A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life And Epic Journey Of The World’s Smartest Bird Of Prey
Jonathan Meiburg Bodley Head £25
With the spectre of mass extinction looming ever larger, nature writing, for all its elegiac transcendence, can make for punishing reading. All too often, there’s a villain hovering in the wings: us.
The subject of indie rocker and twitcher Jonathan Meiburg’s intrepid debut is the striated caracara. An obscure bird of prey that lives in the Falkland Islands, where it’s better known as the Johnny rook, it has many appealing traits.
Orange-faced and silver-beaked, its darkly feathered form suggests a hawk-raven hybrid. It’s clever, clownish and astonishingly charismatic. Perhaps most winningly, it seems fearless where we homo sapiens are concerned.
The subject of indie rocker and twitcher Jonathan Meiburg’s intrepid debut is the striated caracara (above). An obscure bird of prey that lives in the Falkland Islands
Not that these brave birds haven’t suffered terribly at our hands. No more than a few thousand remain and yet, as Meiburg observes, ‘They refuse to behave like a species on the verge of extinction.
They’ll pluck the cap from your head, tug at the zippers of your backpack, and meet your eye with a forthright, impish gaze.’
He first encountered them 25 years ago and has been obsessed ever since. They seem, he says, ‘disarmingly conscious’. What makes them still more unusual is their refusal to follow the raptor playbook.
It was this that flummoxed Charles Darwin when he came upon them in 1833. How to account for their game-loving, gregarious, curious ways?
Meiburg adds some questions of his own before setting off in search of answers, travelling deep into Guyana’s rainforests, up into the Andes, and back in time with the help of palaeontologists and a Victorian naturalist.
Along the way, he stops in Florida, the Antarctic, and Devon, where he meets Evita, a scruffy young striated caracara with a shrill cry, an unnerving stare, and a desk in her aviary.
It’s captivating stuff, full of insights into not only our planet’s evolutionary past but also its future. Because, as Meiburg puts it, if any creature can be said to know a thing or two about surviving in a world ‘primed for upheaval’, it’s the birds that sailors once dubbed ‘flying monkeys’.
How To Love Animals: In A Human-Shaped World
Henry Mance Jonathan Cape £20
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We’ve long had an odd relationship with animals. In the 17th Century, the great rationalist philosopher Spinoza feared that if humans got friendly with beasts, people would start seeing themselves as animals and so put all civilisation at risk.
But, as Henry Mance painfully documents in his book about the way in which we co-exist with other species, living without sympathy for creatures has brought civilisation to a crisis Spinoza couldn’t have dreamt of.
As he begins his research, Mance is a vegetarian – tipped into the practice by a few pages in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens that conclude ‘modern industrial agriculture is the greatest crime in human history’ and by questions from his two young children who’ve been immersed in animal worlds from an early age through their toys and books.
Could he honestly explain to them what happens to chickens and rabbits and cows in the real world? Mance addresses their questions seriously and allows them to take him to some uncomfortable places – such as a slaughterhouse.
The first thing he learns about slaughterhouses is that it’s easy to get a job in one. No questions, no papers, no training, just put on the white coverall and wellies… and there he was on the line, pulling skins from sheep, scooping out pigs’ insides.
After that, there’s work as a stockman on a free-range pig farm – one of the 25 per cent in the UK that meet RSPCA standards – where he discovers how inadequate in practice are the famous five freedoms that British scientists came up with: freedom from pain, injury, disease and distress, plus the freedom to ‘express normal behaviour’.
Inadequate as they are, those UK freedoms are light years away from the torture that passes for farming in Chinese and American animal factories where cost is the only value that matters.
But for Mance, learning to love animals goes beyond decisions about eating them. Animals are not machines and we now know that most have some form of consciousness.
What does that mean for us, and what damage has it done when we don’t take those insights seriously? One example is our disregard for the rights of orangutans that has laid waste to thousands of square miles of rainforest to produce palm oil, used by the food industry to create the ultra- high-processed foods that are a big part of creating the non-communicable diseases which are now killing more people than any infections, including Covid-19.
So how, as Mance puts it, can we take the experiences of the animals, birds, fish and insects of the world into account, as we relentlessly develop our own society? His answer?
Either face the reality he documents so well – or carry on as we are and destroy our planet.
Sheila Dillon