American Scientist

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Christian Cooper. 304 pp. Random House, 2023. $28.00.

When I became a birder during the summer of 2020, it was as though a veil had lifted from the mundanity of my pandemic-limited home life: open laptop, jiggle mouse, doom-scroll, close laptop, detach, despair. With birding, suddenly I was part of an immersive, sensory-rich world in which I could hear the birds sing louder than I ever had before. Although I was initially drawn to it as an escape, becoming a birder helped me feel more deeply embodied, present, and attuned to the natural world and myself. It makes sense to me that birder, comics writer, and explorer Christian Cooper’s memoir Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World likewise examines the broader life experiences associated with his own practice of birding, because they are inextricable from one another.

Although this memoir is primarily personal, it is a story viewed through the lens of the natural world. Cooper introduces readers to his passion for birding, his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, as well as his experiences of being a queer Black man in the United States. He shares his sometimes strained relationships with family members, coming out to his family, his love of travel, and the ways his life changed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these ideas are woven in alongside “Birding Tips,” which ostensibly contain practical guidance about birding but which also function as subtle commentaries on what he’s writing about at that moment.

The book begins with a chapter titled “An Incident in Central Park.” You may think you already know the incident in question: a viral encounter during the summer of 2020 that saw Cooper harassed by a white woman who was upset that he insisted that she leash her dog; but this is not that—not yet. No, this chapter is about Cooper racing out of his office to spot an elusive Kirtland’s warbler. This part of the book is also where Cooper begins to share an interspersed set of commentaries he calls the “Seven Pleasures of Birding.” Number three is The Joy of Scientific Discovery, in which he recounts his encounter with an aggressive bunting (a songbird related to the finch). Cooper had encroached on the bird, and fearing for its family’s safety, the bunting was rightfully angry. Although fighting the man was a nonstarter, the bird could fight a nearby stick, and in an instance of transference, it did so with vigor. This experience inspired a deeper exploration into Cooper’s own emotions, and specifically, the anger he would channel through a dark character he once used as an avatar in his late high school and college writing called Dr. Яamus. In Cooper’s recounting, art imitates birding, which imitates life, proving again just how intertwined those experiences can be.

Like many people, it took Cooper a while to see that his intersecting identities and his varied experiences, all of which defied easy explanation, were not flaws but strengths. Early in the book, he writes about his “spark bird” and connects it to his undefinable identity. In the birding world, a spark bird is the first bird that instigates your love of the hobby. For Cooper, it was the common yet beguiling red-winged blackbird. The bird has been taxonomically controversial since the arrival of European colonists to North America, who wrongfully assumed it to be the same as the Eurasian blackbird. In fact, the red-winged blackbird is an icterid—part of a large family of birds that couldn’t be more American than if they raided the star-spangled flip-flop bin at Old Navy on the Fourth of July.

The Eurasian blackbird is part of the genus Turdus, or thrush, which adds another layer of complexity. Although the Turdus genus has its own variation of redwing, the red-winged blackbird is not it. Cooper relates to the birder’s fatigue at the mislabeling of the red-winged blackbird, recognizing it as similar to his own frustration with society’s labels:

“I am no exception. Like everyone else, I had to sort through aspects of my own identity and where I fit in the social taxonomy, which labels fit and which labels chafed, and how the world may have misidentified me and pegged my kind all wrong. I had to grow comfortable in my own Black skin in a white world, in my own rainbow-queer body in an era where sexuality was only seen as black and white.”

Growing up on Long Island, in a family with a bent toward science and civil rights activism, Cooper became a student of the world, learning in equal measure from the birding field guides and comic books he always kept in tow. After moving to Boston to attend Harvard University, Cooper began to come to terms with his sexuality, joining the Gay Students Association and confiding in his ragtag team of roommates, who rallied around him. Acceptance and a keenly developed sense of self-actualization propelled him toward a dream career in comic book writing, challenging the status quo in legacy brands such as Marvel, where he introduced the very first gay and lesbian characters.

It’s not until the late second half of the book that Cooper ambles up to the life-altering moment in Central Park, the one that catapulted him to international notoriety. While birding in a section of Central Park known as the Ramble, he films his experience of being accosted by an increasingly agitated white woman who attempts to summon the police as a means of racialized intimidation, by calling 911 and reporting that a Black man is threatening her life. Although the claims are patently false (as proven by the video), the woman—who happens to share the surname Cooper—goes from annoyed during the confrontation to theatrical screams, yelps, and sobs when phoning 911.

For Cooper, as for many Black people, it is impossible to exist without at least subconsciously acknowledging that many white people see you as a threat simply for existing. Their supposition of fear can easily become an actual threat to your existence. This was the case for Ahmaud Arbery who, just a few months prior to Cooper’s experience, was out for a jog in Georgia when he was targeted, chased down, and executed by two white men, who were not even charged with a crime for more than two months. The message was clear: You cannot assume you are safe while you are simply living your daily life. Even in the birding world, the sanctuary that Cooper had been part of for so long, the danger still threatened him.

These experiences are not tangential to the experience of Black birders; they are fundamental facets of it. Speaking for myself as a Black birder, I can only try to imagine the deep feeling of being at one with nature that my white peers seem to feel when out in nature, but that I may never tap into. A complete surrendering to the experience where they don’t have to be simultaneously hyperaware of how they’re dressed (definitely no hoodies), what they’re carrying (Amy Cooper told police that Christian Cooper seemed threatening because he was holding a bicycle helmet), and above all, performing joviality. God forbid someone mistakes you at any time for being sketchy, suspicious, or—most dangerous of all—not belonging.

Author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.” By releasing the video of the incident in Central Park, Cooper demanded that the world bear witness to his pain, and the response was powerful. Marginalized people heard the rallying call, and in response, they built a community of resplendent care, embodied in Black Birders Week. That is the ultimate legacy of that encounter, and it is fortified again in this book. Christian Cooper’s love for birding resounds throughout the book, positioning it as a radical act of resistance and reclamation of joy from those who wish to steal it away.

Christian Cooper’s love for birding resounds throughout the book, positioning it as a radical act of resistance and reclamation of joy from those who wish to steal it away.

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Cooper grounds us in the facts of his life—his childhood curiosity about nature, his journey toward embracing his queer identity, the precarity and power of his racialized “otherness” in prestigious institutions such as Harvard and the Audubon Society—while also giving the reader permission to spread their own wings, guiding them into the birding world through tips and quippy anecdotes from his time in the field. He repeatedly illustrates how birding has given him a new lens through which to view his life and the intersections of his various identities. Cooper is a victor and not a victim; he is a man and no one’s martyr. Better Living Through Birding gives a new generation of birders permission to define themselves for themselves, from this point forward.