Black Birder Christian Cooper Overcame ‘Central Park Karen’ and Is Now a TV Star
“I have a nene wedged between my thighs,” Christian Cooper says onscreen with the sort of joy few of us would muster if a Hawaiian goose nestled in our privates.
Cooper, however, is a birder, and very likely the only one you can name.
Part of that is because he helms Nat Geo’s Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper streaming on Disney+. This series garnered Cooper two Daytime Emmy Award nominations. (The awards show airs Saturday, June 8 on CBS and streams on Paramount+, and via the Emmys viewing page.) One of his nods is for “Travel, Adventure and Nature Program,” and the other for “Daytime Personality–Non-Daily.”
The other reason many people know Cooper goes back to an incident four years ago, when he was wrongly accused of threatening a woman in Central Park. His spectacular level of control at the time could have earned the lifelong comic book fan, writer, and editor, his own superhero character: Chillman. (Birdman was taken.)
How did he stay so calm as a woman called the police and started frantically screaming lies about him?
Christian Cooper takes a moment to reflect on the natural beauty at Hacienda la Esperanza.
“My idol since childhood has been Mr. Spock,” Cooper, 61, says of everyone’s favorite Vulcan. “He is not at all ruled by emotion, he is unruffled, he keeps it all under control. And that has always been my goal. And happily, in that moment, I was able to keep that control. I don’t always succeed, but I try.”
The date, May 25, 2020, was the same day a police officer murdered George Floyd. The pandemic was raging and Cooper had sought quiet refuge, as is his wont, birdwatching in the Ramble, a woodsy haven for birdwatchers.
Amy Cooper (unrelated) had her dog illegally off its leash. When he asked her to leash the pet, she threatened to summon police, which he encouraged. He also started taping her. She called 911, alleging “an African-American man—I am in Central Park—he is recording and threatening myself and my dog.”
True, Christian Cooper is Black, and he did record her. Good thing, too, because that recording proved Cooper was the essence of restraint, civility, and grace. Once the story went viral, Amy Cooper was fired from her job. She reportedly received death threats, was doxxed, and eventually left the country.
Since the incident, Cooper has flourished—not that he was doing poorly before it.
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The TV show took him to observe, delight in and share his knowledge about birds in Puerto Rico, NYC, Hawaii, Palm Springs, Washington D.C., and Alabama. He also wrote a charming New York Times bestseller, Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World.
In it, he gives tips such as: “Avoid trying to bird in the presence of non-birders. As you wait patiently for half an hour for that Marsh Wren to give you that definitive glimpse, you’ll just piss off all your friends and relatives for holding them back.”
This self-awareness perfectly captures his spirit and why people flock to him. And it’s why he is so relatable and fun to watch. Much of that is because he’s so comfortable in his own skin—taking pride in that he’s a “Blerd” (a Black Nerd), gay, and a comic book author.
Incidentally, Cooper needs to set the record straight about being queer in the comic book universe.
Jorge Perez and Christian Cooper gaze up at the tiny but mighty endemic Puerto Rican Tody in the trees above.
“A lot of people will say that I was the first openly gay editor in Marvel,” he says. “That's not true; I was the second. The first one is the one who helped me get my job. But I was, early on, one of the first openly gay editors at Marvel.
“And also, I was an assistant editor, which means main Xeroxer, for a landmark comic book called Alpha Flight Number 106, which is the issue where Marvel’s first gay superhero came out,” Cooper continues. “It was the revelation of our first openly gay superhero.”
Comics fans had a meltdown, Cooper recalls of the reaction to the character, Northstar, coming out. Cooper’s sanguine about it, adding that he also wrote into comics a lesbian main character and an elderly Black woman, “namely my grandmother who is amazing.”
“Nobody puts elderly women in comic books,” Cooper stresses. “Nobody! But she was fighting alongside everybody else.”
Cooper chuckles as he recalls those days. He’s relaxed and it’s the same demeanor evidenced on his show.
Onscreen, Cooper possesses the qualities of the best nature series hosts. He is—as you’d expect—smart and extremely knowledgeable about his subject, but he’s also genuinely excited by it, with a jacked-up enthusiasm that’s delightfully contagious. He is so happy and awed that you have to be aggressively grumpy to not give in—even if you happen to be a person who crosses streets to avoid pigeons.
This erudite birdwatcher has become recognizable enough that people stop him in the street.
“Black people tend to recognize me more, and more often they tend to be sort of appreciative, in a sense of, ‘Thank you for what you’ve done,’” he says. “And I don’t consider that I’ve done that much. But I will take the compliment of goodwill. And then other people are like, ‘Oh, you’re the guy with a TV show.’”
He is and may be again. As of deadline, the show is in limbo, neither officially canceled nor renewed. But Cooper doesn’t seem to stress over this. He has other projects in the works, including a children’s book.
Cooper finds the positive even in the ashes of the negative.
While the Black community wasn’t surprised to hear the baseless accusations hurled at him, he says, “that situation was an eye-opener for a lot of other people,” he says. “So that’s a positive. The other huge positive for me is all the Black people turned on to birding. They found out oh, there was a Black guy birding in Central Park. And they were like, ‘Wait, we do that?’ And, then with the TV show, they get to see me actually doing it.”
While he chats, Cooper shares that he is without his constant appendage—binoculars. He intentionally left them in his East Village home to head to Boston for the weekend of his 40th college reunion at Harvard.
“And so I am declaring my freedom from getting up at 4 a.m.,” he says. “I expect there will be quite a lot of late nights and carousing and human socialization to make up for the complete lack of human socialization over the last six weeks, so I consciously and deliberately did not bring my binoculars. Although I’m sure, while I’m here, I will profoundly regret that.”
Alicia Thomas, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, takes a walk with Christian Cooper at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, CA.
During his years at the Ivy, he was not, as might be expected, a zoology major. Cooper was a government major. “It’s called political science at other schools but at Harvard, we have to be special,” he says.
He was president of Harvard Ornithological Club. Now, he’s on the Board of Directors of NYC’s Audubon.
Cooper grew up on Long Island’s South Shore and has lived in the city since 1985. He mentions on his show how his father gave him his first pair of binoculars. It’s been love since he first spotted a Red-winged Blackbird.
“I got all excited because I was like, ‘Oh, wow! I just got this new species of crow,’” he says, laughing at himself when he discovered it was a known species.
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Besides traveling—though “not too much”—Cooper wants to “keep building momentum on this whole ‘birding for everybody’ thing,” he says. “And I mean, everybody! It’s not just Black people. It especially makes me happy when Black people start birding because we’ve been so underrepresented for so long.
“But, you know, I want to get as many people as possible into looking at birds, for them and for the sake of a better world,” Cooper says. “We’ve lost one-third of the birds in North America, and I’m not talking about species. I’m talking about just raw numbers and populations—one-third in North America—in my lifetime.”
A committed environmentalist, Cooper maintains that the more we understand our natural world, the more likely we are to preserve it.
“I’m just excited that I’ve been able to maybe bring birding to some people who might not have looked at it,” he says. “We should all be engaged with the natural world in some way. And birds are by far the easiest way to do that.”
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