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

Random House: New York, 2023.

A Review
By Brian JK Miller

I was fortunate enough to hear Christian Cooper speak in Pittsburgh last summer on the book tour for his 2023 Better Living Through Birding. Going into his lecture, I knew only two things about him, “the incident”, as he calls it, and that he is a gonzo birder. The incident, for those who may not be aware, was his encounter with a dog walker and her unleashed dog in New York’s Central Park in May of 2020. Further details on the encounter may be found here. I assumed that this episode would figure front and center in his talk. But it didn’t. That isn’t to say that what it represented was not an important subtext in his talk but only that he refused to allow the event to define him. The same is true for his book which, a year later, I finally had the opportunity to sit down and closely read from cover to cover. 

The book begins and ends with birds, the rush to see a rare Kirtland’s Warbler in Central Park and the glorious experience of watching Chimney Swifts briefly landing on the ground before they went to roost on a warm Selma, Alabama evening. The story of the swifts landing briefly on the ground (who knew they did that?!) was a wonderful way to end this book as it carries the lesson that there are always new things to learn in birding but also in life. Cooper’s journey of growing up in Long Island, finding a love of birds and Central Park’s birding community, his love of comics and all things sci-fi, his travels along his Five-Way Road, the challenges yet importance of family, and the civil rights activism of his parents and his taking up its mantel in the cause of LGBTQ rights flows across the pages. Did I mention that he wrote the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy comics? How absolutely cool is that?! 

Cooper is an avid ear birder, and he repeatedly returns to birdsong throughout his autobiography. The song of his absolute most favorite bird, the stunning Blackburian Warbler, factors significantly in the closing pages when Cooper experiences its song juxtaposed to violence against black bodies in Steve McQueen’s 2013 12 Years a Slave. This is where “the incident” returns. Not as a direct retelling of the weaponization of race by a white woman against a black man (which Cooper does recount for the reader in chapter twelve) but as the layers of interconnections that Cooper faces as a birder and as a human. The birds abound throughout Cooper’s reflections on his journey through life and, as a gonzo birder myself, I totally connected with how vital birds are to the human experience. But what I learned from Cooper is how intrinsically connected birding can be to our society at large. Cooper’s work is a call for birders to connect their birding to the communities in which they live. In our America, we have a difficult and painful history of power differentials based on race, class, and gender. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in part, we faced these issues through a shared community of birding, a community where everyone has a right to be who they are and feel a sense of belonging? Well, that would be as beautiful as the ascending notes of the fire-throated Blackburnian Warbler’s song. I warmly invite you to read Chistian Cooper’s Better Living Through Birding and, oh by the way, check out his new National Geographic TV series, Extraordinary Birder!