Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg has traveled the world, with and without his band, for two decades—but he’s rarely been a tourist. When he’s not working as a musician, he’s often been involved in scientific research on rare birds, a passion that’s taken him to the outer edges of the world, including the far-flung islands of the Falklands [LINK TO QUIETUS ARTICLE] , the Chatham Islands of New Zealand, the Galápagos, a tiny Inuit village in the Canadian Arctic, an Aboriginal settlement in the croc-filled swamps of northern Australia, and the Masoala peninsula of Madagascar.
But his most recent trips have been some of his greatest adventures. Meiburg, who published entertaining and wide-ranging interviews last year with author Peter Matthiessen [LINK] and Iraqi activist Zainab Salbi [LINK] in The Believer, is currently at work on a book for Knopf about the evolution of the wildlife and landscapes of South America, as seen through the eyes of the strange, intelligent birds of prey called caracaras and the prescient, melancholy 19th-century naturalist and novelist William Henry Hudson.
As part of his research for the book, Meiburg spent six weeks this spring in the wild interior of southern Guyana, traveling many miles up the Rewa river into remote, ancient forests with three Guyanese Amerindian men: Brian Duncan, Jose George, and Rambo Roberts, and a Canadian biologist named Sean McCann, who earned his PhD for proving that contrary to previous researchers’ speculations, the weird forest-dwelling birds called red-throated caracaras do NOT secrete a natural wasp repellent. Guyana is home to some of the least disturbed rain forests in all of South America, and in the upper reaches of the Rewa Meiburg and McCann searched for and found a nest of red-throated caracaras and marveled at the birds’ loud, unique “dancing” displays, group-living habits that make them seem more like social primates than birds of prey, and their diet of wasps’ nests; the birds’ flamboyance, ferocity, and oddness have earned them the pejorative but fond nickname, in Guyana, of “Bush Auntie-Man”.
But Meiburg’s journey was about much more than birds. The Rewa flows through a primeval region where people are very infrequent visitors, where rarely-seen wildlife like giant otters, tapirs, capybaras and pumas stared at Meiburg and his companions in surprise, and the river itself was full to bursting with unnerving creatures including 150-pound catfish, the giant, air-breathing scalefish called arapaima, the ghastly, long-toothed vampire fish or paiara, coelacanth-like aymara, electric eels, stingrays, piranhas, and glowing-eyed black caimans as long as a canoe. It was a trip into a world that remains as it was thousands of years ago, a primeval and Edenic place that still exists today, even as international mining and logging interests bear down on it.
Meiburg will describe this journey (which also includes encounters with the world’s largest spider) as part of his book, (due out in 2018), but he’s available to write a piece about it now. He also documented the trip in photographs and audio recordings.
In addition, Meiburg is an enthusiastic backpacker. His South American adventures were bound to a river, but in the US he’s spent a great deal of time lately in the Grand Staircase/Dixie National Forest region of southeastern Utah, where he especially loves the doug firs, volcanic boulders, and patches of snow on the 10,000-foot crest of Boulder Mountain and a thirty-mile stretch of narrow, waterlogged canyon called Death Hollow, which he hiked last year wearing a wetsuit and a dry bag (and to which he’s keen to return). He recently pointed fellow musician Andrew Bird toward a more famous canyon in the area called Coyote Gulch; Bird was so absorbed by the canyon’s remarkable acoustics that he recorded an album there. Meiburg is an adventurer and polymath of a kind we don’t often see these days; your readers would love spending some time with him.
Shearwater’s new album, Jet Plane and Oxbow, comes out January 22nd on Sub Pop.
