Rosemary Mosco adored the the funny pages of her local newspaper as a child. Her favorite, Bloom County, featured a charismatic talking penguin named Opus with an endlessly whimsical outlook. As a comic artist today, it’s easy to see Opus’ influence in Mosco’s own illustrations and books, which feature cartoon animals with personality.

Always accompanied by her two pesky conure birds who peck at her head while she works, Mosco creates roughly one comic per month. Over a decade, she’s amassed an archive some of which have been collected into her book, Birding Is My Favorite Video Game. In addition to her comics, Rosemary writes other science-based children’s books including a tour of our solar system and a collaborative guidebook with Atlas Obscura.

Most of the characters in Mosco’s comics are talking animals, often birds, that are gleeful in their ignorance whilst regaling the reader in their own esoteric natural history. However, her works are not just anthropomorphized or surrealist riffs on nature guidebooks. Trained as a traditional science writer, Rosemary insists on grounding her work in carefully researched science. She often collaborates with research to make sure her comics provide educational value as well as humorous commentary on the natural world.