{"id":152172,"date":"2021-04-22T17:01:03","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T21:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152172"},"modified":"2021-04-22T17:01:03","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T21:01:03","slug":"at-home-among-the-birds-an-interview-with-jonathan-meiburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/04\/22\/at-home-among-the-birds-an-interview-with-jonathan-meiburg\/","title":{"rendered":"At Home among the Birds: An Interview with Jonathan Meiburg"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Jenna Moore.<\/p><\/div>\n

Jonathan Meiburg was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1976 and grew up in the southeastern United States. In 1997, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked an enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Meiburg explores these passions in his new book, <\/em>A Most Remarkable Creature<\/a>, which traces the evolution of the wildlife and landscapes of South America through the lives of the unusual falcons called caracaras. Like the omnivorous birds at the heart of his book, Meiburg is more generalist than specialist. He\u2019s written reviews, features, and interviews for publications including <\/em>The Believer,<\/em>\u00a0Talkhouse, and <\/em>The Appendix, on subjects ranging from the music of Brian Eno to a hidden exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History. He also conducted one of the last interviews with Peter Matthiessen. But he\u2019s best known as a musician\u2014albums and performances by his bands Loma and Shearwater have earned critical acclaim for many years, often winning praise from NPR, the <\/em>New York Times, the <\/em>Guardian, and <\/em>Pitchfork. In 2018, Meiburg organized and performed in a three-night live reconstruction of David Bowie\u2019s Berlin Trilogy for WNYC\u2019s New Sounds program. He lives in central Texas. This interview was conducted electronically between there and Wilmington, North Carolina.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Recently an anhinga started roosting by the tidal creek that runs through my backyard. It\u2019s fun to watch\u2014the long snaky neck and the way it hangs its wings out to dry like laundry. Once, when the creek was clear, I watched it hunt, and it flew along underwater like a fish. I\u2019ve been told that anhingas aren\u2019t really supposed to be here, or that this is north of their range, which is shifting due to climate change.<\/p>\n

MEIBURG<\/p>\n

To me anhingas are among the most beautiful birds, and maybe the most like their dinosaurian ancestors of any birds. A lot of people think they\u2019re sort of goofy, and I can see that, too\u2014the tiny heads, the absurdly long necks and flight feathers, the overall sense that they\u2019re a prototype someone meant to refine later. They have wonderful nicknames like\u00a0\u201csnakebird\u201d and \u201cwater turkey.\u201d I love how you can see them soaring way up in the sky for no apparent reason, like ravens with long, skinny necks, even though they make their living wading around on the bottoms of rivers.<\/p>\n

They need to stay underwater for a long time, so they have very little oil on their feathers. This helps them sink and stay down. But it means they have to spend a lot of time standing on perches and holding their wings out to dry, which is usually how you see them, and it locks them out of places that get really cold. I was used to seeing them in the southeastern U.S., especially along that elevated stretch of I-10 that crosses the Atchafalaya Basin\u2014but they were thick along the river in southern Guyana when I visited, and they seemed completely at home among colorful, feathered weirdos like parrots, toucans, and capuchin birds. <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What role does this movement of animals between South and North America play in your story? I think of it all as one big blob of land with a canal in the middle.<\/p>\n

MEIBURG<\/p>\n

This question is pretty much at the heart of my book, which starts with Darwin scratching his head about why the striated caracara, a bold, social, curious bird of prey he met at the southern tip of South America, lived there and nowhere else. Trying to figure that out changed the way I thought about the world.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Expand on that, for those of us who don\u2019t instantly make the connection between \u201cstrange bird confined to the southernmost part of South America\u201d and \u201cthe world.\u201d<\/p>\n

MEIBURG<\/p>\n

Until I started trying to understand where the caracaras came from, I\u2019d never realized that North and South America, biologically and geologically, are basically strangers to each other. Lumping them together as a single \u201cNew World,\u201d as Europeans did, really doesn\u2019t make much sense. Tectonic forces kept the Americas apart for a hundred million years.\u00a0<\/em>When they finally joined hands at the isthmus of Panama a few million years ago\u2014a short time, if you\u2019re a paleontologist\u2014two sets of animals who\u2019d pursued completely separate evolutionary journeys confronted each other,\u00a0which one scientist called \u201cone of the most extraordinary events in the whole history of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caracaras are part of this story. Like the parrots, their ancestors probably entered South America through the forests of a warm Antarctica, and in the southern New World they mostly\u00a0play the same roles crows play here\u2014clever, social scavengers, like raccoons with wings. But unlike large crows, which have never found a foothold in South America, caracaras made it to the northern hemisphere thousands of years ago. We\u2019ve found their fossil bones in California and Arkansas, and\u00a0although\u00a0they retreated south after people arrived in the Americas, they\u2019re slowly coming north again. The website eBird says they\u2019ve been seen recently in the Outer Banks.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you settle on that bird in particular?<\/p>\n

MEIBURG<\/p>\n

What hooked me was their personality. Beside the fact that they\u2019re big, flashy birds of prey that behave more like crows, striated caracaras just don\u2019t act like wild animals are \u201csupposed\u201d to. They swagger up like they\u2019ve got as much right to be here as you do, and look you right in the eye. If you sit still they\u2019ll start trying to take things out of your bag. I have a little video of one trying to figure out what to do with a pair of hiking poles. They\u2019re utterly and confidently themselves, and they made me realize that the reactions of every wild animal I\u2019d ever seen\u2014hiding or fleeing in terror\u2014weren\u2019t how it always was. Animals had to learn to do that, from bitter experience.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Any chance you\u2019d share that clip?<\/p>\n

MEIBURG<\/p>\n

Here it is.<\/p>\n

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