Goodreads helps you follow your favorite authors. Be the first to learn about new releases!
Start by following Christian Cooper.
Showing 1-29 of 29
“Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections: between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us. In my life, it has been a window into the wondrous.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Only a fool bemoans lost beauty while still in beauty's embrace, just of another sort.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“A society designed for the oppression of one people rarely stops at the one.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“We love your pets. But Man's Best Friend is a hungry wolf to a bird, no matter the harmless, playful little scamp Fluffy may seem to you. And Athena, with her retractable claws, silent stalking, and high-jump pounce, is a bird-killing machine...The American Bird Conservancy estimates that in the United States, where the domesticated feline is a non-native predator disrupting the natural balance, cats slaughter 2.4 BILLION birds EACH YEAR. Keep cats indoors and dogs on the leash in protected areas, if they are permitted there at all. The birds--and other birders--will thank you.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Once you tune in to one aspect of nature, you eventually become aware of the whole connected network of life around us.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“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.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Religion is poetry, trading in metaphors that convey truth that isn’t literal but remains deeply meaningful to those to whom it speaks. To everyone else, it’s gibberish.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“it felt as if the secrets of the woods were unfolding for only me.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections: between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“How do you describe how the presence of a creature can take you outside yourself, to a most exalted place?”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“one-note trills are a perpetual source of ID consternation for me and many others. Pine Warblers, Worm-Eating Warblers, Orange-Crowned Warblers, Chipping Sparrows, Swamp Sparrows, and Dark-Eyed Juncos all do it, and all might be found in Central Park in springtime. Superficially they all sound the same; factor in the regional and individual variations in each species’ song, and teasing them apart by voice alone with any certainty can be daunting.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“there’s a sequence to the migration that varies from year to year in its specific details but remains remarkably consistent: The Blue-Headed Vireo will be among the first birds back, arriving in New York in mid-April; the Red-Eyed will be the last vireo, beginning in mid-May and rapidly zooming up in numbers; the Acadian Flycatcher will close out the show in late May/early June; and so on.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“in findings published in September 2021, The Lancet—one of the most respected medical journals in the world—revealed that about 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police in the United States between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death. This discrepancy disproportionately involved Black victims.)”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“To recognize something as beautiful, sometimes all it takes is a change of perspective.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“We're at a loss to explain it. It's a moment where I as a birder am reminded we know so very little. I'm not just okay with that; I'm thrilled by it. I'm thrilled that I can hear the sound of ravens, the bird geniuses, and have absolutely no idea what they're communicating. I'm delighted that I'm hopeless—for now—at puzzling out which little peep sandpiper is which. And that when something utterly unexpected happens, like a hovering costas hummingbird, running her bill up and down my calf because she's checking out my leg hair as potential nest material, it's more than just my skin that tingles with excitement. It means my whole life through, I'll still be learning something new from birding. Right until they pry the binoculars from my cold, dead hands. What a terrible, wonderful curse we suffer from, to find joy in chasing flying cigars through town, to witness the impossible, by the light of ordinary street lamps. What ridiculous fools we must be; what birders.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Beginning around 1910, The Great Migration saw some 6 million black people surge Northward, out of the states of the former Confederacy, spurred by the same thing that lies behind the yearly migration North in the spring for so many bird species: improved prospects for the next generation.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“The myopia that lets us see only our woes falls away for a little while. Suddenly, we can breathe again.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“People who think their life is in danger don’t pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they’re about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they’re genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear of the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“What makes birding such a phenomenon? Why not "mammaling" or insecting? Certainly those pursuits have their adherents, as the thousands who visit Africa on safari or who catalog butterflies can attest. And in fact, there's a large degree of overlap among all these obsessions, counting myslef as one of the multi-obsessed; once you tune in to one aspect of nature, you eventually become aware of the whole connected network of life around us.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“What makes birding such a phenomenon? Why not "mammaling" or "insecting"? Certainly those pursuits have their adherents, as the thousands who visit Africa on safari or who catalog butterflies can attest. And in fact, there's a large degree of overlap among all these obsessions, counting myself as one of the multi-obsessed; once you tune in to one aspect of nature, you eventually become aware of the whole connected network of life around us.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“My spiritual impulses resided in a summer breeze and a blade of grass, and eventually birding was the principal lens through which I connected with the natural world that nourished me.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“I have lived my whole life as a Black man in the United States. I don't have to go all the way back to Tulsa and Rosewood and Emmett Till to know what it means for a white woman to accuse a Black man, and who would likely be believed. This was potentially a world of trouble heading my way. Her fingers were already dialing; in a split second of self-preservation, I considered that if I just stopped recording, maybe this would go away.
Which of course was her intent. I can't say whether it was a conscious choice or the product of unconscious bias when she grabbed that bloody, blunt object, of the White Damsel in Distress Threatened by the Black Menace, to try to club me into compliance with her wish not to be recorded; I don't know her at all, can't know why it was so easily within her reach, when she was grasping for something to give her leverage in our confrontation. In the weeks that followed, several right-wing mouthpieces would seek to excuse it, justifying her injection of race into the situation as merely her giving a full and accurate physical description of me to the police. (Never mind the falseness of the accusation in the first place.) Except at that moment, she wasn't speaking to the police; she was talking to me. People who think their life is in danger don't pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they're about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they're genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Which of course was her intent. I can't say whether it was a conscious choice or the product of unconscious bias when she grabbed that bloody, blunt object, of the White Damsel in Distress Threatened by the Black Menace, to try to club me into compliance with her wish not to be recorded; I don't know her at all, can't know why it was so easily within her reach, when she was grasping for something to give her leverage in our confrontation. In the weeks that followed, several right-wing mouthpieces would seek to excuse it, justifying her injection of race into the situation as merely her giving a full and accurate physical description of me to the police. (Never mind the falseness of the accusation in the first place.) Except at that moment, she wasn't speaking to the police; she was talking to me. People who think their life is in danger don't pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they're about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they're genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“People hate whom they have. In humankind’s pathetic need to group identify by treating a different group as “other,” we turn to what’s in proximity for our villains.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Writing a memoir is akin to taking off one's clothes in public, and as I learned years ago in the amateur strip contest as Darren and the go-go boys cheered me on, success at such an endeavor can only happen when you've got a lot of people pulling for you.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“What a privilege, to be a person for whom, every once in a while, a unicorn comes to life! Most people don’t inhabit a world with such magic, but we birders do.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“The suburbs can seem anti-septic. Nature mowed and manicure to Better Homes and Gardens conformity. But wild things roam there that can't be tamed.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“It’s a moment when as a birder I’m reminded: We know so very little. I’m not just okay with that; I’m thrilled by it.”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
“Nor did I know back then that McCartney had written the song as an ode to Black women ("bird" being British slang for a pretty girl) at the pivotal moment of the civil rights struggle. That would only deepen my appreciation for "Blackbird”
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
― Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
