumbering mammals. Not only a fine writer, the author is clearly an adventurer, and he devotes other entertaining chapters to treks into the high Andes and South American jungles in search of other caracara species. He also detours regularly into the life of William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), the British naturalist and ornithologist who was acclaimed during his lifetime but is now known mainly for Green Mansions, a romantic novel set in the Venezuelan jungle.

Wholly captivating natural history.