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April 20 - April 23, 2022
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.
Each time I’ve tugged on these threads, their story has grown larger and wilder than I could have imagined.
surviving in a world primed for an upheaval.
Our eyes still long for new animals, and paintings and carvings in the caves of Europe and the cliffs of the Sahara attest to our long fascination with the creatures who shared our world, and gave us life, in the time when we first became known to them.
and there’s an irony in their meeting that probably escaped him, since the “vulture-crows” had survived by honing the same talents that had led him there—an opportunism that scraped recklessness, and an irresistible interest in anything new.
The carcass had dried to a leathery husk weeks earlier, but the rain had softened it again, and now there was a heaving scrum of birds jumping on and over each other to tear gobbets of skin from its skeleton.
They gave up their oil and wine and bread and lived on flesh alone. They sat in the shade and ate the fruit of trees planted by their fathers or their great-grandfathers until the trees died of old age, or were blown down or killed by the cattle, and there was no more shade or fruit.
they gnawed at desiccated carcasses with armadillos and foxes; they rooted in ploughed-up fields with pigs. It was as if their greatest skill was their ability to learn from others’ successes as well as their own.
his killer reflects a much larger struggle, not just between species but between minds, and an ancient evolutionary argument between generalists and specialists. “In the beginner’s mind,” wrote the Zen thinker Shunryu Suzuki, “there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.”
they don’t expect their fondness to be returned by creatures who regard them mostly as sources of food or as odd and unsatisfying mates; Geoff once kept a female gyrfalcon who would bow and present herself to him until he pressed at her cloaca with his finger.
he prides himself on his eclectic expertise and his gift of gab. An off-the-cuff lecture about the theory and practice of falconry can veer suddenly into the jungles of Borneo, the deck of a Russian submarine, or an island in the Persian Gulf strewn with human bones.
If an audience member brought any kind of food to the arena, Tina would steal it and eat it on the spot, whether it was a hamburger or an ice cream cone. (Once, to Geoff’s horror, she landed on a stroller and snatched a pacifier from a baby’s mouth.)
He brightened when I asked about the Johnny rooks. (“Cheeky bastards,” he said.)
On one side are generalists like the Johnny rooks—curious learners with a malleable sense of how to make use of the world. Staring them down from across the room are the specialists—experts with specific tastes and little room for error.
These professionals might look down their noses at the amateurs: Sit still for once, you dilettantes. The generalists, on the other hand, might glare back and mutter, Try opening your minds for a change.
Was her curiosity an innovation peculiar to her species, or was it an ancient legacy that other hunting birds cast aside?
a need to organize the world around us seems to be as basic to our species as language or religion—or, as Hudson said, shouting when there’s nothing to shout about.
The falcons’ genomes indicate that they don’t belong with other birds of prey at all; their nearest relatives are parrots, and they’ve been on a separate evolutionary path from other raptors for as long as seventy million years—possibly even before the Cretaceous extinctions.
Caracaras seem to live in a more nuanced world of family and friends, of individuals and objects known and unknown—and the unknown, for the Johnny rooks, glows with an irresistible luster.
I wonder sometimes if peregrines gave up society as they pared down their lives and built up their hunting skills.
An egg-laying amphibian that lived three hundred million years ago was the most recent ancestor that humans and birds share, but even this yawning evolutionary distance couldn’t keep Geoff and Tina from understanding each other well enough to play fetch and keep-away, to remember one another after years of absence, and to be so closely allied that Geoff was inconsolable at Tina’s death.
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.
Beauty is not a casual growth, the result of a seed fallen from goodness knows where into a man’s life; it is inherent in the granite itself…. It is in us all from birth to death—from
One factor that seems especially important in the evolution of what we call intelligence is a habitat in which the distribution, type, and availability of food is inherently unpredictable.
nearly all the animals we regard as intelligent—baboons, crows, raccoons, caracaras, humans—are big-brained social generalists that thrive in unpredictable environments.
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.
But who can say how it feels to a raven to pull a wolf’s tail?
No one’s found an example of art, music, or philosophy in social hymenopterans, but no one’s really gone looking for them, either—and would we know it when we saw, heard, or smelled it? You’d be laughed out of the room if you asked most scientists if insects have complex emotional lives or a sense of aesthetics, but you’d have received the same treatment if you’d said the same about crows and parrots only a few decades ago.
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.
A whole city of wasps had been destroyed to supply one meal for a caracara.
Most predatory birds have a small vocal repertoire of a few stereotyped calls, but the caracaras cackled, screamed, and cooed to one another as if they’d invented their own language.
Before his work was done, he’d also need a gas chromatography machine, a crossbow, a guitar amp, a climbing harness, and a dose of pure doggedness and courage. He would also lose thirty-five pounds.
Many forest animals rely more on their noses than their eyes, and for good reason: the chemical world never sleeps, but the visible world is fickle.
a black caracara was perched on the impaled head of the vampire fish, tearing away beakfuls of flesh. It lifted its head and stared as we approached, wearing the suspicious-but-interested expression of every caracara on Earth, then returned to its dinner, pausing now and again to look up and scream.
It was tempting to draw inferences from this hanging city of ants, wasps, and birds about the value of tolerance, the need for cooperation, even the origins of civilization, but the imperative behind it was simple enough: for these unlikely allies, living together in peace beat the alternative.
What are these creatures? And what can they offer me?
Where Brian and Rambo seemed more excited by the largest, tastiest, or most useful animals, Jose seemed drawn to them all, large or small, for the simple fact of their being.
At dusk we made camp on a broad white beach, where Jose and I hung our shirts to dry beneath a Good Friday moon blurred by thin clouds, as if we were looking up at it through turbid water.
The moon broke free for a moment, throwing our shadows against the sand and revealing the stiff-winged crescent of a nighthawk catching insects above the river. “ ‘Remember, man, that ye are dust, and to dust ye shall return,’ ”
Not sitting comfortably at the top of the food chain added to the feeling of wildness.
We were alone in a remote wilderness but confined to the slim border between the forest and the river, and a kind of cabin fever crept in.
I was dismayed that my mind expected the world to be a place where I could speak to distant friends at will, and graze all day on a diet of shrieking headlines and urgent messages.
I tried to accept the hours of enforced stillness for what they were: a chance to bathe in a symphony of animals announcing to friends and enemies that they’d survived the night.
“When night came,” he wrote, “it appeared that the fierce policemen, with their swords and brass buttons, were no longer needed to safeguard the people, and their place in the streets was taken by a quaint, frowsy-looking body of men, mostly old, some almost decrepit, wearing big cloaks and carrying staffs and heavy iron lanterns with a tallow candle alight inside.”
“There is nothing in life,” he wrote, “so delightful as that feeling of relief, of escape, and absolute freedom which one experiences in a vast solitude, where man has perhaps never been, and has, at any rate, left no trace of his existence.”
It was more garden shed than dwelling: a single, low-ceilinged room stuffed with enough farming implements “to have enabled a small colony of men to fight the wilderness and found a city of the future.”
on still days he could hear the rattling calls of caranchos, who were no strangers to picking through scattered bones.
“Do not get the panic!” advised Jose, stepping into the void, and I followed him. We might as well have crawled into a cave.
Its huge, dark eyes, black headdress, and pale body made it look like the lord of the dead in animal guise, bidding us a solemn farewell.
It was easy to see why so many people, including Hudson, had filled this place with dreams. Jose poured oil into a skillet and offered a story from his childhood. Like Brian, he said, he’d grown up in a small village in the savanna, where the mountains loomed enticingly above the plain—mountains his parents forbade him to visit.
