Meet Christian Cooper!
This week , the author and National Geographic's "Extraordinary Birder" is a guest on the podcast "Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant."
(Listen to the radio version here.)
When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, back before Russ and I had children, I went out two or three weekend days a month with four friends. On our drives to different birding destinations, we’d of course all be looking out the window for birds, but between sightings, we’d be shooting the breeze, talking about all kinds of things. We were about as different demographically as was possible with a small pack of Madison birders in the 70s—all white and I was the only female, but one of the guys was a high school kid who started coming with us when he was 14, and one was close to retirement. We had entirely different interests and occupations—the only thing we really had in common was that we all loved watching birds—but we took an interest in one another’s stories, be they about art, statistics, engineering, or teaching little kids. Our friendship enlarged all of us.
The warm feeling of belonging to this little group is a treasured memory that came to mind several times when I was reading Christian Cooper’s wonderful book, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. The lovely stories he tells start with his childhood, when his non-birder dad took him on birding walks with a local birding club where he met a serious birder named Elliott who took him under his wing. He talks about his shame and embarrassment thinking there was something wrong with him as he realized at a young age that he was gay, and about his life-long passion for science fiction and comics—a passion that grew into his becoming Marvel Comics’ first openly gay writer and editor. His writing skills also led to his becoming a senior biomedical editor at Health Science Communications.
In his book, Cooper briefly mentions the Central Park incident when, while birding in a very sensitive area of the park with clear signage asking people to keep their dogs on leash in 2020, he asked a woman to put her dog on a leash, and she retorted that she was going to call the police and tell them an African American man was threatening her. After Cooper’s sister posted his recording of the entire confrontation on social media, it went viral.
Christian Cooper’s gentle and generous yet masterful response, both toward the woman in the moment and toward all the publicity afterward, may have introduced him to millions of us, but he was already famous in New York birding circles as one of the friendliest and most approachable as well as most knowledgeable birders covering Central Park during spring migration.
When National Geographic named him the host of their new Extraordinary Birder series, I binged on every episode of the first season, thrilled with just how good it is. People know how enthusiastic I am about birds from my writing. When I lead field trips, I’m friendly and can blather about birds with the best of them, but Christian Cooper has an amazing, engaging enthusiasm that I couldn’t possibly muster on camera. I instantly took to using his word “fantabulous” when I see cool things, but I could never channel his presence.
On September 19, Christian Cooper will be the guest on a wonderful podcast, “Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant,” produced by PBS’s Nature, exploring the human drama behind saving animals. In this third season, looking at the ecological web from tiny plants to apex predators, Dr. Wynn-Grant focuses on the question, “How can humans look at our relationship to nature differently?” holding a conversation in each episode with a notable scientist, activist, or adventurer of color to see how they grapple with that question in their own lives and work.
I got a sneak peek preview of this week’s episode with Christian Cooper, which will be released tomorrow, September 19, and loved every moment. Listening felt like I was back in a car in the 1970s with another birding buddy, all of us expanding our horizons by hanging out with people we’d never have crossed paths with except for the one common interest that still binds us in a life-long friendship: birds. The podcast episode touches on many of the topics Christian Cooper wrote about in Better Living Through Birding as well as his nuanced feelings about the recent controversy swirling around the Audubon Society’s old, established name honoring a great bird artist who owned slaves and desecrated the graves of native peoples.
Christian Cooper is a wonderful writer, his enthusiasm and warmth shining through every paragraph, but his enthusiastic, warm, and friendly speaking voice adds even more to this podcast episode. It’s really worth a listen. I’ve never met Christian Cooper and doubt if he’s heard of me, but between his book, the Extraordinary Birder series, and this podcast episode, I feel like he’s a dear and treasured friend.
