Something Funny Happens When Rosemary Mosco Mixes Art and Science

Suppose you had to summarize the whole 43-year arc of Rosemary Mosco’s life by picking just six pivotal moments to draw in as many panels. Comics artists call this encapsulation, and it is painstaking work: choosing which scene fragments will best coalesce into a story. For Mosco, a naturalist and science writer and the award-winning cartoonist behind the Bird and Moon webcomic, a biographical strip might look
something like this: 

I. 
A slight, brown-haired girl sits with a gaggle of kids beneath a banner reading “Welcome to Nature Camp/Bienvenue au Camp Nature.” A man in front of her holds a sketchpad showing a doodled T-Rex fleeing a scribbly meteor. The girl’s mouth is agape, her eyes two giant stars.

II. 
The silhouette of a teenager slumps, head bowed, before an enormous desk with a “Guidance Counselor” nameplate. “You can’t combine art and science,” reads a speech bubble. “They’re two entirely different departments.”

III.
Sitting at her light table, pen in hand, a bespectacled 20-something looks out the window at a skyline dominated by Toronto’s needlelike CN Tower. Above, in the night sky, a crescent moon sports the faintest pair of wings.

IV.
The same woman sits in a classroom under a “Welcome to Grad School” banner. It’s a remix of panel 1, with a mustached professor and a projector screen showing a blue-spotted salamander. The woman’s eyes, once more, are stars.

V.
 In a sterile hospital room, her hair replaced by stubble, the woman sinks into an oncology chair, staring listlessly at a book in her lap. An IV connects her arm to a dangling drip bag.  

VI.
With hair to her shoulders, where a pair of Green-cheeked Conures perch, the woman gazes at the glow of a computer screen. In her right hand is a stylus. To her left are a half-dozen stacked books with spines reading “By Rosemary Mosco.”

But Mosco’s comics are not, for the most part, autobiographical. They are about birds. Also invertebrates and herpetofauna. Also butts—so many butts! And regurgitation and mucus and off-putting mating habits. They are about the hilariously weird ways that species have adapted and the arguably weirder rituals and neuroses of the nature-loving humans who observe them. Her comics are full of goofy made-up species and groaner in-joke dad puns. Even when they are sometimes about, say, climate change or species loss, they are not necessarily without lolz.

Earlier this year, I sat in an auditorium while Mosco explained her work to an audience of natural-history buffs in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. “My focus is on familiar creatures,” she said, “and encouraging people to look at them in new and different ways—in silly ways, interesting ways, sometimes ways that are really about the broader world.” On a screen was a four-panel comic labeled “Know Your Northern Cardinals.” Three panels—the first, second, and fourth—showed the crested songbird in familiar shades of brown, red, and tan, captioned “Juvenile,” “Adult Male,” and “Adult Female,” respectively. The third showed the disconcertingly bald head of a cardinal in heavy molt. Its caption read, “Bloödcheëp, Frightful Molt-Demon of the Cursed Abyss.”

“A lot of us write off humor,” Mosco continued, “but I’ve found that if you take any piece of science, no matter how incredibly dry, and you attach a joke to it, then people will get excited and share it and tell all their friends.” 

That kind of virality has helped Mosco build an Instagram following of more than 70,000. It’s helped move copies of Birding Is My Favorite Video Game, her 2018 collection of Bird and Moon comics, and A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, her indispensable 2021 paperback that’s alone in the tiny Venn overlap of illustrated field guide, pop social history, and cheeky cloaca-joke vehicle. 

It’s the same approach she brings to her work for children, including seven books, all illustrated by others, with titles like Butterflies Are Pretty … Gross!, Flowers Are Pretty … Weird!, and her brand-new There Are No Ants in This Book (spoiler alert: there are ants). The day after her lecture in Vermont, I watched Mosco run a kids’ drawing workshop where she showed her elementary-age pupils one of her comics, about the beetle Nymphister kronaueri. The Costa Rican histerid is known for clamping onto the waists of army ants, mimicking a body part while hitching a free ride. Mosco asked the room, “What do you notice about the ant in this picture?”

“It has two abdomens!” declared a boy wearing a “Nature Rocks!” T-shirt.

“It has two butts!” Mosco gleefully replied.

T

he morning after the kids’ workshop, Mosco guided a half-dozen hikers through a wooded preserve stewarded by St. Johnsbury’s Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, the sponsor of her weekend residency in Vermont. The day was overcast, the blackflies thick. Mosco wore a pair of sneakers, a light zip-up jacket, and a cadet-style cap with a Pigeon Lovers Society patch. (Not a real organization—I asked.)

A spooked deer careened through the brush as we set out from the trailhead. We didn’t walk far before pausing to listen to some bubbling birdsong (“A Winter Wren, really symphonic,” Mosco said), then to sniff some red trillium (“Hey, wanna smell something bad?”), then to poke at some slime mold (“Unicellular creatures that get together to form these hideous masses—so cool!”). Mosco ping-ponged from a clump of ostrich ferns to a patch of oak ferns to a scatter of Christmas ferns, enumerating their differences. “Stop me if I’m fern-splaining,” she said.

She was in her 30s before she heard the term “science communicator,” but from a young age, Mosco seemed destined to be one. As a kid in Ottawa, the daughter of a pair of professors, she was drawn to the natural world: loved Watership Down, hunted fossils, rescued injured pigeons, made her own Green-winged Macaw costume for Halloween. She also loved the funnies—in particular Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side, and Cathy. When an educator from the Canadian Museum of Nature showed up at her summer camp, scribbling zany illustrations while narrating a concise history of life on Earth, Mosco’s eight-year-old mind was blown. She became a museum regular, volunteering all throughout high school—which, Mosco says, wasn’t a happy place for an awkward, wildlife-obsessed kid. “To have the museum,” she told me, “it was like, ‘Okay, here’s a place where I belong.’ ”

She remembers plucking a book off a shelf at a friend’s home: Ben, Cathryn, and John Sill’s 1988 parody A Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North America. Her friend’s parents weren’t birders—she knew that much—and it took a few confused, delighted page-flips before she realized the bizarre species inside were fictional. “Okay,” Mosco thought. “So if you make it funny, then people will buy the bird guide.”

At Montreal’s McGill University, she was crushed to learn she couldn’t create a course of study that encompassed both science and art. She settled on anthropology (“I thought, hey, it’s got culture, art, and monkey skulls”). In 2003, three years into college, she took a year off and moved to Toronto, where she went to work for the nonprofit Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) and, in her spare time, got serious about the comics she’d been drawing since childhood. In the small hours, she strolled downtown with FLAP volunteers, toting a butterfly net to scoop up injured birds and cataloging fatalities from window collisions. Back at her apartment, she worked on a long, wordless, black-and-white comic about a lonely city bird who befriends a ghostly, avian-shaped incarnation of the moon.

Mosco put Bird and Moon online and started frequenting comics shows all over eastern Canada and the United States, selling printed copies. Webcomics were catching on, and the indie-comics subculture was thriving. “You’d walk around the show floors and just meet these wonderful people and find all this great work,” she says. “We’d crash on each other’s floors. We’d make all our money during the day, and then once we exceeded our table and printing fees, we’d take the money and go do karaoke all night.”

She finished her degree in Toronto while posting her nature comics and short stories online. She did a few strips for The Globe and Mail and Torontoist, and birdandmoon.com got some traction in what was then called the blogosphere. “But I was still kind of sad, trying to figure out what I really wanted to do,” Mosco says. “There was this city park I liked, and I would sit by the water there and feel so happy. I remembered reading about how sometimes you need to sit and listen to your body and be, like, what makes me happy? And I realized, well, being outside in nature feels good.”

She enrolled in the University of Vermont’s cross-disciplinary Field Naturalist Program, and from the moment a salamander filled the screen in a herpetology class, she knew she had, again, found a place she belonged. 

“You know how you meet someone and you’re just, like, ‘I’m in love’?” Mosco says. When her field studies coincided with blue-spotted salamander migration, getting to hold one was a transcendent experience. 

She’s no less enamored with salamanders today, and searching for them in a slash pile—along with newts and snakes—was one of many preoccupations during our hike in Vermont. We also spent a while, spurred by Mosco’s enthusiasm, admiring how Viceroy caterpillars look like bird poop and unsuccessfully pishing to attract a Canada Warbler she’d seen the day before. “One of two things happens when you do this,” Mosco explained between pissshhhhes. “Either the birds come over or else you humiliate yourself.” 

When it was time to turn back—Mosco had another group coming—we realized we’d walked only a fraction of the trail system. Mosco, as it happens, has a comic about this: A hiker sets out with his naturalist pal, but after a couple of panels cataloging their wondrous trailside sightings, he complains, “It’s been an hour and we’ve walked three feet.” 

“Three amazing feet!” the fist-pumping naturalist exclaims.

A

nother Mosco comic, made more than a decade ago, opens on a crowd of cute, cartoonish folks in lab coats squaring off against a mob in paint smocks and tutus. “SCIENCE!” bellow the poindexters. “ART!” retort the bohemians. And then: It’s on. The second panel is your classic fight cloud, arms and legs and beakers and paintbrushes sticking out at crazy angles. 

But wait! One little scientist and one little artist have escaped the scrum. “This looks like it might take a while,” the former says. “Want to, uh . . . grab some coffee?” 

“Ok!” the latter replies, and off they walk, hand in hand. “Science + art = ⁄,” reads the caption.

The first time I read it, I wondered: Wasn’t Mosco setting up a bit of a straw man here? Is there really so much tension, so much antagonism, between advocates for art and science? In this day and age? 

When I brought this up with her over coffee one weekend, sitting at a bookstore near her home outside Boston, she took her phone out of her pocket. “If you Google ‘science’ and ‘art,’ ” she said, typing the terms into a browser, “what you get is this.” She showed me a screen full of image results: brain after illustrated brain, their right sides colorful and swoopy, their left sides angular and monochrome. “What they are all implying is this idea that these are two different things.” 

Back when she drew that comic, Mosco says, the term “science communication” was still gaining purchase, a descriptor for a field of professionals who use—gasp!—both sides of their brains to present scientific concepts to laypeople in engaging, creative, accessible ways. The first time she heard the phrase, at a conference full of science bloggers and journalists, she thought, “Oh, so I’m not the only person who does this!”  

These days, Mosco has a much better sense of herself as part of a community of comics artists who are also science communicators. Among her role models, she says, is entomologist Jay Hosler, who put out his first graphic novel—Clan Apis, about honeybee ecology—in 2000. He’s since published a half-dozen more, along with peer-reviewed research touting the pedagogical benefits of comics in the classroom. For his part, Hosler includes Mosco’s A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching on the syllabus of his undergraduate science-communication course at Pennsylvania’s Juniata College, where he chairs the biology department. (The class is called Talk Nerdy to Me.) 

The tension in Mosco’s science vs. art comic? It’s real, Hosler suggests. “There’s distrust because of the perception that one side is more intuitive and one side is more inquiry-driven,” he says. “Of course, here’s the thing: Art is experimental, and science is experimental. Art is inquiry-driven, and science is inquiry-driven. But I think by the time folks get to the point of the people in that cartoon, they’ve had it beat into their heads that theirs is the correct way to address the world.”

And one trouble with the schism, both Mosco and Hosler believe, is that it sows doubt about how effectively artistic mediums can get across scientific concepts. “There are a lot of people who think that if you’re communicating science, then you’re not doing science—you’re watering it down,” Mosco says. Hosler agrees: “I’ve had people ask me, especially about science comics, ‘Doesn’t that dumb things down?’ And I say,  ‘No. It smartens them up.’ ”

What makes comics great vehicles for ideas, says comics scholar Adrielle Mitchell, is the principle of amplification through simplification—a phrase coined in the ’90s by comics artist Scott McCloud. “And I think Mosco is absolutely brilliant with it,” says Mitchell, a professor in the English and communication department at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York, as well as an avid birder. Mosco’s panels are uncluttered, Mitchell points out, and there are rarely more of them than you’d care to read in an Instagram carousel. Yet for all their digestibility, they are jam-packed with facts.

“She is accurate and precise and, at the same time, clever,” Mitchell says. “When I encounter one of her comics, I know it’s going to be a whole thing unto itself, in a very small space. Am I going to laugh? Am I going to have that frisson of recognition? I have that a lot with her work: ‘Oh my god, yes, that’s exactly how those ducks behave! That’s exactly how people behave!’ I just feel a little bit of joy.” 

Science + art = ⁄.

E

arlier this year, Mosco lost her dad, Vincent Mosco. He was 75, an emeritus sociology professor, and a prolific author of academic texts on communication and technology. In the dedication to her Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, she wrote how he “grew up in a Manhattan tenement and only knew three kinds of birds: the gray ones, the little brown ones, and seagulls.” 

She mentioned this taxonomy while the two of us loitered around a transit station near her apartment, one of her favorite spots for pigeon watching. The species undermines our sense of what’s wild and what’s domesticated, her book argues, with segments exploring why pigeons were feudal status symbols, how meat birds became show birds became feral birds, what it means to spot banded pigeons in an urban flock, and more. It was her dad, Mosco says, who taught her to look for the backstories and complexities of things others take for granted. “Whenever I look at one of these urban species,” she told me, “I always think of the histories that got them and us here.” 

A puff-chested Adonis of a pigeon strutted by, in pursuit of a hen. “I named that one Romeo,” Mosco said, then explained its coloration is a legacy of generations of human manipulation.

She’s made some poignant comics about grief this year, and in between speaking gigs, she’s shuttled back and forth to Ottawa to be with her mom. But even in bereavement, Mosco has had moments of bittersweet silliness, sifting through a trove of childhood drawings and comics her parents saved. She got a laugh from one about self-conscious hadrosaurs buying falsie cranial crests and another that spoofed a mail-order catalog written for ants. It felt good to laugh.

Humor, for Mosco, is more than just a Trojan horse for knowledge. It’s a reflex and a balm. “I’m kind of goofy,” she says. “As a kid, I really struggled with depression and anxiety. And I would read comic books and Dave Barry—my parents knew Dave Barry was like an antidepressant for me. And comedy got me through! It seemed like an important part of life.”

Her sense of humor helped, somewhat, when she underwent treatment for stage 3 breast cancer in 2010. She was 29 and had only just finished her master’s degree in Vermont. She came to Boston for treatment. It was a trying time, of course, but it also nudged her to lean into comics as a vocation, newly armed with her naturalist’s training. “Part of why I do what I do is because I sort of said, fuck it, I don’t know how much longer I have left,” she says. Then she follows this with a punch line: “Of course, ‘get cancer’ is bad career advice. Don’t do that.” 

Mosco only occasionally makes climate-change comics—in part because they’re research-intensive and emotionally taxing. A recent strip about the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, where she ice skated as a kid, no longer reliably freezing over was downright heartbreaking. But she can bring wit even to a topic as alarming as global warming: See the strip in which a Marvel-esque supervillain threatens the planet with doomsday scenarios, only to find himself one-upped by a fossil-fuel exec in the crowd. 

“Comedy is such a huge thing, especially when things are hard,” says Mosco’s birding buddy Maris Wicks, an illustrator and writer with her own substantial science-comics résumé. Wicks contrasts Mosco’s work to the “doom-and-gloom scare tactics” that have sometimes characterized the environmental movement. Among her favorite of Mosco’s strips is “Instinct Is Weird,” in which a Yellow Warbler stares at a nest, unsure why she’s built it, then quietly panics when her chicks hatch. “There’s humor there, but there is also this universality,” Wicks says. “She’s done the academic route, and she has the degrees to back it up, but there’s such a warmth and sensitivity and compassion to all of her work.” 

For writer Nick Lund, a contributor to this magazine and longtime blogger behind The Birdist, Mosco’s best comic might be her intro to the Northern Pygmy-Owl. The six- to seven-inch owl, the strip explains, can catch prey twice its size. Across four panels, the unassuming owl’s victims pile up. When they culminate with a moose, the unseen narrator’s speech bubble simply reads, “Oh. Oh no.” 

“The nature-comics space is full of a lot of jokes about tits and boobies,” says Lund, who put a poster of the owl strip on his young son’s bedroom wall. “With Rosemary, it’s so apparent off the bat that she’s writing these from a place of deep knowledge. You can immediately tell that she’s one of us in a way that few others are.” 

After we had peeped our share of pigeons, Mosco offered to walk me through Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, one of her favorite birding destinations. First, though, we had to check on her babies. In her tidy apartment, in a room chock full of perches, gyms, and swings, her pair of conures sat listening to Beyoncé. Once uncaged, one of the colorful parrots settled on my shoulder as I scoped out Mosco’s low-key workspace: a Wacom pen tablet, a laptop stand, piles of scratch paper, and bookshelves filled top to bottom with field guides.

From a high shelf, Mosco pulled a copy of A Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North America, the parody guidebook that captivated her as a preteen. In a way, it’s a conceptual cousin to the project that has lately occupied a lot of her time: a humorous dictionary of birding terms, written and illustrated by Mosco and tentatively dropping next spring. She’s juggling that with another picture book, still under wraps, along with plenty of speaking engagements. One of the last times I texted Mosco, she was prepping for a Zoom chat about science communication with a class at Johns Hopkins University. “I’m going to berate them for not curing cancer yet,” she shot back.

Mount Auburn was calling, but Mosco was in no hurry to stop showing me pages from Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds. We admired the Auger-Billed Clamsucker, which drills into shellfish by pecking into the sand, then walking in a clockwise circle. We ogled the Eastern Narrow Sparrow, which looks unremarkable from the side but hilariously compressed head-on. We giggled and snorted and flipped another few pages. Real-life birds could wait.

This story originally ran in the Fall 2024 issue as “What’s So Funny  ’bout Geese, Doves, And Pigeon Banding?” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.