Beginning as an eight-year-old with $20 K-Mart binoculars climbing what he calls “Piss Hill” behind his small home, we journey with him through relationships, boarding school, a broken marriage, and the deaths of his mother and father.

There are many personal stories that any reader can identify with. He writes about his ex-wife, who would join him on birding outings: “Yes, I gave her my old childhood field guide as a present, when life was good. I later took it back when things went to smash—a wretched thing to do, I knew even then. But what really hurt was that she didn’t even care enough to want it back. The heart is a lonely birder.”

Like most of us, Gannon regularly turns traveling for family obligations into birding opportunities. He confesses he is obsessed with listing, which he describes as “another Western colonial act of epistemic violence,” objectifying birds the way natural resources are exploited. He compares eBird to “ticking off the beads of a rosary.” At one point, he just wants “to give up on the whole list-making enterprise. But not just yet.” A few months after ticking his long-overdue lifer, a Snowy Owl, he is at his mother’s death bed. Listing, he concludes, offers “a respite from grief, a bulwark against mortality . . . I’m sure it’s why I became a list-maker in the first place: it’s that wonderful false sense of order and control against the chaos of the real, the immutable.”

While Gannon does not describe the personal safety concerns of J. Drew Lanham’s 2016 essay, “Birding While Black,” he repeatedly comments about what Natives encounter daily: a world that surrounds us with words and names that celebrate the ethnic cleansing of the land—Pioneers Park, Stagecoach, the 7th Cavalry Cafe. Lewis and Clark are celebrated across the northern Plains, and it seems half the names of counties and cities honor Indian-killer generals. One of his best local birding spots is literally Custer State Park. He bemoans the environmental devastation brought by European colonization, connects the near extinction of Native tribes to that of bison and some bird species, and draws a line from that era to nature-deficit disorder today. For Gannon, it is difficult not to see House Sparrows, “those black-bearded interlopers from Europe,” as symbols of Manifest Destiny.

As early as p. 8, he notes that “the names of American birds are often themselves acts of Western imperialism,” while relating a slur often directed at his mother. Near the end of the book, he remembers birding at Little Bighorn and ponders how the nature of the land transcends its history: “I do hear about twenty-five Western Meadowlarks, and I imagine these birds’ ancestors singing the same song before the coming of Custer or even the coming of the Lakota: through all this racial politics bullshit, the Real goes on; the avian abides.”

The final chapter of the book takes on racism and classism in birding, driven by “the subtle forces of white privilege.” Gannon grew up on welfare and food stamps. “It took me many years into adulthood,” he writes, “to realize that 1) you have to spend a good several hundred dollars on a pair of binoculars that are functionally worth a damn; and 2) you can’t identify all those tiny distant look-alike shorebirds without a spotting scope, a decent one of which will run at least $1,500; and 3) you can’t really bird with any genuine freedom without a reliable car and a wallet with enough money to buy tank of gas after tank of gas. I really didn’t have all those privileges until well into my fifties.” To drive home the point (no pun intended), Gannon did not leave the northern Plains until he was over 45 and has only seen the ocean once. He asks, “How many inner-city minority or reservation kids and adults have even the leisure to look at birds?” Not many. Gannon is an exceptional outlier, and his perspective helps broaden the definition of a serious birder and expands our minds about the role that birds and birding play in our lives.

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Steve Hampton (Cherokee Nation) has been birding since he was seven. After a career involved with seabird restoration for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, he now writes about the environment, birds, and the diverse people who enjoy and protect them. Steve is grateful to live in Port Townsend, Washington where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets Puget Sounds.