Bonner Black Takes Us Birding

It's 6:30 AM, and the rising indie-pop star is bright-eyed and ready to talk about her twin passions—making music and finding birds. We’re about to do a lot of the latter.

Bonner Black Takes Us Birding

Most of the 6:30 AM interviews with musicians that have taken place in the last several decades probably happened at the end of an epic night of partying. But when I pull up to East Nashville’s Shelby Park after a good night’s rest, rising indie pop star Bonner Black is bright-eyed and ready to talk about her twin passions—making music and finding birds. We’re about to do a lot of the latter.

We’re in the middle of fall migration, but it’s the resident chickadees that first catch Black’s ear. “I think Carolina chickadees have my favorite melodic song,” she says, contemplating adapting their four-note ditty into one of her songs.

Like countless other people in the past few years, Black took up birding on a whim after feeling stuck in other parts of her life—her quarter-life crisis—buying a bird book and binoculars and heading to this same park.

“I had just gone through kind of a significant breakup,” she says. “I started coming to Nashville to write songs and do the thing when I was fourteen. And so by twenty-five, I was eleven years in and wasn’t signed—wasn’t having the success that I wanted to have. I was so pressured with doing a ton of social media, but it just felt super empty. And so I was sitting outside in my backyard and I was crying, and this little bird came and lingered on a fence post, and I just thought, I need a hobby. And I think birding and being in nature was a crazy part of my healing process.”

The first bird she got her binoculars on in the park was an indigo bunting, and from there she was hooked. Now she’s still doing a ton of social media, but her followers are as likely to be fellow birders as music fans. She’s found a way to blend those groups together, getting fans of her music to think about nature and conservation and attracting fellow nature lovers to her shows. Her bird-centric videos, playing with the stereotypes of the hobby, have since garnered more than 15 million views.

 

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She even combined the two on last year’s “Fall Migration Tour” from Connecticut to Alabama, leading bird walks in the morning and playing shows at night, all in partnership with the Audubon Shop and the Feminist Birding Club. But it took a while before she let herself share her passion for nature with her fans. “For the first three years that I was birding, I refused to post anything about birds. I just wanted birding to be sacred. It was the one thing that was getting me away from social media. It was the one thing that was just kind of getting me out of the music industry, but I kept getting skit ideas because I’ve always done comedy skits. I’ve always loved to come up with silly little video ideas, and how can you not when birding is so hilarious. Birders are so amazing and unique, and I kept getting a ton of ideas. Finally I just posted one. Instead of wasting money on therapy, I just kind of opened myself for the ideas that I was refusing to post, and they started going viral, and then I started getting a little bird following.”

Our conversation in the park keeps getting interrupted by the birds, and frankly, neither of us mind. We spend a few minutes trying to identify a veery in the early morning shadows of a tree, meeting another local birder as we talk through the various kinds of similar-looking thrushes it could possibly be. We walk through fields of bearded beggartick— breathtaking yellow flowers adored by a flock of American goldfinches flitting from stalk to stalk and the indigo buntings that first inspired Black to spend her mornings outdoors. We get our binoculars on blue-winged and Magnolia and Tennessee warblers that only migrate through Nashville between their northern breeding grounds and Central American wintering territory.

In between sightings, she tells her story of being a young girl from Hot Rock, Tennessee, ninety minutes south of Nashville. Of studying ballet and coming to Nashville for vocal lessons. Of homeschooling so she could basically sneak off to Nashville for her senior year, playing shows and working as a karaoke hostess. Of skipping out on college in order to fully devote herself to her music career. In 2022, she released her first indie pop EP, Out of Dreams, following it up with last year’s full-length hopeles romANTICS, both marrying catching melodies with playful stories of love and loss.

There’s a playfulness to just about everything Black does, but especially her social feeds. “You’re in his DMs, I just ID’d a bird he saw on his way to work,” she says in one. “It was a house sparrow, but he thinks I’m really smart.”

“Have you ever thought about doing meth?” she asks in another? “Don’t, and let me offer you an alternative—getting lifers. You can become a birder and every new bird you put on your life list is like doing a hit, or doing a line.”

 

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Developing a following among birders has opened up some unusual opportunities. Since our interview a couple of weeks ago, she was invited to the Delta Birding Festival in Catalonia, Spain and got to see new birds like the “prehistoric-looking little bustards, Bonelli’s eagle and cinereous vultures,” she later reports. “My talk was about how I’m combining my music career with my passion for birding, environmental issues and efforts in the U.S., and leading the conversation about conservation with love and humor.”

She ended her session, of course, with a song.

“I’m not trying to go and pretend I’m an ornithologist, but I love getting the next generation into birds and getting more people to care about our declining bird populations,” she says. “I feel confident to speak to that because, based off my social media, I’ve had so many people message me and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about getting into birds,’ but might have felt funny wearing binoculars. So I think a big part of my talk is leading the conservation conversation with love and humor and getting people to kind of see our joy in this and find their joy and relax their shoulders.”

“On a lot of these bird walks I do before shows,” she continues, “they’ll always be that one boyfriend who got dragged into doing it and I didn’t wanna do it. But by the end of the walk he gets it. I think that’s a strong strategy to get people to to care more and remind them that nature—I mean, look at it,” she says, indicating the amazing fields of flowers surrounding us, as birds serenade. “This is just crazy. It’s incredible.”

We leave the park a little after 8 AM, and most of her musician friends are still asleep. But when it comes to getting outside and connecting with nature, Bonner Black will keep doing her best to wake us all up.

Josh Jackson is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Paste Magazine. You can find him among the smoldering ruins of of Twitter at @joshjackson.

 
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