Range Maps (Birds, Blackness, and Loving Nature Between the Two)

A Genius Grant—winning ornithologist's meditations on birds, wilderness, Black identity, and a determination to fly free.

"I cannot separate birds from who I am because I care for them so. In that light I also cannot separate my love for life from the plight of others who, like me, share the same black and brown skin.” In Range Maps, J. Drew Lanham writes powerfully of his love for birds, his life as a Black birdwatcher, and his belief that Black Americans must be included in nature conservation efforts.

Black birdwatchers like Lanham cannot freely follow their subjects—they are threatened, assaulted, accused of trespassing. His life's work compels him to brave the risks. Grounding his story in his home state of South Carolina, he introduces us to the swallow-tailed kite—a Southern bird that, more than 150 years ago, surely flew above the mighty Combahee River as Harriet Tubman led her raid on the plantations nearby. He acquaints us with the cormorant, a local dark-hued bird that his white students casually call by a racial slur. And he portrays his avian companions against the big skies and rolling hills of the Deep South, where Black families work the same fields as their sharecropper ancestors—often contending with unprecedented floods, contaminated water, and disappearing wildlife.

Lyrical and unflinching, eloquent and urgent, Range Maps brims with the natural beauty of America's birds—and urges us to join Lanham in protecting and honoring them.