Black Birders Week 2025: Celebrating Black Joy in Green Spaces

On Sunday morning, May 25, about a dozen Black birders gathered behind a thicket of marsh trees in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Their eyes and binoculars were trained on a Black-crowned Night Heron at the water’s edge. Neck tucked and crimson eyes locked on the muddy green pond, it stood motionless, poised to strike.

Then, with a sharp swivel of its head and a shuffle of its feet, it broke the stillness.

“Oooohhhh!!!” the birders said in unison, their voices loud, excited, and unrestrained. Then came laughs and cackles:

“It’s making moves!”
“What you find, bro?”
“He’s gettin’ it!”
“We’re rooting for you!”
“Look! It’s showing off that little feather on the siiiidddeee!”

The excitement was part of a bird walk for the sixth annual Black Birders Week, held May 25–31, 2025. Since 2020, Black Birders Week has been hosted by Black AF in STEM, a group of Black scientists and nature professionals, to promote representation in outdoor spaces. All week I attended both virtual and in-person events—including my first-ever organized bird walks—to get a taste of this year’s theme, “Grounded in Community.”

Birding with Joy in the Bustle of New York

As the night heron awed its audience, I caught my first glimpse into what makes Black Birders Week so special. Old nature shows on TV had led me to believe that birdwatching was purely a quiet pursuit, all hush and whispers. But out here in Prospect Park, I was glad to see that Black joy wasn’t silenced. It roared.

“That whole, ‘Shhh! Don’t talk!’—that’s not us!” said Edmundo Martinez, 45, a birder from the Bronx on his second spring migration, as he fine-tuned a spotting scope.

“No, it’s not!” agreed Indigo Goodson-Fields, a Brooklyn resident, educator, and poet who led the walk and has been birding since 2020. She wore a camo vest with a warbler guide tucked in the pocket, bright cyan binoculars slung around her neck, and a shirt featuring illustrations of a Dark-eyed Junco, a Seaside Sparrow, a Song Sparrow, and a Sudan Golden Sparrow. “That’s why I tell people, this ain’t golf—we talkin’!’’

The green parks scattered throughout New York’s concrete jungle, where Goodson-Fields, Martinez, and many others go birding, are anything but quiet. Birds here are used to sirens, honking horns, and booming music. It makes sense to me that a few enthusiastic “Ooohhs!” and “Look-look-looks!” wouldn’t ruffle their feathers.

“A big part of the bird outings that I lead is community,” said Goodson-Fields. “We gone kiki. We gone laugh. We gone talk.”

That’s the culture she cultivates with the bird walks she leads.

“If I’m in a more white birding space or a more traditional birding space, I might not be like, ‘Hey, y’all, I got jokes.’ They might be quiet birders, which is fine,” she said. “But there’s a different energy. There’s a different vibe. There’s a different aesthetic when we’re out birding [with the Black] community.”

For Black birders, watching birds together offers not just joy, but a sense of safety and the freedom to be themselves. I experienced this during the walk with Goodson-Fields. One minute we’re learning about grackles and robins and the next we’re asking about who’s seeing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour later that week (I watched her that Wednesday night).

“We really wanted to amplify and focus on the importance of building community and continuing to find each other within these spaces when it comes to birding,” said Nicole Jackson, an environmental educator based in Ohio and one of the organizers of the national event. As part of the theme, they also chose to spotlight the sparrow family.

“They’re known as ‘little brown birds’ within the birding community, which speaks to kind of their invisibleness in a way that intersects with the Black community,” said Jackson. “But once you really take the time to get to see them up close and think about their behavior, their songs, their calls, and how they thrive in the environment, then it really just shows their uniqueness and speaks to their adaptability and resilience.”

On the Monday of Black Birders Week, in an Instagram Live event focused on uplifting Black women in birding, Sam DeJarnett, host of the Always Be Birdin’ podcast, noted how Black people have always had to find ways to create and maintain community in order to survive.

“Women are the keepers of that skill set,” she said, “And of course we’re going to naturally bring that into birding.”

I had seen exactly what she meant during our walk with Goodson-Fields. Her enthusiasm for each bird was contagious, and interwoven with social insight that created a sense of connection that made us feel like not just fellow birders, but a community. Some Great Crested Flycatchers, just back from Central America were met with a welcoming “Yaas! We love a migratory bird!” As we admired the red-and-yellow shoulder patches on a male Red-winged Blackbird, Goodson-Fields explained that their female counterparts are streaky brown and that female birds are often underrepresented in ornithological research.

Sparrows: “Little Beautiful Birds”

Throughout the walk she also had us keep our eyes peeled for House Sparrows, a species often resented as “invasive,” but that we viewed as friends to celebrate. As a beginner birder with fresh eyes, I saw no need to snub the House Sparrow. Goodson-Fields ended the walk by reading a poem she had written, which drew parallels between how House Sparrows were brought to America by Europeans, much like enslaved people from Africa.

The walk resonated with everyone, especially those like me who were first-timers. “It feels welcoming,” said Annika Hansteen-Izora, 30, another beginner from Brooklyn. “When they said, ‘We’re Black people; we’re gonna bird and we’re gonna talk and make noise and learn about the intersections of the birds and Black people,’ I’m like, that’s so cool.”

Later that afternoon, I took the subway to the Marsha P. Johnson State Park for a raptor meet-and-greet put on by the Wildlife Center of Long Island. There, I witnessed moments of Black joy among tiny bird lovers, including Zayer Haskins, 7, and his 3-year-old sister, Evren.

Clutching a pair of foldable blue pocket binoculars, Zayer marveled at Marcus the Great Horned Owl, Amelia the American Kestrel, and Baby the Red-tailed Hawk. “Birds should not be endangered because they’re wonderful creatures,” he said.

Nearby, Jaxon Freiberg, 6, and his sister Bowie, 3, from Brooklyn, lit up when Marcus the owl rotated its head nearly all the way around to look at them, as if it were playing “peek-a-boo.” “It was really cool to see the birds,” said Jaxon, “And almost all of the birds were brown.”

Birdwatching Circa 66 Million Years Ago

I closed out my week with a final bird walk—and a reflection on Black birding in our current moment—during a “dinosaur safari” at the Bronx Zoo. Adé Ben-Salahuddin, a birder and paleontology researcher (and former Black Birders Week correspondent), led us through the zoo’s dinosaur trail, where lifelike animatronic models of more than 60 dinosaurs and pterosaurs peer out from the underbrush.

As a self-proclaimed dinosaur nerd, this walk took me to my special place: “birdwatching” circa 66 million B.C. with a crew of fellow dino-enthusiasts. Signs along the walkway pointed out connections with modern birds: Gallimimus, famous for fleeing a Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park, was actually covered in feathers. Parasaurolophus may have used its hollow crest to amplify its calls, like today’s hornbills. Citipati sat on its eggs the way emus do.

Then we spotted a large bird hunched high in a tree, as if stalking a feathered Deinonychus below. Now nearly a week into my birding career, its silhouette was familiar to me—a night heron.

“It’s a Black-crowned!” said Ben-Salahuddin.

“Dinosaurs right in front of it! Money shot!” said another group member, Black Birders Week organizer Dara Miles Wilson. Laughter rang out.

Reflecting on how far Black Birders Week has evolved since it began in 2020 (by coincidence, it was the same week as the Central Park birdwatching incident) Miles Wilson said, “I think we’ve really taken this from a reactionary place of hurt and ‘We need justice!’ to ‘Hey, we also have joy out here!’”

For Ben-Salahuddin, that joy is also resistance. “Every effort is being made to stop stuff like this from happening,” he said of the recent national backlash against celebrating diversity and inclusion. “Someone needs to push back against it.”

Black Birders Week is part of that pushback. It’s a celebration. It’s community.

It’s a space where Black joy roars.