By Gustave Axelson, All About Birds, June 6, 2020
Birder Christian Cooper’s “happy place,” as he calls it, is New York City’s Central Park in spring. He remembers how he fell in love with it.
“One moment, there was a Blackburnian Warbler at eye level, about arm’s length from me … just throwing its head back and belting out the song,” Cooper recalled on a Facebook livestream discussion on June 4. “I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move.”
Just last week, on May 25, Cooper’s right to safely go birding in public was threatened—one of a recent string of incidents that exposed inequalities that Black people face in America. In a now-infamous video exchange, a woman falsely accused Cooper of threatening violence and called the police after Cooper asked her to leash her dog. The incident went viral online and was covered widely in the news. Soon, a group of about 30 young birders had organized a #BlackBirdersWeek as a place for discussions to flourish about the experience of birding while Black.
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