Minorities in Birding: Background information when reading Better Living Through Birding

Minorities in Birding

This article relates to Better Living Through Birding

The viral video of Christian Cooper confronting a white woman who threatened to call the police on him while he was birdwatching in New York's Central Park helped drive the 2020 protests stemming from the police murders of Black Americans. Yet Cooper has done much beyond this video to raise awareness about racism in general and within the birding world.

The last chapter of his memoir Better Living Through Birding shows him traveling to the Deep South to both reckon with his racial history and promote a more equitable vision of birding through the Black Belt Birding Festival. The event, hosted by the Alabama Audubon (a branch of the bird protection and conservation organization the Audubon Society), sought to increase interest and participation in birdwatching by minorities, as well as to bolster economic and tourism opportunities for the Black Belt, a region spanning Southern states populated by majority-Black farming communities. Individually, Cooper has created a DC Comics graphic novel that includes a story about a Black man who goes birding. He is also on the board of directors for the New York City Audubon.

Birdwatching has historically been overwhelmingly white, privileged and exclusive — a fact that Cooper alludes to as he recalls being introduced to birding, when he and his father arrived as "maybe the first Black people ever for a South Shore walk" with the Audubon Society. In 2011, a survey conducted by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that 93% of birders were white and only 4% were Black. This isn't surprising considering that naturalist John James Audubon, for whom the Audubon Society is named, was a white, racist slaveowner. John Muir, the first president of the Sierra Club, who is often seen as representative of the American love of nature, also enslaved people and was known to have called Black people lazy "sambos" and Native Americans "dirty."

There have been some strides forward in combating this legacy of white privilege and racism. Both the Sierra Club and Audubon Society (some branches of which have committed to changing their names) denounced their racist past in 2020. 2020 also saw the first-ever Black Birders Week. In general, there have been more conversations in recent years about minorities in birdwatching and increasing access to the birding world.

Photo of a northern cardinal in Central Park, New York by Ahmer Kalam, via Unsplash

Filed under Society and Politics

This "beyond the book article" relates to Better Living Through Birding. It originally ran in June 2023 and has been updated for the June 2024 paperback edition. Go to magazine.