Join The Walden Woods Project for a virtual event with David Gessner!
About David Gessner:
David Gessner is the author of thirteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling All the Wild That Remains. Gessner is a professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he also founded the literary magazine Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Orion, and many other magazines. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show The Call of the Wild.
About the presentation:
This year marks the 25th anniversary of David Gessner’s Return of the Osprey, which the Boston Globe hailed as “a classic of American nature writing” and chose as one of its top books of the year. For Gessner, the writing of the book changed not just the way he wrote, but his life. He began his Osprey year in relative ignorance, barely able to tell a gull from an Osprey. It was a year of obsession and at times it felt like his goal was to become one of the birds. In his presentation, Gessner will explore the way that obsession has been an aid to writing both Return of the Osprey and his newest The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird.
About The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird:
This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.
Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.
Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought hordes of observers to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.
When: Thursday, November 13 7:00-8:00 pm EST.
Where: ZOOM
Registration required. See below.
