It is 7.57am on a Monday morning. I see Christian Cooper sitting with perfect posture on a bench right at the entrance of Central Park at West 103rd street. His first question for me is: have I brought any binoculars? I don’t own a pair, I admit. No worries, he says. If we spot anything, he’ll lend me his. That’s the most important birding tip I learned from his new book: you spot movement in the sky, with your naked eye first, then you raise your binoculars, not the other way around. Cooper is joyous when he tells me this. “If the book does nothing else but teach people how to use binoculars so they can actually see the birds, mission accomplished,” he says.
The book, Better Living Through Birding, is Cooper’s first memoir. It traces his journey from his childhood as a nerdy kid from Long Island, to his time as a comic book editor, to his birding days in Central Park. While doing so it weaves the history of Black people in America – from slavery and lynchings to segregation and economic disparity – into the unfolding of his life.
It also covers the moment, three years ago, when Cooper received international attention when, while birdwatching in Central Park, he asked a woman to leash her dog, in compliance with park rules, because he didn’t want it to disturb or maim any nearby birds. The woman, Amy Cooper (a stranger to Christian, their shared surname a coincidence), who is white, became irate and said that she would call the cops and tell them that an African American man was threatening her life. Christian Cooper was doing no such thing, but he did film the entire exchange.
