A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey

by Jonathan Meiburg

The sound of the crested caracaras’ weird, rattling call—a dry karruk-karruk—lingered in Darwin’s mind, along with the contorted pose they struck as they uttered it, throwing their heads back until they nearly touched their tails. Despite their heraldic appearance, their “necrophagous habits” left him feeling uneasy in the deserts of Patagonia, where “they are very evident to any one who has fallen asleep on the desolate plains,” he wrote, “for when he wakes, he will see, on each surrounding hillock, one of these birds patiently watching him with an evil eye.”

They are the southernmost birds of prey on Earth, and among the rarest: no more than a few thousand are left, a number only slightly larger than the wild population of giant pandas.

But if you visit them, 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—and it’s this earnest, playful quality, not their rarity or remoteness, that caught and held me when I met them twenty-five years ago. Striated caracaras seem disarmingly conscious, and they prod at the turf with their bills and feet and crane their necks to peer at everything with keen but slightly dubious interest, as if they’ve just emerged from the ark and wonder what else the world might have to offer.

Darwin wrote that chimango caracaras were “truly omnivorous, and will eat even bread,” and in the tropics, the tribal birds called red-throated caracaras thrive on a unique diet of wasps’ nests and fruit. In the high Andes, a species whose feathers adorned the heads of Inca emperors has been seen working in teams to uncover lizards and insects by flipping heavy rocks, and the crested caracaras who unnerved Darwin in Patagonia are said to spread wildfires by dropping burning sticks in dry grass, and feasting on the ensuing stream of refugees.

All the while, I’d be thinking of Darwin’s unanswered questions, and a few of my own: Why are you like this? Why are there so few of you? How did you come to be?

I walked Sea Lion’s coast all morning and sat down to rest on its southern cliffs, looking down on colonies of rockhopper penguins and cormorant-like birds called imperial shags. The shags turned their slender beaks and bright blue eyes toward me for a moment, then resumed fortifying their nests with beakfuls of mud and seaweed. Their long, curved necks and functional wings distinguished them from the squat, flightless penguins, but they’d been to the same tailor: both species were black above and white below, with whimsically ornamented heads: a curlicue of black feathers and orange nasal wattles for the shags, a spiky yellow crest for the red-eyed rockhoppers. As long as I didn’t move, the birds acted as if I wasn’t there, and at the base of the cliff, long coils of giant kelp curled and uncurled in the foaming waves.

I was contemplating the blue-black water stretching away toward Antarctica when I heard a rush of wings and a faint clicking of talons on the shale, and turned to face a pair of young striated caracaras—the first I’d ever seen. Unlike the penguins and shags, they were unmistakably interested in me; one took a few steps in my direction and cocked its head like a dog. A gift seemed appropriate, but I didn’t have any food, so I fished a pen from my pocket and dropped it on the ground. The two birds gazed at it for a moment, as if deciding what to do, and then one stepped forward to seize the pen with its large, dexterous foot—an almost parrot-like gesture—and looked up at me, as if to say Is this all you’ve got? Then its companion lunged for the pen, flapping its wings and screeching, and the tumbling pair chased each other over the lip of the cliff.

Back in Stanley, I asked around about the pen-stealing birds and soon learned two things: that they were called “Johnny rooks”—a rakish nickname from the whaling days—and that they weren’t, generally speaking, held in high regard. A few people said they were vicious pests; many simply called them “cheeky.” I’d heard New Yorkers call city pigeons winged rats, and Texans muttering darkly about urban invasions of great-tailed grackles, but it seemed especially British to accuse a bird of impertinence.

By 1997, much had changed. The journey from England no longer required a month at sea, though it was still extraordinary—an eighteen-hour flight that departed from a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, stopped to refuel on a volcano in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, then carried on to another military base in the Falklands, where civilian passengers took a ninety-minute bus ride to Stanley over a rutted gravel road. Gas stoves had mostly replaced peat, and television had just arrived, but life in the outer farms remained much as Robin remembered it, and on the Jasons he expected to see places that hadn’t changed in centuries.

These piecemeal, trial-and-error lives made them seem like survivors of an ancient shipwreck, determined to wring a living from the island any way they could. When I first saw them running toward me at full tilt, I felt a shiver of cognitive dissonance: Aren’t wild animals supposed to run away? One yanked the knit cap from my head and landed just out of reach, fixing me with a probing gaze, and as we walked the coasts of the Jasons I often looked down to see a winged shadow merging with my own, then up to find a caracara hovering a foot or two above me. If I stood still, they would descend by inches to tap me on the shoulder and soar away, as if inviting me to play tag.

Remarkably, decades of persecution haven’t frightened the clownishness out of the Johnny rooks. Younger birds will perch on your boots if you sit still long enough, and they’ve been seen kicking at discarded rubber gloves and playing tug-of-war with scraps of plastic sheeting.

Though we’ve come after them with rifles and shotguns, they seem drawn to us all the same: their curiosity, it appears, is stronger than their instinct for self-preservation.

Hudson thought these physical and emotional states—the joy of play, the love of beauty in other beings, the pleasure of making sounds with our bodies—were shared by all animals, and far more than incidental to life or evolution. He was certain that animals’ lives felt no less consequential to them than ours do to us, that their intelligence had been vastly underestimated, and that even a grasshopper, observed closely, has its own musical tastes.

Above all, Hudson felt scientists hadn’t looked at living animals closely enough, or had looked too closely at the wrong things—focusing on anatomy while ignoring behavior, fixating on our differences while playing down our obvious similarities. “All that is in our minds,” he insisted, “is also in theirs.”

Hudson took a long view of these aggravations. “The mind in beast and bird,” he wrote, “as in man, is the main thing,” and chimangos seemed to have been gifted with a model that exceeded that of most birds he knew. He saw their opportunism as ingenuity, not mischief, and he thought Darwin and Azara had been unfair in painting them as “a sort of poor relation and hanger-on of a family already looked upon as bankrupt and disreputable.” Hudson regretted that people were so often repulsed by the animals who understand us best, from rats to city pigeons; every living thing, he believed, had a right to be respected for what he called its “manner of life.”

Juno was a special case. She was ill-tempered and standoffish at first, but she rarely left Hill’s side after he nursed her back to health from an infection that clouded her eyes (though she also kept a parrot consort, another African gray named George). Juno enjoyed playing a game with Hill, captured on film by the BBC, in which she lay on her back in his open palm and let him toss her into the air and catch her again, over and over. “Up she comes and down she goes,” Hill wrote, “legs in the air, eyes half closed with pleasure, secure in the knowledge that she will land in my hand.”

But you’d have to travel forward forty million years to find an animal that strongly resembles you or me, and you could argue that we’re still living in a golden age of dinosaurs. Only about seven hundred dinosaur species have been identified from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods we regard as their finest hour, but more than ten thousand species of dinosaurs are alive today, outnumbering mammal species by more than two to one. The variety of their sizes, lives, and minds is so staggering that it’s tempting to wonder why the Cenozoic isn’t called the age of mammals and dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs we call birds of prey, however, have never abandoned their ancestors’ hunting lives. They still prey on animals nearly their own size (or larger), and some exclusively hunt their fellow dinosaurs. Many are famous—in the United States, for example, nearly everyone can picture a bald eagle, a red-tailed hawk, or a great horned owl—but others are obscure, and most people aren’t aware they exist.

Elf owls, barely four inches tall, eat insects and live in abandoned woodpeckers’ nests in giant cacti in the southwestern United States and Mexico. African pygmy falcons are so small that they can live inside the many-chambered nests of sparrow-like songbirds called sociable weavers, and leap out from time to time to feast on their neighbors. A diminutive falconet from the Philippines is smaller than the largest hummingbird.

But Hollywood’s version of these clever, social dinosaurs lacked a crucial detail: in real life, velociraptors were among the many dinosaurs who sported full coats of feathers. (A scientist remarked that if you saw one on your street, your reaction probably wouldn’t be Oh my God, a dinosaur! but What is that big, weird bird?)

Its true age was most recently revised in 1953, when radiometric studies of a hunk of extraterrestrial metal called the Canyon Diablo meteorite suggested that our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago—a number so large it repels understanding.

It allowed geological and biological processes enough time to give rise to improbable wonders, and helped scientists see that the fossil remains of plants and animals that no longer exist were evidence of former versions of life on our planet. This seems self-evident now, but it was far from clear a few centuries ago, when Western scholars had to square fossil creatures and living animals with a world thought to be a few thousand years old.

But Darwin was also dedicated to extrapolating from what he could directly observe, which ultimately led him to the third idea: the principles we now call the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin (and his coauthor Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d arrived at the same theory on his own) argued that life’s variety wasn’t the product of a master plan; it had sorted itself, over time, by passing on the traits of varied individuals to their descendants. Life on Earth, they concluded, will never arrive at a fixed state.

William Henry Hudson held a different opinion, and he’d be relieved to know that in the century since his death, the concept of birds as mindless bundles of pure instinct has been thrown out. We now know that some birds are capable of nearly all—if not all—the attributes of consciousness we once reserved for ourselves, including the ability to plan for the future, abstract notions of time and self, and the need to process daily experiences through dreams.

Peregrines love solitude, crave routine, and avoid mistakes; Johnny rooks love novelty, crave company, hate boredom, and do risky things all the time, investigating anything that catches their curious eyes. Like us, they seem to have an uncontrollable urge for discovery. To have maintained it for thousands—perhaps millions—of years, it must somehow be serving them.

Sean pointed out a laughing falcon on a snag above the river, and a bat falcon catching dragonflies looked like a pint-sized peregrine, its white collar glowing in the late sun. But the Rewa’s most obvious avian residents were its fishing birds: kingfishers and herons, gull-winged ospreys, black skimmers and swallow-tailed kites, whose parabolic flight was almost absurdly graceful. Strangest of all were the sinuous relatives of cormorants called anhingas or snakebirds, which pace along the river bottom spearing fish on needle-sharp bills. They leaped from low branches into the water at our approach, opening their wings as they dove, and disappeared as if they had never existed.

Just upstream of the arapaima’s pond we saw a giant otter gripping a catfish in its front paws and devouring it like a burrito, and an hour later we surprised a puma lounging on a sandbar, which raised its head and eyed us coolly.

Few animals bother to resist army ants. Almost none eat them. Like wasps, each army ant species has its own culture and preferred diet, and they’ve been terrorizing the residents of tropical forests since the Jurassic. They’re as feared in real life as Hudson’s imaginary “hunting-leopards,” and creatures of all sizes drop everything and run when they see (or smell) them coming. The stream of panicked spiders, scorpions, cockroaches, centipedes, and lizards fleeing the ants, in turn, provides a feast for predatory songbirds who specialize in consuming refugees—not unlike the chimango caracaras Hudson saw chasing half-scorched rodents from wildfires in the Pampas.

above kwitaro backbone the Rewa grew narrower and darker, and its animals more abundant; there were more macaws, more caimans, and more tracks in the sand—even the deep, rounded prints of a jaguar. A long-tailed hummingbird with a shining red breast buzzed us near a brake of wild guava, and Rambo eased back on the throttle to let a capybara climb out of the river.

As we approached the waterfalls that marked the end of the lower Rewa, we paused to admire the most incredible feat of animal architecture I’d ever seen: a tree draped with the woven nests of birds called red-rumped caciques.

“That’s Polybia liliacea,” he said. “Really aggressive social wasps.” He took pictures while I admired the paper walls of the wasps’ citadel, striped in alternating ribbons of cinnamon, rufous, and chestnut brown, and studded with thousands of small black wasps—an army of defenders poised to take all comers. It was hard to believe that creatures so tiny could build a structure of such size and perfection, or that it could support its own weight without collapsing into the river.

Below the nests of the wasps and caciques was a tumor-like lump the same shade of gray as the tree’s bark, about two feet long. “That’s an Azteca nest,” he continued. “There are millions of ants in it. The wasps are probably associating with them on purpose.”

Above the falls, a sense that we’d entered a different version of the river and its forest was immediate and striking. The trees were shorter, smaller, and closer, the water nearly level with the shore, the wildlife even more bold and abundant. Flotillas of giant otters poked their wild-eyed faces out of the river while legions of macaws cackled and rasped, and every few hours we heard the screams of red-throated caracaras warning their rivals and laying siege to cities of wasps. Howler monkeys peered down from the crowns of the tallest trees while bands of squirrel monkeys raced along lower branches and vines, carrying babies on their backs. Rambo pointed out a sloth dangling from a high snag, its ever-smiling face turned to the sun.

As pure darkness gave way to blues and grays, the tremulous whistles of owls and nightjars elided into songs of thrushes and wrens, screams of parrots, and the metallic whistles and bonks of South American specialties like bellbirds and fruitcrows.

No two performances were the same. One morning I spent a half hour listening to a pair of calling sunbitterns—squat but delicate birds, like a cross between a heron and a hen, who paced along the shore with hypnotic smoothness, swiveling their striped bodies and unfurling golden wing feathers when they flew. Their song was equally beautiful and odd: a set of hollow notes that ascended by quarter tones, so airy and diffuse that they seemed to come from everywhere. As the sun broke through the canopy, they were joined by a bird I couldn’t place, singing a descending countermelody in the same octave—then another, whose sparkling seven-note song was like a peal of tiny bells.

Our breath condensed in the cool, wet air seeping down the channel, and the trees above us blotted out the star-filled sky. The steep walls of the creek glittered with iridescent droplets, which I thought at first were dew. Then I saw they were the eyes of tropical wolf spiders, and the blood drained from my face. Some were nearly the size of my hand. Brian brushed past them without concern, pointing out another Theraphosa crouched beneath a rotting log.

Every turn of the creek revealed hundreds more, many of them running down their favorite prey—cockroaches—at an alarming speed. After twenty minutes I’d seen enough for a lifetime, but Brian pressed on for nearly an hour, stepping blithely over two columns of army ants and a quivering mass of termites while I focused on breathing, and on placing the capitals of the fifty states in alphabetical order.

But we’re entering an era in which entire ecosystems face extinction, and protecting every habitat won’t be possible—especially on islands. As the oceans rise, a growing host of nonhuman refugees around the world will soon have no homes to return to, and we’ll need to use our imaginations more forcefully if we want them to survive.

But our world is changing in ways we’ve never seen it change before, and we may need to stretch our ideas of wildlife conservation in ways that seem risky, even reckless, if we want to save animals like the Johnny rooks. Since we’re the ones destroying their homes, it seems only fair to see if we could learn to live together, and when you consider all their lineage has accomplished, from the wasp-eating tropical red-throats to the rock-turning alkamaris of the high desert, it seems unlikely that the challenges of our cities would be beyond them.