Every spring, avian enthusiast Christian Cooper spends his early mornings searching the Ramble in Central Park for migratory birds that make New York City home for the season. With binoculars in hand and a helmet from the day’s bike ride clipped to his pack, he listens closely for bird calls he has memorized since childhood.

While on his usual stroll the morning of May 25, 2020, Mr. Cooper encountered a white woman with an unleashed dog. After she refused his requests to leash the dog, Mr. Cooper began filming her. The woman, Amy Cooper, then called the police, alleging an African-American man was threatening her. The video went viral online, thrusting Mr. Cooper into the public eye and igniting nationwide outrage and discourse about racial injustice.

In his memoir Better Living Through Birding, Mr. Cooper tells the story of that day, and shares how birds shaped his complicated childhood and his life as a Black queer activist, science and comics writer and wildlife fanatic.

“Writing a memoir is really like taking your clothes off in public,” said Mr. Cooper during an interview with the Gazette.

In the book, he writes that birding first served as an emotional escape for him — a temporary diversion from the grief he carried by suppressing and concealing his sexuality.

Christian Cooper's book was published in June.

“I’m writing about stuff and feelings from 55 years ago,” he said. “As a kid, I had all of these weird nerdy bits, from being secretly queer to being a birder and brainy when it wasn’t all that cool.”

The natural world was a refuge for him, but when it wasn’t available he sought solace in science fiction stories and Marvel comics. Today, Mr. Cooper is the host and consulting producer of National Geographic’s television show Extraordinary Birder, and is the first openly gay writer and editor to have worked at Marvel.

His fascination with birds and comics is unwavering, but are no longer used to mask his identity.

“One of [the book’s] biggest messages is that you shouldn’t try to iron out or eradicate really weird and unique parts of yourself because they’re what’s ultimately going to make you feel most fulfilled,” he said.

Still, even with his accomplishments, Mr. Cooper initially wasn’t convinced that he could write a memoir worth reading.

“I thought, who the hell would want to read that?” he said. “But then I saw Colin Jost from Saturday Night Live wrote one and I thought, he’s, like, 12 years old. So I decided that I could.”

Mr. Cooper said that he knew right away that the story of his viral experience in Central Park would play only a small part in the book. Although it made national news, Mr. Cooper was quick to underscore that it was only one day of thousands he has spent birding in the city.

“If you’re telling the story — my story — which a memoir is supposed to do, chronologically it comes near the end and it should only have a certain amount of space devoted to it,” he said.

But “The Incident,” as he calls it, occurred at a particularly charged moment in U.S. history — the same day that George Floyd was murdered by former policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minn. It presented an opportunity for Mr. Cooper to speak up and write about the country's historic and contemporary racism.

“When ‘The Incident’ first happened, I wanted to crawl under a rock for a week until it blew over and I could get back to life,” he said. “But a moment had been thrust upon me, and to some extent I could decide if it was for better or worse . . . I was sort of like, all right that’s a challenge and I need to meet it.”

Sprinkled throughout the book as reminders of what unites Mr. Cooper’s experiences are birding tips that invite the reader to step outside and search the skies.

Mr. Cooper said that by the end of his story, he hopes readers begin to consider their own daily rituals and the ways that people of other identities might experience them differently.

“I just hope it gets people to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes,” he said. “I also hope it gets people out their front door and looking at birds.”

Christian Cooper takes part in a panel discussion at 2:30 p.m. on August 5 and a conversation with Ben Tumin at 2:30 p.m on August 6.