Author Jonathan Meiburg took us through the landscapes, animals, and people of his book A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey. Along the way, we visited penguin colonies in the Falklands, gazed in nervous wonder at the world’s largest spiders in the forests of Guyana, and unravelled the ornithological mystery of the unique raptors that puzzled Darwin and fascinated the writer and naturalist William Henry Hudson.
In 1997, Jonathan Meiburg 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. His first book, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, published by Knopf in 2021, combines natural history, travel writing, and literary biography to tell the story of the unusual falcons called caracaras and the people who live with them, and is one of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of the year. (“Calling this a bird book,” wrote one review, “is like calling Moby-Dick a whaling manual.”) Along with scientific publications, Meiburg has also has written on subjects from a hidden exhibit hall at the American Museum of Natural History to the last long-form interview with author Peter Matthiessen—but he’s best known for his work with his bands Shearwater and Loma, whose albums and performances have been praised by NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Pitchfork. His unique career between the sciences and the arts makes him an ideal and accessible guide on a journey through wild landscapes and deep time, in the company of weird and wonderful creatures and people.