For many Black Americans, the outdoors feel off limits. Black birders want to change that.
On the edge of a parking lot in southwest Philadelphia on Saturday, a sudden flash of red and wings caught the eye of Corina Newsome.
Newsome, who studies seaside sparrows along the Georgia coast and is an associate conservation scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, is no stranger to birds. But the bright colors and startling speed of a ruby-throated hummingbird stunned her all the same.
“Oh, wow,” Newsome said as she watched the bird dip its beak into a wildflower, then zip into a nearby thicket of trees.
A short while later, Anwar Abdul-Qawi stood atop a two-story observation deck a half mile away, peering over the marshy waters of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge with Newsome and two other birders. Friendly chit-chat quickly hushed as the group spotted the striking orange and black of a Baltimore oriole, flitting in some branches overhead.
Despite both he and the oriole being natives of the city, Abdul-Qawi, a zoologist and educator at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, had never seen one before.
“First time,” he said, as the bird sang above. “I'm so happy.”
The group’s jaunt was, literally, a walk in the park — yet it conveyed a deeper significance, for such excursions by Black Americans into outdoor spaces remain rare in the United States, and at times even dangerous.
In February 2020, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was jogging through a neighborhood in Satilla Shores, Georgia, when three white men followed, stopped, and murdered him. The killing, a hate crime, took place just a short drive from where Newsome conducts her field work on sparrows.
Three months later, Christian Cooper, a leader of New York City's birdwatching community, asked a white woman in Central Park to abide by park rules and leash her dog. The woman became argumentative and was captured on video by Cooper threatening to call police to “tell them there's an African American man threatening my life," before dialing 9-1-1.
The potential danger of such an action became clear within hours, when in a separate incident a thousand miles away, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd, murdering him and precipitating a national reckoning on racial injustice.
For Black Americans whose jobs or hobbies often take them into outdoor spaces, the events hit close to home. Chelsea Connor, a graduate student and herpetologist at Clemson University, remembers turning to a private online networking group for Black people pursuing careers in the sciences and finding widespread concern.
“We started talking about our experiences being Black outdoors, either birding or doing field work and encountering racist violence,” Connor recalled. “We were angry and hurt and scared.”
One member, Harvard University researcher and graduate student Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, suggested they organize a day to promote Black birders. Another member, Tykee James, a government affairs coordinator for the National Audubon Society, suggested it be a whole week. Within days, the group pulled together the first national Black Birders Week, with virtual and in-person events running throughout the country.
This year, the event is back for the third time, running through Saturday. Over the past two years, organizers say Black Birders Week has grown, with events now online and in person in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Raleigh, North Carolina. Participants watch birds, learn about falconry, review techniques to overcome mental illnesses and learning disorders, and otherwise find support to pursue their passions.
For Cooper, who on Wednesday led a bird walk in his favorite Central Park stomping grounds, the week represents progress. But the end goals remain far from fulfilled.
A Penn State University study released earlier this year found that a historical gap between the ratio of white and Black Americans going outdoors has widened during the pandemic. While an increase in overall activity now sees more than half of Americans recreating outdoors at least once a month, a smaller group of 14% of Americans gave up on going outside, with Black, Latino, Asian and Indigenous people disproportionately represented.
Access also remains an issue. Prior studies found that parks in predominantly white and high-income areas have about one acre for every 50 people. But parks serving predominantly minority communities have just one acre for every 500 people.
“This is a problem that has roots that go back to 1619,” Cooper said, speaking of the year in which enslaved Africans were first brought to Jamestown, Virginia. “It's been intractable for a very long time. You're deluding yourself if you think that'll change overnight.”
Everyone has a story
Among Black Americans pursuing degrees or careers in natural sciences, nearly everyone has experienced some form of adversity or racism along the way.
Growing up in a public school in Philadelphia, Abdul-Qawi remembers a meeting between his parents and the school's administrators. When one asked Abdul-Qawi about his career goals, he told them he wanted to be a zoologist.
“The principal and all the assistants looked at me and started laughing,” Abdul-Qawi said. “They said, 'That's a really hard field to get into ... but you have nice long legs, play basketball for us.'”
Newsome recalls similar experiences, going through a 10-year period of her education and early career when she didn't encounter a single other person of color in wildlife biology.
“Whenever I would make any kind of mistake or feel like I wasn't competent in a particular subject matter, I would wonder: Am I not supposed to be here?” Newsome said. “I was constantly questioning myself because I didn't see anyone else like me.”
For others, the experiences have been directly hateful.
During her undergraduate education, Connor, the herpetologist, had several racial slurs directed toward her. As the only Black student in her dormitory, she said white students spread rumors about her. Though she reported the incidents, she said nothing happened, affecting her mental health and prompting a decision to transfer.
“I still really loved animals, but determined it was not the place for me,” Connor said.
For Black people in the sciences, driving change within large institutions remains a key challenge in both the educational and professional worlds.
James is the president of the Audubon’s Washington, D.C. chapter, an organization whose namesake, John James Audubon, was both a preeminent early American wildlife artist and a slave owner.
James helped organize a successful unionization effort among the organization’s front-line employees last year and said the society has made some strides in recent years to promote more equity, diversity and inclusion within its workforce. But he said leadership remains hostile to union efforts to increase wages, clarify pay scales and increase support for professional development.
That creates an environment of economic insecurity that can drive workers from marginalized backgrounds from the organization, James said, a problem he believes is missed by a leadership team with salaries in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, tax records show.
“We need to implement something that’s co-written by workers, and not just a management, top-down initiative,” James said.
Similar frustrations drove Nicole Jackson, an environmental educator in Columbus, Ohio, into entrepreneurship; after helping to organize the initial Black Birders Week in 2020, she founded N Her Nature, a life coaching business providing nature therapy to Black women through outdoor experiences
For Jackson, corporate diversity initiatives invite failure if they don't actually listen to, and then address the concerns of Black employees. At times, they may even backfire, if white employees feel like they’ve done their part.
Instead, Jackson urges allies who wish to support their colleagues of color to pay attention to the things that make them and their colleagues uncomfortable and step up to address them even when they might incur professional risk.
“With allyship comes accountability, and sometimes a lot of it is the inner work,” Jackson said. “Advocating for your fellow Black and brown co-workers or community members can sometimes be very uncomfortable and feel very strange. But it needs to happen if you want the organization to be more welcoming and inclusive.”
Celebrating new connections
Despite being clear-eyed about the challenges Black Americans face in science and the outdoors, organizers of Black Birders Week said they see signs of progress. And that's particularly true within their own community, with the tragedies of 2020 serving as a catalyst for finding one another.
As a molecular biologist and director of vaccines for the pharmaceutical company Merck, Jason Hall has often been one of the only Black individuals in the room, either in educational or professional settings. That experience carries over into the outdoors, where as an avid birder, Hall said he at times plays up his use of binoculars to telegraph what he's doing, lest an ignorant onlooker assume something nefarious.
“I got so used to being the lone exception out there in the forest,” Hall said.
But that changed after the first Black Birders Week, Hall said. He founded the In Color Birding Club and began to organize Black birding walks through parks in Philadelphia. Attendance began to spike. The groups began going farther afield.
This year, Hall led a bird hike at Hawk Mountain in Kempton, Pennsylvania, one of the country's best destinations for watching raptors, but also a historically white-dominated nature reserve in a rural area two hours from Philadelphia.
On a sunny Sunday morning, only a single hawk and a few vultures flew by the mountain's rocky northern lookout. But that wasn't really the point, Hall said. Instead, it was to create an “intentional space” for Black people somewhere many might not otherwise have felt comfortable exploring on their own.
“Ever since Black Birders Week, birding has introduced a new layer of Blackness for me,” Hall said. “Something that I feel was stunted in me, Black Birders Week opened those doors. Years later I've been able to walk through them and meet so many beautiful people.”
There are signs of institutional change as well.
The displays within the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia are rich with the names and likenesses of the white scientists who dominated its past. But this year, the museum and research center hosted a Black Birders Week panel that invited Abdul-Qawi, Hall, James and Newsome to share their experiences before an audience of students and adults curious about the natural sciences.
On Facebook, advertisements for the event drew derisive comments from some corners, questioning the need for a Black Birders group or chastising the museum for supporting the initiative. But Sean Stallworth, a programs coordinator for the academy, said it saw the need to highlight that people of color were being marginalized in something as simple as birding.
“We wanted to do something about it,” Stallworth said. “Being out in nature and enjoying and learning about amazing birds must be a pastime that anyone can participate in.”
And in perhaps one of the highest profile developments to stem from 2020, National Geographic announced last month it will air a new television series, “Extraordinary Birder,” hosted by Christian Cooper. The six-part program, whose premiere date has not been announced, will take viewers to cities and natural settings across North America, as Cooper provides education on the local species.
For many Black birders and naturalists who recall television stars like Steve Irwin as the original spark for their interest in the outdoors, having a Black host for today's children will be monumental.
“The Black community is a community that has not been historically brought out into the wild. ... At least in theory we're not supposed to be out in nature,” Cooper said. “But it's just as much ours as anyone else's.”
Kyle Bagenstose covers climate change, water and other environmental topics for USA TODAY. He can be reached at kbagenstose@gannett.com or on Twitter @kylebagenstose.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Black Birders Week 2022 seeks to make outdoors more welcoming for all