This article was published online on May 4, 2021.
When I was growing up in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, my classmates and I took Texas history twice, in the fourth and seventh grades. We learned about Texas’s history in the United States, its previous existence as a republic, and its time as a province of Mexico. Among other things, we were exhorted to “remember the Alamo” and “remember Goliad,” famous events in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico. Some other aspects of the state’s history were less covered. I didn’t need school lessons to tell me that Black people had been enslaved in Texas, but in the early days of my education, the subject was not often mentioned.
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Welcome to the Ooops I Forgot to Write the Newsletter edition of Essential Arts. I’m L.A. Times arts editor
Craig Nakano filling in for columnist
Carolina A. Miranda, who as you’ll see has been immersing herself in architectural solutions for people who are unhoused. This week has been bizzz-eee as California kicked its reopening into a higher gear, so there’s much to share. I’m sitting down to write at an hour when I’m usually in a seismic snore. My 2-year-old is asleep, the coffee is hot, the contact lenses are out and the glasses are on. Let’s do this.
Author Jonathan Meiburg crouches in the scrubby South Texas brush at Martin Refuge.
Bryan C. Parker
Walking beneath the hazy evening sun and mesquite trees’ arching branches, Jonathan Meiburg stops along a dusty path and points up toward his left. There, a northern crested caracara ascends into the air with a powerful whoosh, propelling its black and white body forward with a series of mighty flaps before gliding gracefully to another perch farther down the trail. Meiburg turns back toward the rest of us his partner, Jenna Moore; our guide, Patty Raney; and me with what almost looks like a smile. His mouth slightly agape, Meiburg’s joy mixes with a serious sense of awe and fascination.
Crested caracara (Martin Zwick/REDA&CO/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
When Jonathan Meiburg came across a striated caracara, he was astonished by the bird of prey’s curious nature and uncanny gaze.
“I had never seen anything like them,” he recalls. “They look something like a combination of a crow and a hawk. They just don’t act the way you think of a bird of prey acting, or any wild animal for that matter. They come right up to you.”
After college, Meiburg won a fellowship and went on to document community life across the Earth. He followed in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, who also studied striated caracaras nearly 200 years ago in the Falkland Islands.
Raptor rapture: Jonathan Meiburg s A Most Remarkable Creature csmonitor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from csmonitor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.