Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World Family Action Network Zoom Event

This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.

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: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, 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.

Cooper will be in conversation with Natalie Y. Moore, an award-winning journalist covering segregation and

inequality for WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate. Moore is the author of The Billboard, a play about abortion,

and the acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation (2016). Ms.

Moore’s reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice, and violence and her work

has been broadcast on the BBC and Marketplace, and on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things

Considered, and Weekend Edition.