In two memoirs, authors of color meditate on birding and identity

Christian Cooper received worldwide media attention after a heated interaction with a white woman in New York’s Central Park in May 2020. Cooper, a Black man and an avid birder, asked the woman to leash her dog, as the law required, so as not to disturb the wildlife. She refused, and as their encounter escalated, she pulled out her cellphone to call 911, saying, “I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.” 

Cooper, who filmed their confrontation, posted the clip to social media, and it quickly amassed millions of views. The episode took place on the very day that George Floyd was murdered, and the woman’s false accusation was seen as further corroboration of the depths of racism in America. 

Now Cooper has written the delightful, edifying “Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World,” one of two recent memoirs related to birding and identity. The other is the compelling “Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir” by Thomas C. Gannon, an English and ethnic studies professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who belongs to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. 

While Cooper revisits the incident that led to his unlikely fame, he is more interested in extolling the virtues of bird-watching and charting its decades-long significance in his life. “As a Black kid in the 1970s, I was rarer than an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in the very white world of birding,” he writes of the hobby that he adopted as a boy on Long Island. “As I simultaneously struggled with being queer, birds took me away from my woes suffocating in the closet.” 

“Better Living Through Birding” chronicles the major events of Cooper’s life, among them his undergraduate years at Harvard, his stints writing for Marvel Comics, his political activism, and his relationship with his father. He connects all of these to birding, whether explicitly, via the relevant birding tips interspersed throughout the narrative, or more subtly, as he credits his lifelong passion with influencing how he engages with his surroundings. “One of the best things about birding is how it pulls you out of your inner monologue and forces you to observe a larger world,” he writes. 

While he describes the thrill of unfamiliar bird sightings during travels in Africa, Australia, and beyond, Cooper, a New Yorker, also conveys Central Park’s importance in his life, praising its community of birders. It seems fitting that the harrowing incident there, which he acknowledges caused him “no significant harm,” has afforded him the opportunity to speak out about the things that mean the most to him: “fairness and justice for Black people, equality for queer people, the sheer joy of birds and the need to protect them and their wild places.” 

Like Cooper, Gannon began birding as a boy. One of four sons of a mostly absent white father and “a single Indian woman on welfare,” he had trouble affording the bird guide and cheap binoculars necessary to nurture his obsession. “Birding While Indian” conveys Gannon’s devotion to the pursuit in short chapters blending straightforward narrative with more impressionistic writing and poetry. Birding provided solace to the author during a traumatic year at a boarding school for Native Americans in South Dakota and, more broadly, a childhood during which he wasn’t sure where he belonged.

As a Native American, Gannon states, “it is impossible to write about birds and nature without being political,” and he condemns European colonizers for both the genocide of Indigenous tribes and the extinction of a range of animal and avian species. He expresses discomfort with aspects of birding and bristles at the origins of many of his favorite birding places’ names, such as South Dakota’s Custer State Park, which honors the officer who died leading the U.S. Cavalry at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn.

These two books have commonalities. Both authors mention having to be on their guard when roaming public spaces with binoculars, fearing that their intentions will be misconstrued. Both convey the pleasures of birding and applaud recent efforts to expand its appeal among underrepresented populations. As Cooper points out, birding is available to all of us: “All we have to do is step outside, look, and listen.”