Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

Finally got around to picking up a copy of this from the library. Let's see if reading a book just because the frontman of my favorite band wrote it is a good idea when the book in question is a non-fiction treatise on the caracara, purported to be the 'smartest bird of prey.'

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't read an actual, physical book in a while, so the first thing that sticks out to me is the typesetting. The first page perfectly fits two elaborate, rambling paragraphs describing Tierra del Fuego - you can tell the author had the audiobook in mind while writing them - which transition nicely on page flip into an introduction of Charles Darwin's first foray into the Falkland Islands and his first encounter with these mischievous, hat-stealing birds of prey.

In the second chapter, the book abruptly transforms into a true crime novel. It is 2012, and the author has just discovered the corpse of a juvenile striated caracara known only as G7. No one knows who - or what - killed it, and it is now our mission to find out. This seems to be the plot thread the author is using to stitch together all his meticulous descriptions of the environment and digressions into the people, both modern and historical, who study these birds. It's a little thin, but so far it's working.

I think I'm going to put on The Golden Archipelago while reading this. It's only fitting.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

DD

> No one knows who - or what - killed it, and it is now our mission to find out.

I assume the answer will be something like 'global warming and environmental destruction', but I'm kinda hoping it's 'some madman; we know him as Bird Bothering Bob'.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

The author initially fingered a fight with another caracara as the culprit, but some of the details didn't add up - the victim died from a broken neck, but it didn't look like he'd been in a scuffle. The crime was too clean.

A few months later, researchers spotted a lost chimango - a smaller mainland relative of the striated caracaras on the islands - hanging around some of the flocks of teenage caracaras, trying to find a good opportunity to snatch a bite. He briefly considers the convenient possibility that the chimango might've been the culprit, but rules it out too - chimangos are smart but much smaller, and while they can take out larger prey, they usually target the weak or the injured. G7 was spotted hours before his unfortunate demise, looking just fine.

Besides, chimangos are scavengers, and while something had taken a bite out of the victim's corpse, it had been very careful to only pick out the pectoral muscles. Not really the modus operandi of a bird that had been scraping the last bits of meat off an abandoned carcass. But thinking about this reminded our amateur investigator of a throwaway line he'd read in one of William Henry Hudson's books, where that exact pattern was mentioned as a curious habit of the peregrine falcon.

You can almost hear the pieces clicking into place. Unlike the caracara, which are very much generalists - a strange mishmash of falcon biology and crow behaviors - peregrine falcons have evolved specifically for this kind of kill. They dive-bomb their prey, stunning them so they can't put up a fight, and then use their specially-shaped beaks to snap their spinal cords. It's not common for a peregrine to go after a striated caracara, but they're opportunists and an inexperienced juvenile might've slipped up just enough to be an easy mark.

We'll never know for sure, but it's conclusive enough for this episode of Last Birdcast on the Left.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

The next few chapters are about William Henry Hudson, a 19th-century Argentinian-born British naturalist and bird enthusiast. The author writes about Hudson like my high school Latin teacher talked about Julius Caesar - with an earnest wistfulness and intimacy that almost suggests personal knowledge of the late historical figure. I often suspected that my Latin teacher was actually a 2000-year-old Caesar fangirl; she seemed suspiciously proud of herself for working a typewriter long enough to individually write out each of our exams. The jury is still out on Meiburg.

Between waxing poetic on Hudson's 'emotional' and 'artful' writings (Did you know Hudson met T.E. Lawrence? The real Lawrence of Arabia? And Lawrence read one of his books twelve times? Well, now you know!), the author draws rambling parallels between the caracara and the humans fascinated by them. The wanderlust that drew the first human explorers to the desolate Falkland Islands is compared to the opportunism and curiosity that gave these 'vulture-crows' an ecological niche; these birds who seem to defy categorization become a metaphor for Hudson's outsider nature as someone who grew up in the Argentinian countryside and then moved to Great Britain. A few paragraphs are devoted to Geoff, a falconer with a colorful past and an impressive number of ex-wives, so that his relationship with Tina, a tame striated caracara he trained to do tricks you'd usually associate with parrots, could be brought into the context of a relationship relationship.

I've noticed at this point that this book is pretty light on actual information about birds. That's fine with me; the author might've done his master's thesis on these birds, but he's not a professional ornithologist and it does show. In a way, it's another parallel. Meiburg describes Hudson's Birds of La Plata, which was his introduction to the author, as 'as much a memoir as a bird guide.' I could say the same for this.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

Here we are introduced to a man going by the name of the Penguin King. I have long aspired to become flightless bird royalty, so it is with great disappointment that I must accept that my preferred title is taken. Perhaps there is still a chance for me to declare myself Nona the Dan, High Prince of Steamer Ducks.

(He was apparently a wealthy English eccentric who imported a large number of South American birds, including England's only king penguins, and converted his manor house in the Cotswolds to a wildlife park he called Birdland. His relevance to the book is mostly that he purchased the Jason Islands, where the author did his research, and turned them into a wildlife reserve.)

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

He sounds familiar! I wonder when and where I heard about him...

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

Less edgy version of the Tiger King?

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

I tried to find out more about the Penguin King; unsuccessful so far, but thought our penguin nonny would like to hear about this penguin popularity contest:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-65343340

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.facebook.com/SpikeKingPenguin/

He's even got a Facebook page! Adorable. Could use some more selfies if you ask me, but I can never get enough penguin content. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

The next section starts with a hypothetical William Henry Hudson sitting in a hypothetical rowboat in the Cretaceous period, getting hypothetically vaporized by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Not sure why this was necessary, but okay.

In any case, this all serves as a backdrop to talk about natural history - or really, a lack of natural history, because it turns out we don't know shit. Sometimes I forget how much of what we consider basic knowledge today is still new. The mismatch between the flora and fauna of North and South America baffled Darwin, but now we know that's the result of plate tectonics. In elementary school, I learned that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, but that hypothesis was only presented in 1980 and officially accepted in 2010. Only a few years ago, scientists using genetic sequencing discovered that falcons are actually more closely related to parrots than to other birds of prey.

Here we return again to the scene of the crime: the murder of G7 (a caracara) by an unknown assailant (most likely a peregrine falcon). Both are descendants of some shared common ancestor, but while the ancestors of the peregrine falcon left South America and and found a niche as fast hunters with big eyes, the caracara stuck around as cheeky social learners. Maybe they filled the niche that would've otherwise been occupied by crows, which never found a foothold in South America.

> Penguins, for example, are definitely social, but a penguin researcher once told me, not unkindly, that the only thing dumber than a penguin is a rock.

This is extremely uncalled for penguin slander, but also kind of relatable. The only thing dumber than me is a TRA.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

as a pengwin who learned how to type, this is very insulting! *waddle waddle*
*falls over*

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> In elementary school, I learned that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, but that hypothesis was only presented in 1980 and officially accepted in 2010.

I'd noticed that shift without noticing it, iyswim. I remember being taught that what killed the dinosaurs was a mystery, but that the meteor was the most popular guess. More recently, I read a pop sci book that treated it as fact, going into detail about the specific crater in Mexico left by the impact. "I guess they decided, then? Or is this book just strident because it's pop sci?" A smarter person than I am would have looked into it; I just left it as an unknown, to join the huge rolling cloud of unknowns.

(Reading this over, "what killed the dinosaurs was a mystery" sounds like they had the unfortunate bad luck of being caught up in a Poirot.)

> the only thing dumber than a penguin is a rock.

What induced this opinion of them?

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> Penguins perform stunning feats of navigation and endurance but rarely have to solve novel problems: their lives consist of chasing their favorite prey, following other penguins around, avoiding scary aquatic predators, and basking in the sun on the islands where they breed.

It's a bit of a one-off comment - the author brings up a study where chimangos who were allowed to observe another chimango solving a puzzle for food would solve that puzzle far more quickly and easily than those who aren't. But social learning is a very specific generalist trait that doesn't just arise naturally from being a social animal; penguins are given as an example of social animals where their clearly-defined ecological niche simply doesn't require them to adapt on the fly (ha!) like parrots or humans do. They're not really dumb, but they're dumb if you apply human standards to them.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

What astounds me most about this book is Meiburg's stupendous ability to relate his enormous mancrush on William Henry Hudson to every possible subject he can bring up in a book ostensibly about birds of prey.

In the third section of the book, the author goes to Guyana. Why Guyana? Well, three unique species of caracaras can be found there - but more importantly, William Henry Hudson wrote a romantic novel where the protagonist discovers a mysterious and sexy noble savage heroine named Rima in the forests there. It is inexplicably important for us to know that a statue of Rima was erected in Hyde Park, where onlookers were appropriately horrified by her bare breasts.

In Guyana, the author meets up with a chemical biologist searching for a rumored wasp-repelling compound in caracara feathers. Another common research field for chemical biologists is smells and pheromones. By the way, did you know that William Henry Hudson found it weird that Englishmen didn't wear cologne? It was a great sticking point for him when his friends tried to integrate him into English high society.

Several anecdotes later, we finally reach the forest. Before we can learn anything about its feathered inhabitants, though, the author would like us to know that William Henry Hudson never visited Guyana, much less its forests. He did, however, enjoy sitting in the privately-owned forests around London and pretending he was in the forests (which he also never visited) of his birth continent. This strikes me as a remarkably Victorian England thing to do, so I suppose his friends were at least successful in installing this one quality in him.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

It must be hard for the author; that's a rare blorbo.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

I checked; no fic! Just one mere mention in a Good Omens thing.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

This makes me want to write a non fiction book where I just keep bringing up some random guy who has nothing to do with the subject. :)

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

I actually enjoyed this section of the book quite a bit - it's basically a travelogue of the author's research vacation to Guyana and his vivid descriptive style with its melodramatic flourishes is delightfully suited to the narrative he's weaving.

Here is Meiburg, who has decided to spend an entire month in one of the wildest places on earth in pursuit of his William Henry Hudson pipe dreams. His travel companion is Sean McCann, a quirky chemical biologist who just finished up four years of research on caracaras for his PhD on insect repellent and who spends most of his time engaging anyone who will listen in 'pleasantly one-sided' conversations on how many honeybee stings it takes to kill a person. The author learned about him through a Youtube video titled 'Red-Throated Caracaras Are Way Cool Because They Are the Wasp-Murdering Superheroes of the Rain Forest.' There are 665 views on this video. I wonder how many of them are Meiburg.

Assisting in this endeavor are three local guides named Brian, Jose, and Rambo. They are absolutely fascinated by these two idiot academics who keep getting sidetracked and giving impromptu university lectures on Russian bioweapons and Ice Age megafauna and are also baffled as to why they're looking for caracaras. There are perfectly good jaguars and harpy eagles out in the rainforest, after all.

> I wondered if Sean and I seemed like tourists who'd traveled thousands of miles to Central Park and asked to see the pigeons.

Anyways, they don't end up seeing jaguars or harpy eagles - but they do see a ton of birds, of course, and howler monkeys and piranhas and an entire host of exotic insects that Sean addresses by scientific name like he's trying to sell the cable networks the pilot episode of Venomous Wasp Whisperer. Meiburg encounters several gigantic bird-eating spiders and pretends he's not entirely freaked out by them. Rambo catches some of the ugliest fish in the world and feeds them to friendly caimans.

There are three species of caracara in Guyana Yellow-headed caracaras have adapted to human life; they're adapt scavengers enjoying the bounty of roadkill and trash cans. Black caracaras are shy and rarely seen, and the red-throated caracara has found itself a strange little niche trolling wasp nests for easy prey. It's kind of impressive how little we know about these birds; Sean was the first person to even see a red-throated caracara nest. I guess that's the point of the whole book, though - how little we know, how little time we have to learn it.

> 'You're listening to Radio Bush Auntie-man,' Sean intoned. 'All screaming, all the time.'

The local name for the red-throated caracara is a derogatory name for gay men. This is never explained. Yet another one of the caracaras' many mysteries, I guess.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> 'pleasantly one-sided' conversations

Hah, yes, academics are great in small doses. The first time you meet someone, "wow, this person knows so many interesting things!". The fifth time "... honeybees. again." But good when you're tired and you want someone else to carry the entire conversation.

I like how the only thing we know about the shy caracara is that it is shy. Makes sense.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> The author learned about him through a Youtube video titled 'Red-Throated Caracaras Are Way Cool Because They Are the Wasp-Murdering Superheroes of the Rain Forest.' There are 665 views on this video. I wonder how many of them are Meiburg.

Potentially TotalViews-2; one view is now mine! I didn't watch the whole thing, but I'll link the video for ease of retrieval:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LjmqOy6xdVc

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

One thing I forgot to mention - there's a whole chapter dedicated to Sean McCann's adventures in academia and Meiburg just sounds so done the entire time. You can really see why he fucked off to make music instead.

Sean originally wanted to be a herpetologist, but he switched to entomology for better job prospects. Unfortunately, those job prospects were mostly finding new ways to kill mosquitoes efficiently, and while he did like insects, he wasn't going to survive doing a PhD on something that mind-numbing. He wanted to study social wasps, maybe, or army ants.

Finally, he manages he get himself a position in a research group that specializes in household pests. He figures he's going to have to write boring grant proposals about how wasps are a threat to human life, but he accidentally admits to his advisor he'd rather be studying reptiles and birds - and surprisingly, his advisor offers him a project to research a rumor that the red-throated caracara, a voracious wasp-eater, might secrete some kind of natural wasp repellent.

So Sean decides to do a little advance research.

> After a search of scientific literature going back to the eighteenth century, Sean felt pretty sure he'd found every word ever written about red-throated caracaras, by scientists and amateurs alike. It added up to a single afternoon's reading.

What he did find, though, strongly suggested that the caracara wasn't producing any sort of wasp repellent - they were just smart enough to realize that if they did enough damage to the nest, the wasps would simply abandon their babies and start over somewhere else. Having summarily disproved the initial hypothesis, Sean took the job anyways. After all, what else was he going to do? Kill more mosquitoes?

Then there's like another four points throughout the roadtrip where Sean brings up something interesting (like black caracaras!) and then goes 'meh, no one'd ever give me funding for that.'

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

Too true tbh. Academia be soul-crushing that way.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> At first Todd is a gracious and obliging host, but he slowly tightens his grip, and the young adventurer ends up forced to read the collected works of Charles Dickens aloud for the rest of his life.

I present this line for dan's perusal without context.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

This is the end of A Handful of Dust, isn’t it? I remember, because I hated it so much. That book traumatised me. It was like that yellow ribbon story, in that I’m sure it was supposed to be funny and you were supposed to be enjoying it, but I just found it upsetting.