Review: 'Birding Is My Favorite Video Game' by Rosemary Mosco
The natural world, oddly articulate and hilariously alive
Birds, as it turns out, are endearingly strange. And in Mosco’s hands, they’re quite willing to speak for themselves, alongside the rest of the natural world. Birding Is My Favorite Video Game, a collection of comics intended for inquisitive minds of all ages, leans into this tonal jollity right away.
Panels like Birds Are Gross, Hawkward, and evolution sucks appear as an early and entirely conspicuous wink to the reader, familiarizing us with the work’s distinctly playful rhythm.
At the same time, information arrives coyly clad in feathers and scales, whether as dialogue or gamified visual explanations, always carrying a steady streak of wit.
There’s something particularly effective about the way Mosco pairs biological fact with conversational framing. Her approach lets the rest of the animal kingdom take on a more familiar shape, with its behaviors sitting just close enough to our own to compel a kind of residual empathy.
The result is a distinctly human aftereffect, deepening the rift between us and the world we inhabit—especially the numbness our senses have come to accept as inherent.
The book also has a habit of slipping across time in ways that gently thrill the mind, with modern bird species appearing alongside their slyly inserted ancestors, including a sharply clawed dromaeosaur. At the tip of Mosco’s pen, evolution feels less like a distant process than something still very much in motion.
But beneath the comedy—and nature’s harmonious veneer—the world begins to take on a more elaborate shape, revealing itself as something far busier.
We see plants evolving to fend off whatever is trying to eat them, and creatures adapting to keep eating them anyway. And so, the familiar picture of nature’s quiet ways starts to thin out.
In a sense, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game captures the peculiar triumph of lifting a rock to realize how many universes our blindness houses.
Even small details are given room to expand. The earthy smell of rain hitting dry ground is traced back to its bacterial roots, illustrated with a mix of wonder and irreverence that makes biology feel impish, especially in how it settles back inside us.
Mosco returns to this approach often, taking something ordinary and letting its underlying mechanisms come into view through its proximity to human senses.
There are also moments where the scope shifts outward. Climate change enters through its effects on other life forms, including the dissolution of shells and the distortion of senses caused by ocean acidification, folding larger environmental pressures into the same puckish visual language as the rest of the book.
And then, just as easily, it detours into something like a guide to Nature Names FOR YOUR BABY. Options such as “compressed flapwort” make an appearance, landing understandably low on the list of desirable monikers.
It’s a small inclusion, but it captures something central to the work’s tone: the sense that the natural world, especially when pushed against language, is just as absurd as it is intricate.
Taken together, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game moves easily between fact and play, using humor to keep its subject matter in motion—always slightly opening and reframing what we believe we’re looking at.
An advance copy was provided by Andrews McMeel Publishing.
Path of Engagement
♜♝♞♜♝
Genre
Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga
Publication Date
July 28, 2026