Christian Cooper on going from a bird hobbyist to a National Geographic host

13:09Christian Cooper on going from a bird hobbyist to a National Geographic host

Christian Cooper has a massively impressive resume, but to many people he's known as the "Central Park Birder" – or, the Black man who stood up for himself when a white woman called the police on him in 2020.

Since then, Cooper has released a memoir and hosted a show with National Geographic about his passion for birding.

Cooper joins Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about how his hobby has soared to new heights, and why he wants to bring birding to new audiences.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: You went to Harvard. You're one of the first openly gay writers and editors of Marvel Comics. You've published your own comic book, a bestselling memoir — but your true passion is birdwatching, something that you've been doing since you were a kid. What do you love about watching birds, man?

Christian: Oh, what don't I love about it? Principally it goes back to the fact that birds communicate with the same senses that we do. We love our dogs, we love our cats, but their primary sense is their nose, whereas birds, their primary senses are the same as us — they use sight and sound. And so we can appreciate the spectacular colors, the incredible patterns, the sounds they make, and particularly in the songbirds, the beautiful music they put forth into the world. Add to that the romance of the fact that birds fly, that they are the ultimate symbol of freedom, something we all dream about being able to do under our own power. Birds are just it.

WATCH | Using lasers to disperse ravens on Extraordinary Birder:

Elamin: I don't have the immediate training to be a bird watcher, which is to say I don't always notice birds around me. But I have a six-year-old, and my six-year-old has completely reoriented my relationship with birds because my six-year-old has a relationship with her grandmother who teaches her the names of the birds around … and it has kind of made me realize that for years I've just been missing a whole part of my immediate environment.

Christian: Exactly, and that's really all being a birder is — you walk through the world with a little bit more consciousness. You're noticing and paying attention through your eyes and through your ears to the birds around you. It doesn't take special equipment. It doesn't take special knowledge. You'll start to figure it out — and then other birders, we love to help. We see a new birder and we get all excited.

Elamin: You called your memoir Better Living Through Birding. I'm curious, how do birds teach us to live better?

Christian: It's more a matter of how do birds get us outside of ourselves? Because when you're birding — first of all, being in nature alone is incredibly healing. They've done studies on this. But when you're birding, you've got to focus on looking for a particular kind of motion. You're listening for different sounds, and you can't do those things with whatever is preying on your mind. That all slips away for a little while because you're engaging completely with the natural world beyond you, and it's absorbing you and you're learning things from it; everything is copacetic and all those other things are gone. They'll come back, but for a little while they're gone.

Elamin: You're describing a form of meditation, right? Sort of a single focus that is like, "Let me just clear all the other thoughts. This is where I'm trying to direct my attention."

Christian: Exactly. And at the same time, the wild is giving you an incredible sunset or mountain backdrop or trees that are leafing out for the first time this spring. So you're just absorbing all of that. And plus, if you are able and walking as you're taking your bird outing — just walking is a form of meditation. It works.

WATCH | Trapping herring gulls at the Javits Center on Extraordinary Birder:

Elamin: I think generally, the outdoors are spaces that when I think about them, I think that they've excluded Black people. As a Black person, I don't necessarily think of myself as an outdoors person. I think most of the marketing when it comes to hiking, camping, all of these ideas — they don't really include a lot of Black people. Why do you think that is?

Christian: Oh, there's a lot of reasons for it. But you're absolutely correct that Black and brown people go to the national parks far less than our proportion in the population. I think there's a lot of structural reasons for that…. I think some of them are in terms of legacy problems that affect our communities, built-in barriers. For example, if you are working two or three jobs to keep a roof over your head, you're not necessarily going to have the money to be able to send your kids to a summer camp where they can develop an appreciation for nature. They're not going to have that connection to nature to want to go out to the great outdoors. So we've got a lot of things to overcome, and that's one of the things I'm hoping the show will do — is get a lot of Black and brown kids thinking, "Oh, he's looking at birds. He's in the outdoors. Maybe I can do that." Because it's so much easier to picture yourself doing it, if you can see somebody who looks like you already doing it.

Elamin: You've been at this for a long time. What's the best advice that you ever got in terms of bird watching?

Christian: The best advice I got was just open yourself up. You don't have to have a pair of binoculars. You know, if you're a casual person, you're thinking, yeah, maybe, maybe not. You know, you don't have to invest in any fancy equipment. Just step outside and look and listen. And if you're homebound, just go to the window and look outside the window and look and listen. That's all it takes to get started to be a birder and the rest will come.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Christian Cooper produced by Jess Low.