Black Birders & The Week
CW: Sexual Violence
This is going to be a sad one. And also a good one? Maybe? Definitely a complicated one.
The truth of it is, I’ve been meaning to write about the Black birding movement for a couple of months now.
One of the great pleasures in being a nature lover today is watching the nature-watchers grow and shift and diversify. There will always be a place for someone like me, a middle-aged white woman, but learning about birds while a new, more diverse generation of nature lovers and professional scientists takes up their binoculars has been such a joy.
This is the story of that shift, as I understand it, as well as the story of what happened this past week, when something happened to challenge that new community and what it did in response.
Up until recently, birding has largely been the province of middle-aged (or older) white white women, and, to a slightly lesser extent, middle-aged white men. A 2006 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report went ahead and put a fine point on it: “The average birder is 50 years old and more than likely has a better than average income and education. She is slightly more likely to be female and highly likely to be white.”
But starting around 2019 (from my perspective), the profile of birders — and those who felt comfortable calling themselves birders, publicly & online — began to change.
That’s when Jason Ward, with frequent guest appearances from his brother Jeffrey Ward, launched Birds of North America (BONA). BONA was a YouTube documentary series featuring the Ward brothers walking around urban parks and wildernesses, talking to people, birding, and interviewing professional scientists. It was a wonderful introduction to birding — it’s how I learned about spark birds, for instance.
The New Yorker took note, and wrote about the Birding Brothers of the Bronx.
Around the same time, a wildlife conservationist (now a graduate student at Georgia Southern State, Corina Newsome) released this hammy, awesome, birding-themed video “Anything for the Count” — a remix of the Offset ft. Cardi B. song, “Clout.”
It went viral, and honestly, even though I’ve watched it many times before, I watched it at least four times again on Sunday in prepping to write this blog post. I mean … “everyone wants to see tits/everyone wants to see chicks”? In the context of a birding remix, this is just — *chef’s kiss*.
Media began to follow Corina Newsome’s career; on May 20, 2020, her hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a profile: “It’s Important You Know I Grew Up in the ’Hood,” Says This Wildlife Conservationist from Philly.
Other black nature writers, bloggers, and Twitterers were also having a moment. And then, on May 25th, 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black man and former president of the Harvard Ornithologist Club, was birding in Central Park in New York and asked a white woman to leash her dog. (They were in a part of the park where dogs were required to stay on leashes.) The woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), threatened to call the cops and tell them “there is an African American man threatening my life.” Christian Cooper taped the interaction and then his sister posted the video online.
The internet — or at least the very small, nature-focused slice of the internet where I tend to reside — exploded. Amy Cooper was charged with falsely reporting an incident in the third degree. The Central Park incident sparked a great deal of pain and reflection about the ways in which Black nature-lovers and scientists can face challenges to their physical and mental well-being, simply by exploring the outdoors. Jason Ward wrote an article for Audubon, “The Woods Are My Safe Haven—But That's Not True for Everyone.”
In response, several Black naturalists involved with the BlackAFInSTEM movement, including Jason Ward and Corina Newsome, organized a week of events celebrating and highlighting Black birders. #BlackBirdersWeek took place the very week after the incident in Central Park and was an enormous success, with a great deal of media coverage and many national organizations, like Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, promoting it. (Here’s a CNN story on Black Birders Week, for instance, and here’s another on The Verge).
Even if you weren’t a Black birder, it was still a thrill watching Black birders and naturalists find each other on Twitter and realize how big their community actually was and could be. “I thought I was the only one in my area,” was a common comment, or, “I didn’t know there were any other Black birders into [this particular thing or this particular bird].”
This was the story I thought I was going to tell. This is a story about a movement that, if it isn’t entirely feel-good, is at least about a big group of amazing young people, doing inspiring work.
And then last week, Aisha White, a young Black woman in Atlanta who was just learning to bird, wrote a blog post, “I Was Raped By A Popular Figure in the Birding Community,” and tweeted about it. She didn’t immediately identify the accused rapist, but she referred to the “The Woods are My Safe Haven,” article, and within a short time, she confirmed: she was accusing Jason Ward of rape. It is a very credible accusation, as this article from Audubon details. By Audubon’s records, the two had gone birding, together and alone, on the date White names. White has a photo of a doctor’s note from a few days later: diagnosis, sexual assault. She has text messages between the two the day after.
With the accusation, it was as if all of Black birding Twitter — all of nature Twitter, and all of the nature community — held its collective breath. Not only had White accused possibly the brightest, most well-known star in the Black birding constellation of rape, but she had accused him of doing the very thing he advocated against: he had taken an outdoors space and defiled it, making it more difficult, not less, for women to feel safe as birders.
And so it felt like an exhale when at first a few, and then many, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands birders and nature lovers — many of them Black, but by no means all; many of them women, but by no means all — said they believed White, and would stand with her.
Newsome tweeted:
Another birder, Nick Lund, tweeted:
So far, Ward has said nothing.
Complicating the issue still further: on the same day that White made her accusation, charges were dismissed against Amy Cooper. She had participated in a “restorative justice” program, and Christian Cooper had said from the beginning that he would rather talk about the “underlying current of racism” than Amy Cooper.
I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here, talk about the underlying current of racism, and of misogyny, and how those currents flow through, and around, and touch on, and sometimes pollute the natural environment, and in this case — birding.
This is not a happy post, obviously. But it is a post about change, and community, and a reclamation of space. I am glad to stand with White, and to support Black birders and Black Birding Week. I’m glad to be a witness to these changes, and I hope to work for and witness more changes to come. I hope you’ll feel the same.