Celebrating diversity, though bird song

Black Birders Week brings community and curiosity to Lake Placid

By David Escobar
On a damp spring morning in Lake Placid, a dozen birders trudged along the trails at John Brown Farm State Historic Site, raindrops soaking through their jackets. Between spurts of rain, the group paused beneath the forest canopy, listening closely for the call of a Blackburnian warbler.

Stephan Roundtree, an avid birder and environmental advocate from New York City, led the group through the muddy trails. He used the Merlin phone app to help identify nearby species, but as the rainfall quieted the usual birdsong, Roundtree turned to mimicry, calling out like a chickadee to help the group tune their ears.

“What I think I try to emphasize when I’m out there is just treating it as an experiential thing, and I try not to be clinical,” he said. “You can still admire that this thing is belting out its call in the rain, and just appreciate that.”

Roundtree was one of several leaders guiding participants through the basics of birding as part of a Black Birders Week event. The national initiative, launched in 2020, celebrates Black nature enthusiasts and challenges stereotypes about who belongs in outdoor spaces. It began after a viral incident where Christian Cooper, a Black birder, was falsely accused of threatening a white woman while he was bird watching in Central Park.

Creating space for curiosity

Vanessa Rojas, a professor at the SUNY ESF Ranger School in Wanakena, co-organized the Black Birder Week event in Lake Placid in collaboration with the Adirondack Diversity Initiative. She said the goal was to create a welcoming environment where beginners could ask questions and build confidence.

“It’s way less intimidating than going out somewhere where everyone has these big, fancy cameras and don’t want to answer your questions,” Rojas said. “I feel like it’s a way to not feel ashamed that you don’t know what the bird’s name is or something.”

Rojas began birding in city parks in her hometown of Flint, Michigan. Those early experiences, she said, taught her to slow down and pay closer attention to the natural world and the animals that inhabit it.

“I feel like a lot of times hiking has this end game of getting to the top of the mountain and back,” she said. “And birding is very different, where you stop and you listen.”

That slower, more intentional pace also resonated with Giselle Pemberton, another leader on the walk. Growing up in Trinidad, Pemberton was surrounded by tropical birds whose vivid colors sparked her early interest in nature.

“I always thought they’re pretty, they’re cute, and they’re definitely colorful,” she said. “And so I always watched a bird, but I never considered it birding.”

Pemberton’s relationship with birding changed after she moved to Brooklyn. There, she noticed that most birders in her local park did not look like her. White people remain the majority of leaders and participants in many outdoor activities, and Pemberton said that lack of representation can make it more difficult for some people of color to feel welcome.

“I feel comfortable in spaces in the outdoors, because it’s all I ever knew,” she said. “Whereas, for a community of people who were historically told they can’t be in that space, it’s a different experience for them.”

Birding as belonging

Tamara Jolly, Community Initiatives Manager for the Adirondack Diversity Initiative, said a central goal of Black Birders Week is to shift perceptions about who belongs in nature and to help build a more diverse community of outdoor enthusiasts. Representation, she said, plays a powerful role in attracting people of color to outdoor activities like birding.

“I’m not sure that there’s a name for it,” she said. “That unspoken energy that you get when you see someone that looks like you open those doors to say, ‘Come on in. You can do it too.’”

Utica resident Mary Hayes Gordon, who drove over three hours to attend the bird walk, said the organizers’ welcoming spirit deepened her understanding of birds and allowed her to build camaraderie with fellow outdoor enthusiasts of color.

“Sometimes it’s just kind of nice to be around people who kind of look like you,” she said. “It brings people together that maybe normally wouldn’t have come.”

Along the trail, Karol Cooper beamed with delight while learning ornithology facts and techniques to identify birds. As a novice birder, Cooper said the experience broadened her perspective on the kinds of outdoor opportunities she could explore back home in Rochester.

“That’s a whole broad spectrum of enjoyment that I can now venture out into and start to get even more out of something that I had been doing for a while,” she said.

Although the weather and her lack of birding experience made bird sightings more difficult, Cooper said she still found joy in the bird walk, especially in watching others share in the moment.

“I can share in other people’s experiences,” she said. “So if someone else standing next to me just saw something, even though I may not be skilled enough yet to have seen it or notice it, I know that it’s something I’m going to be able to do.”

Cooper said she will carry that feeling — and her newfound birding skills — with her, ready to put them to use on a sunnier day.

David Escobar is a Report For America Corps Member. He reports on diversity issues in the Adirondacks through a partnership between North Country Public Radio and Adirondack Explorer.