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.
Photos courtesy of the artist
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.