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On the cover of A Most Remarkable Creature is the oldest-known image of a stiated caracara, which this book is mostly about. The caracara is a type of falcon, of which there exists ten different species.

Caracaras have a knack for solving complex problems and learning from one another—one species has been seen working in teams to flip heavy rocks in the high Andes—and in captivity they’ve performed extraordinary feats of memory and insight. (A captive striated caracara named Tina, who spent her entire life in the UK, demonstrated the ability to distinguish objects by shape and color, and knew a set of stuffed animals by name.)

Meiburg paints a vivid picture of caracaras with the passion and verve that seems to possess him when making music; he's a charmed composer and front-person of Shearwater, a band named after a type of bird.

This book takes the reader into Meiburg's intimate knowledge of and passion for birds. While Jonathan Franzen may be the most commonly-known birder-the name used for people who enjoy viewing birds-Meiburg brings us farther into the realm of birds, and actually other animals and nature itself, as we follow him on his travels.

It's the rotation 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, in a churning world that’s our planet’s most enduring scene.

Meiburg's descriptions are often prosaic, which is just when they work and do not; his paragraphs often become David Foster Wallace-ish in his passion for using strange words as opposed to common ones, which is, naturally, a stylistic trait.

There's a lot to be said for Meiburg's nerdiness:

I daydream about keeping a striated caracara in my apartment. It would be the world’s most exasperating roommate, but watching it build a nest of shredded T-shirts, LP jackets, and guitar strings in my bookshelf might be worth it. I can imagine it standing on my kitchen counter in the morning, tearing into a box of cereal with its beak or cracking an egg with a blow from its clenched foot, then stashing a piece of toast under my chair while I boil water for coffee. After breakfast, it might become absorbed in a dirty sock or a roll of paper towels while I try to figure out where it’s hidden my keys. All the while, I’d be thinking of Darwin’s unanswered questions, and a few of my own: Why are you like this? Why are there so few of you? How did you come to be?

Meiburg's curiousness is contagious as is his preference to dig into things: as I was reading his book I felt compelled to go deeper into birds and other animals that he writes of. The book positively wafts of knowledge and passion, which is beautiful to see.

Peregrines, whose name means “wanderer,” aren’t only the fastest birds on Earth; like most true falcons, they’re also long-distance migrants. Many seasonally commute between the northern and southern world, logging as much as eighteen thousand miles in a single year, and though some of their routes are fairly straightforward (New England to Cuba, for instance, or northern Siberia to Turkey), there are many curious variations. One bird banded in Nome, Alaska, turned up a few months later in Hawaii; another,banded in Arizona, turned up in Japan, where it was suspected of hitching a ride on a container ship. Along with these prodigious feats of flight and navigation, true falcons’ visual powers almost defy belief; peregrines have the fastest visual processing speed measured in any animal, and their eyes are so sharp that they could read the headline of a newspaper from a mile away. John Alec Baker noted that a human with eyes in the same proportion to its skull as a peregrine would have eyes that measure three inches across and weigh four pounds each.

I found this section terrifying:

“No caracara, Sean?” asked Jose. “No caracara,” Sean said, taking a seat beside me. “But this is an excellent forest. There should be some big spiders in here.” I didn’t love the sound of that, but Sean insisted he could teach me to love them. The previous night he’d showed me the gleaming legs of a pink-toed tarantula, hiding in the bark of a fig tree like a crab in the crevice of a rock. “There’s a lot we don’t know about tarantulas,” he said, tickling its toes with a blade of grass. “This might even be a new species.” The pink-toe didn’t budge, but at the base of the tree I found its molted skin, light as air and surprisingly colorful, with an iridescent green patina and a flush of red at the base of its curved fangs. What an ordeal it must be, I thought—and what a relief—to slough off the outside of your body like a scab. What would it feel like, on the first night after a molt, as your new skin hardened in the cool air? Brian perked up at the mention of spiders. “When you see the Theraphosa,” he said, smiling broadly, “now, that is a beautiful spider to see.” It wasn’t the word I’d have chosen. Theraphosa blondi, the Goliath birdeater, is the largest spider on Earth and a specialty of the Guiana Shield—a reddish-brown behemoth without any stripes, spots, or iridescence. What it lacks in ornament, it makes up for in bulk: female birdeaters can weigh half a pound, and the legs of both sexes can span eleven inches or more. Like most tarantulas, birdeaters lead mostly uneventful lives; they spend most of their time hidden in a burrow from which they ambush insects, lizards, rodents, and (rarely) birds that disturb silken tripwires at its mouth. Females rarely wander, but males go on seasonal walkabouts to find mates, who often kill and eat them after sex. Part of me wanted to see one, in the same way Hudson longed to peer inside the caranchos’ nest; another part was quite happy not to. “You will see him,” Brian said. “A few days from here.” Sean, seeing the look on my face, leaped to the spider’s defense, urging me to remember that tarantulas are afraid of almost everything, since many birds and mammals love to eat them.

One thing that Jonathan Franzen has got, as opposed to Meiburg, is a seasoned and carefully tuned sense of rhythm; Meiburg's book reads slightly fractured, making it seem an essay collection rather than a book standing on its own legs.

I enjoyed the introduction, then I felt the book went into a lax state, then back again with full force as Meiburg wrote about his travels in South America. His writing about the birds in regard to being endangered and as affected by the climate crisis is also very interesting.

There is a lot to be found in this book: if you're even slightly into ornithology: congratulations. This book will be a precious gift. If you're into travel writing and beautiful writing on nature and animals, go get this book. I'm looking forward to what Meiburg will have published in the future.

Jonathan Meiburg's 'A Most Remarkable Creature' is published by Knopf on 2021-03-30.