They’re intrusive, bold, and will eat just about anything, from small mammals and turtle eggs to carrion. Most have yellow legs, striking black-and-white plumage, featherless red faces, and blueish-silver hooked beaks. The 10 surviving species of caracara inhabit the most varied and extreme corners of South and Central America, with some populations reaching into the southern United States. Abounding with intriguing characters and too-close-for-comfort wildlife encounters, the book is an enrapturing tale about the unfolding evolutionary drama of our planet.Ī Most Remarkable Creature hinges on the charismatic genus of birds called caracaras, which are related to falcons but look more like a mash-up between a vulture and an eagle. His latest project captures the same adoration for the natural world that’s expressed in his music: In A Most Remarkable Creature, Meiburg’s debut book released last month, he explores the hidden forces that gave rise to our world and the species we share it with. If you’ve heard Meiburg’s name before, it's likely because he’s the lead singer of the band Shearwater, whose occasionally bird-themed albums have been praised by NPR and Pitchfork. “It's not an overstatement to say that I was hooked from that moment.” The birds were playful and daring-unlike any bird of prey that he’d met before. “I was walking through colonies of albatrosses and there are penguins everywhere, and whales and seals, and there are these magnificently weird caracaras running up to me and staring at me, like, ‘What are you?’” Meiburg told Audubon in a recent interview.

But when he arrived at a collection of windswept, treeless islands in the far reaches of the archipelago, he was surprised to find a raptor that seemed as curious about him as he was about it: a Striated Caracara. It was 1997 and Meiburg, fresh on the heels of his college graduation, had received a year-long Watson Fellowship to study human communities in the world’s most remote places. Indie rock musician Jonathan Meiburg didn’t initially travel to the Falkland Islands for the birds.

A most remarkable creature