This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Remember the news story from 2020 about a bird watcher in

Central Park who told a woman she needed to leash her dog because she wasn't a part of the

park designed to attract wildlife and an unleashed dog was a threat to the wildlife. She refused.

He started videotaping the incident on his phone. The woman who was white called the police

falsely claiming that an African-American man was threatening her and her dog.

The man, Christian Cooper, has written a new memoir and is my guest. One chapter is devoted to

the Central Park incident. The rest of the book is about growing up as an outsider and how he

turned that to his advantage. Growing up in the 70s he was a young black bird watcher in a world

of white bird watchers, a closeted gay boy, and a Marvel comic book nerd before that was considered

cool. While at Harvard he came out and then became a gay activist. He was one of the first openly

gay writers and editors at Marvel and created what he thinks was Marvel's first lesbian character

and was in on the creation of Marvel's first openly gay male character. Now Cooper hosts a new show

for the National Geographic Channel called Extraordinary Birder. Any series on the board of New

York City Audubon, his new memoir is called Better Living Through Burding, notes from a black man

in the natural world. As you can guess from the title, the book is also filled with his stories

about bird watching. Christian Cooper, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. The first chapter

of your new book is titled An Incident in Central Park and I thought, yes I know about that incident

and you write, I am, you're describing what's happening at the moment you said, I am,

I am a black man running through New York Central Park and you describe how your heart is pounding

and you say, I know what this looks like and I'm thinking, I don't remember the part about you

running in the Central Park incident, but then you explain you're really running because you got

an alert on your phone about a rare bird sighting in the park and you don't want to miss it.

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