Who knew a stag do could be so life-changing?” So asks Ollie Olanipekun — a man who must be in the extreme minority of having come out of a pre-wedding weekender with his world altered for the better. Loading into a minibus after two days’ quadbiking and rafting in a forest for his brother’s stag, he spotted an owl, “and, for a split second, I’m sure I caught its eye.” He went home, grabbed a pair of binoculars from his parents’ house, “and from then on, I was fascinated by birds.”
Olanipekun charts this love affair in Outsiders — a memoir-cum-call-to-action for would-be naturalists written with Nadeem Perera. The pair are better known as the brains behind Flock Together — a birdwatching collective for people of colour that, since it was set up during lockdown, has amassed 20,000 followers on Instagram, a Gucci campaign, a 15-track EP and book deal, and chapters in New York and Tokyo.
Like all modern meet-cutes, 36-year-old Olanipekun and Perera, 28, connected over Instagram. Olanipekun, a creative director, was posting birdwatching snaps when he noticed someone naming the species in the comments — and one “serendipitous moment” followed on from the next. Having only ever birdwatched solo, and wanting to set up a group for some time, finding Nadeem — who lived five minutes away in Hackney — meant “we had to do something together,” says Olanipekun. Within a couple of weeks they’d had their first meeting à deux, on a park bench, and a couple of weeks after that 15 people were walking through Walthamstow Wetlands, “fascinated and wide-eyed,” Perera recalls. He describes the first post-lockdown walk as “magical, absolutely magical,” the enthusiasm palpable in his voice. “Especially when our time outside was limited to one hour a day, people realised how valuable a resource nature was.”
There was more to it. “The world was on its knees,” Perera, a football coach, reflects. George Floyd had been killed, sparking Black Lives Matter protests all over the world; the men wanted to create a “birdwatching-turned-support club” for a black community in despair. “We were living in times where everybody had been very separate,” says Perera. “That was the recipe for our community to come together and find a space to heal each other.”
And it did, he remembers of that first walk, where “people were very, very excited to be together and to look around and know that you’re surrounded by people who have shared similar experiences to you. It was just a very, very special feeling that still exists in the walks today.”
The subtitle of the book is The Outdoors is Yours: Olanipekun and Perera’s mission is to make black birdwatchers feel the industry’s “old, white and tired” image needn’t be a barrier. And Flock Together’s love for the planet is a self-fulfilling ecosystem: the more they help people of colour engage with nature, the larger the cohort wanting to enjoy and protect it. Their monthly group walks have increased in size sixfold. “I feel good about that,” Perera adds. “We are bringing our community’s creative energy — which we have in abundance — and bringing our vibes and flavour and creative innovation to the natural world.”
Global events reinforce the importance of Flock’s work. A number of the group’s female members say birdwatching en masse is the only way that feels safe following the murder of Sarah Everard last March. There is strength in numbers for those disturbed by the case of Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher falsely accused of threatening a white woman in a New York park two years ago. Perera will not let such acts put him off, he says, “but I wouldn’t blame a black person if it did.”
Flock is, well, flying — but Perera and Olanipekun aren’t yet done. They recently appeared on Springwatch, and received a letter from the Prime Minister, yet there is more to the movement than binoculars and buzzards. They’ve set up Flock Academy, hoping to encourage young birders into “radical responses” to a natural world in crisis: “We are hoping that in 15, 20 years, there is a wave of young black and brown naturalists... [with] city edge and creativity solving a lot of the problems related to the environment.”
Perera has also begun ‘Moth Mondays’ on his Instagram account, to facilitate better understanding of the creatures on our planet. It all requires so little, he says — “you literally need eyes, to look up, and say, ‘oh, that’s nice a bird.”
“In modern society… you’re pushed and pulled and being asked to be something or to produce something. No matter who you are or what you do — or what you don’t do — there’s a place for you in nature. There’s a warm embrace waiting for you.”
