THE JO-TEL … illegal blog downfield

Pitchfork: How long were you down there [Galapogas]?

JM: It was just a couple of weeks. The thing that I was really excited about was that I found a dead adult Striated Caracara, the bird that I study. I don’t why she had died. I think it might have been some some kind of internal injury. I’d talked to the curator of the Natural History Museum in New York, and they’d said, “Hey if you ever find a skeleton of this bird let us know because we don’t have one.” I’d never seen a dead one because I think when one dies it gets eaten by the other ones pretty fast. But this one was on a territory still being guarded by its mate. So I snagged and spent a couple of days in the taxidermist’s trailer cleaning it and getting all of the flesh off the bone, and packed in salt and sent it off the museum.

- Jonathan Meiburg, lead singer of Shearwater