Better Living Through Birding Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

About this book

Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up.

Christian Cooper is a self-described "Blerd" (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper's viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper's story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper's journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.

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Biography

Christian Cooper is the host and a consulting producer for the National Geographic TV series Extraordinary Birder. He served as president of the Harvard Ornithological Club in his college days, co-chair of the board of directors of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in both his and that organization’s youth, a writer and editor for Marvel Comics in the 1990s, and a science editor for 20 years before taking the helm of Nat Geo’s birding show.

Currently, as a vice president of New York City Audubon, he advocates for greater, safer access to green spaces for all, with a focus on outreach to youth in underserved communities. Continuing his activism on issues of LGBTQ equality and racial justice, Christian combined his passions in the Black Lives Matter graphic short story It’s a Bird from DC Comics. He looks forward to bringing the gospel of birding to ever wider audiences through Extraordinary Birder and his memoir, Better Living Through Birding, from Random House.