Two Birdwatchers Talk about America over Zoom and Tequila

Until June 2020 J. Drew Lanham was arguably the most famous Black birder in the United States. That title, if you want to call it that, was wrested from him temporarily by Christian Cooper, the man who on Memorial Day was profiled and threatened in Central Park by a stranger with the same last name, Amy Cooper, after Christian asked her to keep her dog on a leash. That incident held the nation’s fickle attention for a few moments before it was overwhelmed by larger, more deadly events that led to the protests that rocked the country.

In 2013 Drew published a piece called “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” in Orion magazine. The rules included “Be prepared to be confused with the other black birder,” “Don’t bird in a hoodie,” and “Blackbirds—any black birds—are your birds.” While the article, one of Orion’s most popular, vaulted him into the status of the country’s best-known Black birdwatcher, it wasn’t as if there was a lot of competition. Drew was, as he has written, a rare bird.

Drew and I got to know each other because we were both so-called nature writers, a term neither of us were comfortable with at the time. But it is true that we both have, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically, followed in the footsteps of that grand-daddy of the genre, Henry David Thoreau. Drew’s first book, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, takes Thoreau’s old genre and shakes it out. I can’t help but think Henry would approve. While the Concord hermit gets a lot of flack these days (for having had Mom do his laundry, among other things), one thing Thoreau taught was not to respect our elders. That is, not to over-respect them. Take the old and make it new.

Soon after the Central Park incident Drew and I drank tequila together—on Zoom of course. “Water is the only drink for a wise man,” said Thoreau. We thought otherwise. The plan was to talk about race, and for me to interview Drew about the issues that were tearing our country apart, but for most of the three hours it was a social call. Maybe that’s what we needed.

In the weeks before our talk Drew had been interviewed constantly. He said, “One interviewer started by asking me: ‘How are you?’ and I thought, but didn’t say, ‘I’m just fucking tired. I’m exhausted.’”

He paused, then added: “But I have to keep at it.”

In a turn Thoreau would have appreciated, we ended up talking as much about the writing shacks we had built as about racial strife. A couple years before, Drew had gone to look at an acre of land in Tamassee, South Carolina, telling his realtor that he would drive up to take a look but would turn around if he saw any Confederate flags in the immediate area. He ended up buying the land with money he had received from winning a conservation award and building a tiny house there where he could retreat and work.

“I never had my own space before,” he said.

I knew this already, having just reread The Home Place, in which he describes spending his childhood and early teens sleeping in a too-small cot in the same bedroom as his grandmother. I mentioned how I wouldn’t have wanted to have my sexual awakening with my grandma ten feet away.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “My wife says I now hoard spaces. My office at school. The converted storage space behind our house. And now my Tamassee retreat.”

We talked for a while about how neither of us built to code, but how building our shacks was a lot like writing: the problem-solving and the way you can get absorbed in it. We both kept bone-yards of odd materials, knowing we would have a use for them later.

“I never throw anything away,” said Drew.

The cabin had become his increasingly necessary retreat from...