Jonathan Meiburg

“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.”

“Striated caracaras’ small population and range are red flags of impending extinction, and humans have done them few favors in the Falklands, where introduced predators and decades of persecution have taken a toll on their numbers, their prey, and their habitats.”

“The ‘flying monkeys’ that troubled and amused Darwin, it seems, are entering the most precarious moment of their lives. Unlike the Guadalupe caracaras, they’ve survived long enough for us to care about them—but their island homes are poised to shrink even further, and their most important prey could soon move beyond their reach. This may be the way of things on a warming planet, as we’re forced to accept the extinction of species we’ve run off the road; but every time I think about the prison of their tiny range, I can’t help dreaming up ways to break them out. If it’s still possible to save the Johnny rooks, it feels heartless—and unimaginative—not to try.”

“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.”

“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….

  “The first ones I saw stared back at me so intensely that I felt slightly abashed, as if I owed them an explanation.”

“[The earth’s] 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.

  “Our response to figures like this is usually to nod in their direction and go about our business.”

“It’s an outfit that makes them [red-throated caracaras] both striking and slightly ridiculous, like weaponized chickens.”

“Connecting the biological journeys of living things with the geological history of the earth is sometimes called historical biogeography or phylogeography, but it’s really just a new kind of history—the one William Henry Hudson dreamed of, with other living creatures in it.”

“Hudson was moved by the thought that he and Polly [a parrot] might have shared a memory of a common home to which neither of them could return, and to him, her curious reaction to his Spanish seemed like proof of not only her intelligence but her ability to access the mysterious and melancholy depths of memory.”

“But the price Hudson paid, like Abel [from Green Mansions], was to live in a state of perpetual longing—and, like Rima, to feel he was alone in the world.”

“This was his [Hudson’s] greatest theme: that only by looking to the nonhuman world, with all the tools of science and art, can we see what we really are—and that we aren’t as alone as we feel.”