On a sunny, Tuesday morning in June, I sit down with Jonathan Meiburg to chat over Zoom. Meiburg, the author of the recently published A Most Remarkable Creature (Knopf 2021), a book that expertly navigates the complex world of caracaras – South America’s severely understudied birds of prey – is full of fascinating stories and information. We talk about everything from the correct pronunciation of “caracara” (both “care-uh-care-uh” and “car-uh-car-uh” are acceptable) to Meiburg’s career as the leader of the extremely prolific band Shearwater. Early in our conversation, Meiburg pauses to take a sip from his coffee mug which sports an illustration of a striated caracara that can only be described as “cute.” When I express my admiration for such a specific mug, Meiburg laughs and tells me, “Birdorable.com.” This sort of easy-going charm that Meiburg exhibits is infectious, and our conversation moves effortlessly from subject to subject. As we talk, it is clear that this is a man deeply in love with the natural world and all of its mysteries. Much like his book, he is filled with an unwavering curiosity for all that is still unknown about the Earth.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Meiburg has grown up all over the southeastern United States. He tells me that his father worked for the Environmental Protection Agency which meant that his family moved often. As a child, he “loved being in nature and hiking,” and his time spent in the outdoors had a profound influence on his decision to apply for and accept a college fellowship that would unknowingly begin his love affair with birds. Over the years, he has performed in many bands, most notably the aforementioned Shearwater, Okkervil River, and Loma. He has also written various features and reviews and conducted interviews for publications like The Believer which published Meiburg’s conversation with esteemed nature writer, Peter Matthiessen – the last interview given by Matthiessen before his death in 2014. On Meiburg’s professional website, his bio describes him as “an ideal guide for a journey that takes in the deep history and landscapes of an entire continent,” and after talking with him for nearly two hours, that couldn’t be more true. What follows is our conversation – edited for length – about his new book, humanity’s relationship to climate change, and everything in between.
Miyako Pleines: You first encountered caracaras through a fellowship where you were exploring remote places, correct?
Jonathan Meiburg: Yes, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. They give out about forty to sixty fellowships each year to undergraduates who are finishing their senior year at one of the participating schools. The foundation funds you to pursue a project you design yourself. You travel to one or more non-U.S. countries that you’ve never been to, for a year. You have to go on your own, you can’t affiliate with any institution or organization, and you have to stick to your project. The project can be anything in which you can demonstrate an interest. My project was a study of community life at the ends of the earth. In addition to Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands, I also went to an Aboriginal settlement in Cape York in Australia called Kowanyama, the Chatham Islands of New Zealand, and an Inuit settlement in what’s now Nunavut territory in Baffin Island called Kimmirut.
MP: What drew you to wanting to explore these remote locations?
JM: There’s something about isolation that has always appealed to me. I wondered what it would be like for people who really were quite isolated and who weren’t confronted by any sort of urban environment whatsoever. Places where you had to reckon with the planet in a way that you never really did growing up in the suburbs. That was probably my kind of naive starting point.
MP: It sounds like the same thing that drew you to exploring these places, also drew you to the striated caracara which is a very isolated bird.
JM: That was the first type of caracara that I met, and I was taken by surprise when I met it. I didn’t have any idea what it was, so I had this pure experience of meeting this creature that just came running up to me like, “What are you doing here?” and I’m like, “What are you doing here?” and we just stared at each other. I remember that moment so clearly, and now looking back, I feel like the book began then.
MP: You have your master’s degree in geography, is that correct?
JM: Yes.
MP: Your thesis was on striated caracaras. Was that the beginning of the book for you?
JM: Definitely. My thesis is called, “The Biogeography of Striated Caracaras” and A Most Remarkable Creature is kind of an exploded version of that in some ways. I was looking at questions like, “Where are striated caracaras? Why are they there? What forces might have contributed to them being there? What group do they belong to? What do we know about their ecology?” It’s a pretty readable thesis, but it’s more technical. When you’re writing a thesis, you don’t have to worry about pulling your audience along so much, whereas with the book I’m constantly fearing that I’m going to lose the reader.
MP: Well, you didn’t lose the reader, at all. I’m drawn to writing that takes a subject and pulls from it all this different information. I think that’s what the book did, and that’s why I loved it.
JM: These birds taught me about the world on a huge scale. There are huge things that I had never known about, things that are so big I was astonished that I didn’t know them. Like the difference between North and South America and how they weren’t connected until relatively recently. And how living things had to meet and sort of deal with one another in the Great Biotic Interchange. It makes you wonder what other giant things you didn’t learn about growing up.
MP: I was watching your interview with the author Jeff VanderMeer that you did recently, and you were talking about being hesitant to put too much of yourself into the book. I find that really interesting because in my own work, I’m constantly writing about myself, so to hear someone say, “I actively tried not to do that,” was really a different perspective.
JM: Well, it’s not very 21st century! I do appear in the book, and some of the parts where I appear are some of my favorite parts of the book, but I tried to do it in a way so it’s not just the unending drama of me. Have you read Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght?
MP: I haven’t read it yet.
JM: In it, even though he’s there, he’s not telling you what he thinks about things very often. He’s just telling you what he’s seeing and what he’s experiencing. His “I” is kind of transparent. You don’t have to deal with it to get to the story. Peter Matthiessen, whose writing I really admire, was always messing with this in his books. His presence as a character approaches and recedes and sometimes is gone entirely, and I think he was reticent about appearing too much. Also, there are ways to appear in a book that don’t use “I.” Like John Steinbeck for instance, who almost never uses “I,” and yet he is so present as a personality in the way he expresses things, that it almost feels closer than if you had to identify this “I” character.
MP: That’s an interesting idea of how you can be present without actually being in the story. I like that.
JM: We live in the memoir age, and there are people who grumble about that as being how everybody is self-obsessed now, but some stories can only be revealed by that level of scrutiny. Some stories don’t need it, though. I think a lot of it is like being a director of a film and trying to decide where you’re going to put the camera. It makes a huge difference.
MP: I see many similarities between yourself and Charles Darwin and William Henry Hudson, the two scientists you talk about throughout the book. You discovered striated caracaras in your 20’s, just like Darwin, and Hudson was this man who was a scientist but also a writer much like yourself. Do you see parts of yourself in them, as well?
JM: Darwin was a rich kid. He never wanted for money his whole life. Hudson on the other hand had to just scrap. It was his only option. I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t get to be a gentleman naturalist like Darwin. In my life post college, I’ve been working various jobs and being academia adjacent, but not going there professionally. I’ve been working in touring bands and trying to get by as a musician for many years. Hudson had to do a lot of different things just to keep himself afloat, and of course I identified with that. Also, his sense of being a stranger everywhere he went. I think everybody feels like that to some degree. I don’t think I’m particularly special, but I’ve always felt a little out of step with everyone I’m around. To see Hudson feeling that and finding solace in the natural world and seeing it not as something outside of the human world but as something that the human world was deeply part of and yet didn’t know it, that was really encouraging to me.
MP: He was born in South America, but he spent most of his life in England, right?
JM: Yes. He did, but he was never quite English. He also wasn’t really South American, either. Today we’d say he lived in this sort of liminal place where he was neither “fish” nor “fowl.” That gave him a perspective that I think is extraordinarily valuable. It gives him a melancholy tone, because when you think hard about things, it can be easy to get kind of sad. How do you write a book about the natural world that’s not depressing? For me, one of the most powerful ways to do that is to just zoom out and look at the larger picture in time in terms of what life on Earth has been like and what life on Earth may be like in the future. When you look at all the separate journeys that all the creatures of the world are on and have been on for as long as there’s been life, that’s not a sad picture. But it’s a real picture, so you can go there without losing yourself to despair.
MP: I’ve been making my way through David Wallace-Wells’s book, The Uninhabitable Earth, which I feel is a book that is very depressing. You feel very sad reading it, but when I was reading your book, I didn’t necessarily feel that way. When you look at the bigger picture, there are so many things that have happened in time that were catastrophic, but nature and life somehow found a way to recover and come back even though it didn’t look the same as before.
JM: Yes, and it wasn’t the same. A paper just came out about the effects of the K-T asteroid on the Amazon rainforest which said that the asteroid basically created it. Once the forest rebuilt itself, its species composition was totally different. It had been dominated by conifers before, and it had this open understory, but then having its clock cleaned started everything again, only this time without large, herbivorous dinosaurs. It really changed the forest that appeared.
MP: In your book, you talk a lot about trying to save the striated caracara from becoming endangered. I was wondering if you could talk more about that because I thought your idea of introducing striated caracaras into cities sounded great. I would love to meet these birds!
JM: They’d like to meet you! I’m a little tongue-in-cheek when I’m making that suggestion, of course.
MP: But if we want to save them, it also seems like a good suggestion!
JM: It comes down to this question of what do you do with living things that you want to keep living but their habitat is being destroyed? If you can’t stop the habitat from being destroyed, you come to a crisis point. You either say, “Well, this is the way of things. We let them go,” or you say, “I want this to live.” I give the example of ginkgos. We just wanted those to live. We liked them. Some people would argue there is no wilderness left and that there’s not a place on earth that is unaffected by us. The idea that living things have to live away from us in someplace where they can be safe, there’s nowhere that’s really that safe. If you’re an animal trying to deal with human beings, you can either live really far away from us, or get in really close. I give the example of coyotes which have become much more of a presence in the eastern united states than maybe they ever were. In the northeastern populations particularly, they have a lot more wolf DNA, and they’re larger. Some people call them “woyotes.” I’ve seen some of these things. They’re big! They’re not the little, scrawny coyotes I think of from the southwest. In a way, it’s as if the wolves are coming back anyway. They’re just doing it with a little coyote costume draped over their heads. Nature is not a passive entity. Our feeling that we are just knocking it back and knocking it back comes partly from the fact that I think the last 200 years have just been unprecedented in terms of human impact on the world. When my grandfather was born there were 1.2 billion people. Now there’s 8 billion. That’s a huge thing, and it happened in two generations.
MP: We just kind of put our foot on the gas there.
JM: And not just in the number of people but in all the things that have made that number of people possible. 8 billion people couldn’t have lived on Earth a couple hundred years ago.
MP: So, we need to try to find ways to live alongside nature and incorporate it into our daily lives.
JM: Either that or you don’t live with it. It’s going to have to live with us, and we’re going to have to live with it. We’re going to have to learn to do that or decide that that’s not what we want and just pave everything. [laughing]
MP: I’m curious about what attracted you to birds in the first place?
JM: The answer, unfortunately, is not very mysterious. It’s striated caracaras.
MP: That’s the answer?
JM: It really is. I was not interested in birds when I went to the Falklands. I heard you could see breeding penguins there and that sounded interesting because who doesn’t want to see penguins in the wild? So, I went to go see them, and that was when I met the striated caracaras. Then I met Robin Woods in Stanley who was about to do a survey on the outer islands of the Falklands of breeding pairs of these birds. I travelled with him for seven weeks in this little wooden boat that was built in the 1920’s. The islands were crammed full of breeding albatrosses and penguins and burrowing petrels and land birds like the flightless ducks, teal and grebes. They were all in an abundance that was kind of staggering even though it was not terribly varied. There’s something like 60 species that breed in the Falklands so you can get your head around it, and to be with the person who knew more about this world than just about anyone else in the world, there was no way that my mind couldn’t have been pried open. Having seen these birds there in that extraordinary concentration, abundance and variety while in the presence of someone who understood it – which is very important – that changed the way I saw everything else from that point on. But it wasn’t an instantaneous thing. I didn’t then start devouring bird books or take a deep dive into ornithology. It took several years from that point to start accumulating more general knowledge about the world of birds, but it was that moment of locking eyes with a striated caracara that drew me into that world.
MP: You obviously have done a lot of travelling both for research and for touring with your bands. I’m curious if you’ve ever thought of yourself as migratory, and if so, are there migration paths that you find yourself taking a lot?
JM: I’m probably more nomadic than migratory. Although nomads are usually migratory. Nomadic people don’t just wander aimlessly. They’re travelling between ephemeral resources. I wrote an essay about touring that obliquely sort of made that connection.
MP: What is the difference between songwriting and writing a book for you? Are they totally different things or do you feel like there are ways they overlap with one another?
JM: I think in almost any artistic endeavor, the overall process has similarities in that there’s sort of the initial exploration stage where you’re trying a bunch of stuff, and then there’s analyzing it, refining it, and editing it. Those parts are nearly identical. But as far as writing prose versus writing song lyrics, that’s totally different. The whole point of a song is that it can’t really exist without the music, otherwise why would you write it? A book is for someone else to read, whereas a song is something that you have to perform. It comes out of you. You singing it is also part of what it is. It can’t really be abstracted from that exactly.
MP: You also talked with Jeff VanderMeer about moments in art that are just for the creator. Is there anything like that in A Most Remarkable Creature? Things that you put in just for you?
JM: In a way, you could say the entire notes section. To me, the notes are some of the most wonderful stuff in the whole book.
MP: Like the deep cuts.
JM: Exactly. The notes are that, but then there’s other things. I hid a Twin Peaks reference in there somewhere. There’s a David Bowie reference too.
MP: Are you working on anything new right now? Music or writing?
JM: Yes. I’m about to finish the Shearwater record. The first one in five years, and that ought to come out in the fall. There will also be another Loma record that we’re going to start in the fall. As far as books go, I do have an idea that I talked to my editor and agent about. It’s a book about the once and future life of Antarctica, which is sort of like a logical continuation of A Most Remarkable Creature in some ways because Antarctica keeps looming in that book in one way or another. There would be a couple of threads to it. One is the paleogeography of Antarctica which I mention in AMRC. It used to be a forested, lush place, and bits of that forest still exist, just not in Antarctica, but rather scattered around the southern edges of the world. There are Antarctic forests, but now they are in southern Argentina, or in New Zealand, or New Caledonia, and their possible role as a sort of arc that helped save the animal world after the cretaceous extinctions would be a thread in the book. Second, the continental shelf around Antarctica has a marine life that is unbelievably abundant and lush, but it’s not fish, and it’s not crabs. It’s worms, sponges, tubeworms, octopus, giant isopods and giant sea spiders. There’s this whole other benthic fauna. The first people who dove below the ice in Antarctica were stunned because above the ice it looks like a wasteland, but when they dove below, they saw life in incredible profusion. I feel like that’s a story people don’t really know about. Then there’s what happens to Antarctica in the future, because the ice is going to go away. What is that going to be like in biological terms, political terms, and long term? There are all these scientific bases in Antarctica, and people are doing science there, but that’s not why the bases are there. They’re there as political claims. The U.S. sent a fleet to Antarctica in 1946. There was concern we were going to fight a war over Antarctica with Russia, which is part of why the Antarctic treaty was signed in the 60’s and then updated in 1991. The treaty just says everybody is in a truce for now and that Antarctica is just for science. Right now, there’s no mineral extraction that goes on in Antarctica even though it has everything that all the other continents have. The Antarctic treaty comes up for review in 2048, which is just around the corner, and there’s going to be more and more debates about this. It’s not going away and it will be colonized by people who aren’t scientists. Antarctica is going to become less and less abstract.
MP: Right now, when you think of Antarctica you just think of it as this cold place at the end of the world.
JM: Right! That’s where most of us are, but there’s this other life it’s going to have. Both biologically and politically speaking, and so I want to try to look into what that would be like. Kind of “Past: Forest, Present: Marine Abundance, and Future: God Knows What.” That would be the way the book would go.
Banner image, author photo: © Jenna Moore.
