Man who confronted “Central Park Karen” gets TV show

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Christian Cooper, the bird-watching Black man who was the target of false accusations during an encounter in New York City's Central Park in 2020, has a new TV show airing on National Geographic.

The channel announced this week that Cooper, a lifelong bird-watcher, will host a series called Extraordinary Birder. In the series, Cooper will take viewers into the "wild, wonderful and unpredictable world of birds," according to National Geographic.

The channel has yet to announce a premiere date for the show.

In an interview with The New York Times Cooper said his love for bird-watching began at age 10, and he told the newspaper he "was all in" when National Geographic approached him about the possibility of a TV show nearly a year and a half ago.

"I love spreading the gospel of birding," he said in the Times interview.

No defending Karen's behavior, which was totally out of line. But in reviewing the transcript, the guy did sound a bit threatening:

I do not want to relitigate the incident as the thread doing that was locked and if this thread becomes relitigation it will be locked again.

What this does prove is with so many channels you have a chance to be rewarded for your "weird" special interest. It helps if you are in the right place at the right time. Christian's incident occurring the day George Floyd was murdered sure helped.

I think the show has a chance at success. This show should appeal to more than just hardcore birders, there are a humongous amount of animal lovers out there. His mini-celebrity should get an initial decent audience. Thereafter it is like any show, will the audience find Christian engaging?

Those claiming Christian Cooper was really the aggressor actually conveniently ignore (and this wasn't mentioned the aforementioned locked thread) that he was a passionate/avid birder.

The whole reason he was riled up originally was he wanted to protect the birds in the area from being harassed by the unleashed doggie. If he had been white I am sure Amy cooper would have just argued with him that her dog has much right to be in the park as those birds but she didn't and everyone knows why.

It's quite likely Amy Cooper was just an entitled dognutter acting like an entitled dognutter. The attitudes some people have in regards to their dogs are despicable.

There’s nothing that can keep Christian Cooper from enjoying his “happy place,” the bird-friendly Ramble of Central Park — not even his tense, viral video encounter three years ago with a woman walking her dog off leash in his refuge.

Cooper is a lifelong birder, and Black, a relative rarity for the pastime.

He scored a memoir, out this week, and has his own series on Nat Geo Wild, traveling the U.S. doing what he loves most: birding. “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper” premieres Saturday.

Christian Cooper’s decision to record was personal but routine for birders trying to convince park officials to do something about dogs off leashes where signs clearly prohibited it to protect plantings in The Ramble and leave the birds undisturbed. He was polite but firm as he spoke off-camera while Amy Cooper raged.

“I thought to myself, you know what? They’re going to shoot us dead no matter what we do. And if that’s the case, I’m going out with my dignity intact,” he told the AP.

For a second, he added, “I was like, oh, yeah, when a white woman accuses a Black man, I know what that means. I know what trouble that can mean in my life. Maybe I should just stop recording and maybe this will all go away in a split second. Then I thought, nah, I’m not going to be complicit in my own dehumanization.”

Amy Cooper never apologized directly to him, though she issued a statement of regret. And since then, Christian Cooper has done some soul-searching on what it must be like, at least sometimes, for women to feel unsafe in public outdoor spaces.

“I would hate to think that I would go through a situation like that and not learn something myself. And so I try to keep in mind now that, yes, I’m perfectly comfortable in The Ramble. It’s my happy place. But that’s not necessarily true of everyone,” he said.

He declined to cooperate with prosecutors in the criminal case against Amy Cooper. It was an election cycle, he said, so it felt performative. But also, he felt, she had been punished enough through public disgrace.

“I decided I kind of have to err on the side of mercy, particularly weighing with that a sense of proportionality because I had not been harmed. I had not been thrown to the ground by the police or, God forbid, worse. I had never even had to interact with the police. I’m sure my opinion would be different if I had,” he said.

Now, Cooper is all about spreading the gospel of birding once again. His book, “Better Living through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World,” opens with the Central Park encounter, and then launches into his life:

How birding helped him connect to the world as a closeted gay child in his predominantly white Long Island hometown. How all things Star Trek, science fiction and Marvel Comics have sustained him to this day, at age 60.

“The cure to my outsider status was to go outside, outside of myself, outside of my own head, outside into nature. Because you can’t go looking for birds without really focusing on what you’re doing, and focusing on the natural world around you,” he said.

“And when you do that, you can’t be preoccupied anymore about, ‘Oh my God, I feel so horrible.’”

As a longtime board member of the New York City Audubon Society, Cooper has seen the ranks of Black birders increase, and he has participated in a movement among National Audubon Society chapters to cast off the name of John James Audubon. The 19th-century artist and naturalist known for his paintings of North American bird species was an anti-abolitionist who owned, purchased and sold enslaved people.

Cooper’s chapter of the society is in the process of coming up with a new name, though the parent organization declined to do the same.

On Nat Geo (the series hits Disney+ on June 21), Cooper serves as host and was a consulting producer. He’s a kid in a wonderful, winged candy shop.

The six episodes have him scaling a Manhattan bridge tagging peregrine falcon chicks, navigating volcanic terrain in Hawaii in search of elusive honeycreepers, and trekking rainforests in Puerto Rico to check on fertility issues among parrots. He also shot in Palm Springs, California, and Washington, D.C., as well as Selma, Alabama, where members of his father’s family once lived.

Cooper has spent time in public schools teaching kids about birding. He wants to reach even more with the fame he earned the hard way.

“I’m hopeful that a lot of young Black kids will see maybe one of the first big birding shows on TV with a black host leading the show and think, ‘Oh, maybe that’s something I can do, too.’ That would be awesome.”

Uniondale-raised writer-editor and lifelong bird buff gets to watch his feathered friends and see his name in the title while doing so in Nat Geo Wild’s new “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper,” premiering Saturday at 10 p.m.

“Oh, my God!” exclaims Cooper, 60, with an embarrassed laugh when asked about the title. “First, I didn't pick it. And second, it's not a reference to me. I can tell you that with confidence because I know the extraordinary birders,” he says of the biologists, conservationists and elite bird aficionados he encounters in the six-episode series taking him around America from Hawaii to territorial Puerto Rico to show some of the countless avian species hiding in plain sight.

“I have my skills and I'm a good birder, but I'm not an extraordinary birder,” demurs Cooper, who while growing up had been a youth board member of the South Shore Audubon Society and is now a New York City Audubon board vice president. “I think the title is a reference, first, to the people we meet in the show who are doing incredible things to protect birds and their habitats. But it's also about the fact that every birder is extraordinary. Because once you start birding, it changes your perception of the world around you. You just can't help but be plugged into it in a different way than you were before. And that’s extraordinary.”

The Manhattan-born Cooper otherwise had an ordinary upbringing on Long Island, as one of two children of the late Francis Cooper, a science teacher, and Margaret Cooper, an English teacher. Younger sister Melody Cooper has written for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and other shows, and is now on two Netflix projects on hold due to the Writers Guild strike.

After graduating from Uniondale High School, Christian Cooper went on to a 1984 bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University, where he was president of the Ornithological Club. In 1990, he joined Marvel Comics, working as an editor on Marvel’s creator-owned imprint, Epic, and on titles starring the Hulk, Ghost Rider, the Punisher and Blade.

He left in 1996, returning as a freelancer later that year to write the licensed “Star Trek” series “Starfleet Academy” for its 19-issue run — introducing the “Trek” universe’s first openly gay human character, Yoshi Mishima. Cooper went on to spend nearly two decades as an editor at Health Science Communications. Divorced, he lives in Manhattan with his partner, John Zaia.

Cooper returned to Long Island last Saturday for a voter-registration drive at Freeport Village’s first official Pride Month celebration, at the invitation of Nassau County Legis. Debra Mulé, a fellow Uniondale High 1980 graduate.