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 )

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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.