Central Park Birder on “the Incident” and Beauty of Birding

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, our next guest believes we should be looking to the skies to learn some important life lessons. Christian Cooper is a passionate bird watcher, but went viral after he was on the receiving end of a racially charged incident in Central Park. Well, he is now turning one of his darkest days into a platform for inclusion and education. Cooper hosts a National Geographic TV show about birds, which debuted last month. And in his new memoir, details about how a life of bird watching prepared him for that now infamous incident. He is joining Michel Martin to discuss the natural world.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Christian Cooper, thank you so much for joining us.

CHRISTIAN COOPER, AUTHOR, “BETTER LIVING THROUGH BIRDING”: Thanks for having me

MARTIN: Before we dig into your book, and your new TV show, which are both really kind of joyous experiences, I have to say, I am going to start with the pain. Because you start with the incident that will be the reason that many people know your name, which is that you were in Central Park, in New York City, in 2020, when this white woman, you know, falsely accused you of threatening her life as you were doing what you do in the park, which is observing birds. And this happened right around the time that George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. So, you know —

COOPER: Same day.

MARTIN: — so many things — same day, like literally hours before. That it is in an episode just kind of took on a life of its own, and I just wonder what you make of that?

COOPER: It was disorienting for the first couple days. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and wait for it all to blow over until I could get my life back. And eventually, I realized that would be a mistake. That for better or worse, there was an opportunity here to articulate certain things about where we stand as a country and to, at least, give a certain perspective that maybe people weren’t aware of, particularly white people. I think most of us black people are aware of it, but I think a lot of people — and white people weren’t aware of racial bias and how deeply it infects our culture.

And so, this was a chance to talk about it in a way that, for example, George Floyd could not, because he’s no longer with us. So, I figured, let me try and do that in — with, you know, what’s been given. In other words, if people are going to shove all these cameras and microphones in my face, I’m going to use them to try to say what I think needs to be said.

MARTIN: So, could you just talk a little bit more about what that feels like, to be at the center of that kind of maelstrom and frenzy and just — and why you kind of wanted to wait for it to go away?

COOPER: Well, it’s disorienting and disruptive. It’s kind of weird to turn on your TV and your normal morning newscast is talking about you, or to, you know, have your phone vibrate in your pocket with the latest update from, you know, “The New York Times,” and it’s got your name in it. That’s weird and it’s unsettling, and it’s difficult to process, especially when it’s coming at you from sort of all directions. The weirdest was when I came home, and a conservative rag in New York newspaper had sent a photographer to stake out in front of my apartment building to catch a photo of me. And I’m ducking into my apartment building like I’m Princess Di ducking the paparazzi. I mean, that’s weird (ph). So, you know, it’s a lot to deal with. Eventually, I was just like, all right. Well, if this is what it is, then let’s use it for a positive purpose.

MARTIN: You decided not to pursue criminal charges against the woman who falsely accused you, just for folks who haven’t followed your story or haven’t had a chance to read your book yet, why not?

COOPER: It was up to the district attorney whether he wanted to pursue the charges or not. I decide — I declined to cooperate in that. If he needed my cooperation, he could subpoena me and I would agree. They were a lot of reasons behind that decision, partly a sense of proportionality. Her life had imploded. If — but I also understood that there was potentially a legal point to be made. So, there was a lot to balance.

Ultimately, I was right on the line, and I decided on — that — you know, sort of a sense of mercy had to prevail. But there’s something even more important that happened in that moment, which is that it’s not about her. And to focus on her, to — for everybody to say, of, we got to throw her in jail, that puts the attention in the wrong place.

The important thing in that incidentwas how it demonstrated how deeply racial bias runs in our country and how it’s integrated. And that bubbles up in much more important ways than the dustup between me and her. It manifested later that day when that racial bias made a white police officer think it was OK for him to kneel on the neck of a black man until that man was dead. That racial bias comes to the fore in the other cops who were there who did nothing because of that racial bias that informs how they make their decisions. You know, we see that racial bias going all the way to, for example, the fact of the people of Washington, D.C., largely black and brown, don’t have any voting representation in Congress, while, you know, white rural Vermont, with fewer people than D.C., white rural Wyoming, with fewer people than D.C., get two senators each, but the larger black and brown and urban people of Washington, D.C. have no representation. That’s racial bias at work.

Those are important. Those are the things we should focus on. You know, while we’re high-fiving, we put that woman in jail, the Supreme Court is rolling back affirmative action. So, we got to keep our eyes on the prize. We got to be focused on what matters, and what we can do to try to eradicate that racial bias when it bubbles up in these places the matter.

MARTIN: Before we move past the incident, we’ll call it that, you’ve been visiting that section of the park for years, and I just wondered if it changed your relationship to that place that has is meaningful to you?

COOPER: Not at all. And it’s funny, people have asked me that. How could those three minutes, four minutes, however long it was, possibly compare to 35 plus years of going to that place, that exact spot, and seeing absolutely amazing birds, like a mourning warbler that came out onto the woodchip path for all of us to see, this is incredibly rare sculky (ph) bird, and it’s out in the open for all of us to see, for a week. That’s what’s imprinted from in my head for that spot. That other stuff? Yes, it happened, but the birds are so much more significant for me.

MARTIN: OK. Well, let’s talk about the birds. Your book, your new book, “Better Living Through Birding,” notes from a black man in a natural world. It’s just — it’s very interesting kind of meditation on like all the things we’ve been talking about so far, kind of social justice and our place in the world and how we take up space. So, just talk about, if you would, just to start, like how you fell in love with birding and with birds?

COOPER: Sure. And the first thing anybody who has to know about the book is that it is a memoir. It’s not a how-to about birding, though there is that shot through it, because I’ve been birding my whole life. And what got me started was my spark bird, as we say in the lingo, in birding lingo, was a red wing black bird.

I put up a back bird feeder in the backyard, and I was looking at all these all-black birds with red on the wings. So, I thought, I discovered a new species of crow, until a little 10-year-old me was all excited, and then I found out, no, actually, they are red-winged blackbirds. But that didn’t matter, I still loved it. And that’s what got me started.

MARTIN: So, before we move on, what’s the difference between birding and bird watching?

COOPER: There is no difference. We prefer birding these days simply because you can be blind and be a birder. And fact, in the Puerto Rico episode of my show, “Extraordinary Birder,” we actually meet a blind birder who only sorts by sound and is able to analyze recordings over 24 hours to tell the people who run the reserve, oh, these are the birds that have shown up over the last 24 hours. And I can tell you that because I’m listening to the recording and telling you exactly what’s been there. By myself, I’m what they call a near birder. You can drop me into just about anywhere in the northeastern United States and I can tell you what birds are around just by what I hear. So, you know. it’s not just watching.

MARTIN: Interesting.

COOPER: And why now these days, we use birding.

MARTIN: So, you talk about — in the book, about — and you talked about this before, about being, oh, I’ll just, you know, a closeted queer kid in a predominant — a queer black kid in a predominantly white Long Island neighborhood where you were kind of always sort of a bit of an outsider, or at least, you kind of felt like one. How did birding kind of help you be in the world?

COOPER: Well, you know, I knew that I was gay from like super early, like the age of five. So — and I, from that age, knew enough to hide it, interestingly enough. So, when you got all that bottled up inside and you feel at odds with everything, with the whole culture, you know, it can be – – it weighs on you.

What birding does, you know, no matter what your roles are and no matter where they come from is because you’ve got to focus on, you know, looking for a certain kind of motion, listen for particular sounds, for a little while at least, whatever woes you’ve got fall away. And instead, you are fully engaged with a natural world around you that is so much bigger than you are.

And then, as you’re engaging with this world, you realize, I’m part of this world too. I am an integrated part of this natural world. And you start to learn about it, and you just get engaged on so many levels with the wild. And while you’re doing that, you know, whatever is preying on your mind, whatever is weighing you down for at least a little while, it just goes away. And that’s awesome. That’s incredibly healing. And that’s why I wish more black people would bird, because we need that, you know? We need to be able to let go and just feel some healing from the natural world.

MARTIN: It sounds, in a way, like you immediately felt at home in the natural world, but did you feel, still, an outsider in that world as you took up this passion?

COOPER: Oh, my God. I was a closeted gay person, I’m black and I was a birder, on top of that, and a nerd, a science fiction, comic book nerd. You know, I might as well have been red stamped of my forehead but the scarlet letter. So, yes, I’m with odds with the world around me. And, you know, that was difficult at times. But —

MARTIN: Well, but the birds don’t care. I mean, the birds don’t care.

COOPER: That’s —

MARTIN: They don’t care about any of that.

COOPER: That is the thing, the birds don’t care if you are queer, straight, trans, you know, black, white, Asian, handicapped, able-bodied, they just — they don’t care. So, that’s pretty amazing.

MARTIN: You do have some really funny stories though where you kind of, you get the word that there was a special bird that you wanted to see and you’re like, hold up, I got to go.

COOPER: It helps to have understanding bosses. And there’s a word for that, by the way, in birding lingo, it’s called the twitch, where you hear of some rare bird that is, you know, in — showed up somewhere and the twitch is when you drop everything and you just go, because you’ve got to see this thing.

So, yes. It helps to have people around you who understand what you’re about, and that this may occur at certain times. And when a Kirtland’s Warbler showed up in Central Park, which there’s only about 6,000 of them in the entire world and they breed in an area about this big in Michigan, and one of them took a wrong turn, ended up in Central Park and somebody saw it and knew what they were looking at and got the word out, and we lost our minds. I mean, everybody twitched for that one.

MARTIN: I see that. I hear that. So, how do you get started? Give us little hint here.

COOPER: I mean, the most important thing if you want to get started birding is to just look and listen. Step out your front door and look and listen. Get to a local park, look and listen. That’s the first thing. And, you know, you will see birds. You may not know what they are, and that’s

OK. You don’t have to be an expert. You’ll learn. Some people think binoculars are a barriered entry because they can be super expensive, don’t let that stop you. If you don’t have them, they’ve been plenty of times and I’ve been caught out without my binoculars, and you know what, I just use my eyes and my ears, and I drink it all in.

MARTIN: I wanted to ask you about one other sort of issue. You’re a longtime board member of the New York Audubon Society. There are those who believe that the name should be changed, to get rid of the name of John James Audubon. He was a noted opponent of abolition. He owns and sold enslaved people. What are your thoughts about it?

COOPER: I’m one of those people who comes down on the side of we need to lose the name, and I’m very happy to say that New York City Audubon, of which as you mentioned, I’m a board member, has made that decision to change the name. And we need to be clear, there is no erasing Audubon. This is not cancel culture. This is not, you know, oh, my goodness, his name must be stricken from the role. You can’t. John James Audubon was huge in terms of illustrating the birds of North America, bringing public awareness of the birds of North America to a wider audience.

So, you know, you can’t do anything to change that. You can ask to risk it, but the fact that a lot of work was funded by the sale of slaves, by the work of slaves. So, you know, and that’s an important asterisk, but you can’t erase him. So, why change the name? Because birding has been overwhelmingly white for the longest time.

I mean, I used to joke when I was young that, oh, you can count all the black birders in North America on the fingers of one hand, and I was only slightly exaggerating. You know, happily, that’s changing. But there’s still a huge deficit in the numbers of black birders. And if you lead with, oh, please join our birding organization, it’s the John James Audubon Society, you know, named after this slave owner, you’re going to have a hard time getting black people who haven’t already signed onto birding to join. And we really need to do that, because we need to get everybody birding. We need everybody focused on the birds, because we’ve already — in North American, just in my lifetime, we have lost one third of the birds in North America. Gone.

MARTIN: And why is that? Is that climate? Is that development? Why is that?

COOPER: There’s a whole lot of reasons. There’s a whole lot of reasons. Habitat loss. Climate change. You know, and all of them just coming together to really give us, as human beings, a huge warning sign that something is terribly, terribly wrong with our environment. I mean, talk about canary in a coal mine. We’ve got one-third of our birds acting as that canary telling us we’ve got to do something to fix our environment. So, if we’re going to do that, we need all hands on deck. The demographics of the country are changing, and if birding remains an entirely white, or perceived as entirely white activity, then we are in trouble.

MARTIN: So, before we let you go, Mr. Cooper, you know it’s — you’ve had this wonderful — I mean, you’ve written this wonderful book, you might have written it absent the incident in Central Park, maybe, you have this show a National Geographic, “Extraordinary Birder.” I don’t know if those opportunities would have come to you had it not been for this terrible painful incident. And I just — I don’t know. I wonder how you feel about that.

COOPER: No, I don’t think there’s any doubt about the fact that there’s a connection between, you know, the notoriety that came with the incident and the opportunities that came my way. I consider myself incredibly privileged, because — and I’ve certainly found this out making the show, Extraordinary Birder,” because that title isn’t about me, it’s about all the different biologist and just plain old birders who are doing extraordinary things to save the birds in — from the habitats that we all enjoy.

And they are all doing these amazing things, have been doing them for years, and they don’t necessarily get the chance to tell their story in their own words, as I’ve been able to do. And so, I consider it — I consider myself extremely privileged, and I think there are hundreds of thousands of equally amazing stories out there that people are just living.

And if I had never gotten the opportunity to write this book or do this TV show, I would still be living what I do, which is, you know, as I said before, fighting for justice for black people and probably for queer people and wild birds for all people. And I’d still be doing it. So, this just — let’s be — do it on a bigger platform. So, yay. And I am happy that that’s happened. But really, I think a lot of people have amazing stories to tell and I wish all of them got the attention that they should get.

MARTIN: Well, speaking of the attention over something, you know, turning pain into purpose, I was curious if the woman who falsely accused you, has she ever reached out to you? Has she ever apologized?

COOPER: She apologized in the press in a fashion. I don’t think it indicated that she quite understood everything that had happened, why it was significant. She never reached out to me directly. I’m not looking for anything from her. You know, I have my own life. I’m moving forward with it, and hopefully, she’s doing the same.

MARTIN: Christian Cooper, thank you so much for talking with us today.

COOPER: No. My pleasure.

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