On a sunny, crisp Saturday morning in early November, about 20 bird watchers gathered at Duke Gardens to participate in “Just Us Birding with Naturally Wild,” a series described as “an affinity space for Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) participants with any level of birding experience.”

One of the birders, Jillian Martin, became interested in birds from her grandmother while growing up in Newnan, Georgia.

“She was like, ‘I don’t know what bird that is, but isn’t it nice?’” Martin said. “She’d see nests in different places, and she’d say, ‘Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it, because the mother might not want the birds, or you might knock it down accidentally.’”

“Just Us Birding” was led by bird guide Deja Perkins, a Chicago native, and founder of Naturally Wild, LLC, who is now working on a doctorate degree in Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University.

“The only birds I noticed as a kid were the Canada geese because they were so large,” Perkins said.

Perkins was an undergraduate at Tuskegee University when she completed an internship at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge during spring migration season.

“It was the first time I saw eagles flying over my head every day,” she said.

The participants, binoculars at the ready, spent the morning identifying birds, and learning how to monitor the creatures in their own neighborhoods using Merlin and eBird. The program kicked off Sept. 7, with subsequent gatherings in October and November.

Perkins paused at the Duke Gardens entrance and explained that the birds could be any and everywhere.

“They might be on the ground scratching and foraging,” she said. “We’ll have some that might be moving through the leaves at the [tree] tops. Just keep your eyes open and if you see something, go ahead and point it out for us and I’ll try to get everyone’s eyes on the bird, okay?”

The first birds spotted by the group were three orange-chested robins fluttering in and around a stand of cherry trees.

Listening to bird songs is one thing, but getting a bird’s eye view of the creatures can be challenging.

The fledging group of birders spotted Carolina chickadees, ruby-crowned kinglets, a red-bellied woodpecker, gray catbirds and yellow-rumped warblers.

Meanwhile, the smooth trill of the white-throated sparrow was ubiquitous and a few hopped across the garden lawn.

“His eye is on the sparrow, indeed,” Martin said, referring to the gospel song.

The tour ended inside the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants, where more white-throated sparrows continued their sweet song, yellow-rumped warblers flitted from branch to branch, an orange-beaked cardinal perched on a thin tree limb, and white-breasted nuthatches softly knocked on tree trunks while searching for insects.

“They knock like woodpeckers, but not as hard,” Perkins explained. “They are flecking up the bark of the tree.”

Deb Monnin, a retired occupational therapist with Durham Public Schools, said the Blomquist Garden was loaded with birds when she participated in the Naturally Wild event in September.

“They are not as many this time around,” she said.

Moreover, as many as 150 birds’ names honor people with connections to slavery and white supremacy, according to the Post. 

For instance, Jameson’s finch is named after James Sligo Jameson, a British naturalist and heir of the Jameson distillery fortune, who purchased an African girl as a joke, then drew sketches of her being stabbed and dismembered by a group of natives he described as cannibals, the Post added.

A recent National Geographic story also pointed to “the conspicuous lack of color in the colorful world of birding” and why people of color may find it difficult to become involved in the activity, including “concerns about how onlookers might react to seeing a black or Hispanic man with binoculars wandering the woods,” along with “lingering fears about racism in the U.S.—like whether it's safe to go to areas where the Ku Klux Klan had been strong, or where militias still thrive—and, for some who grew up in cities or suburbs, a fear of the unfamiliar woods, full of critters.”

In his essay, “The Whiteness of Birds,” published by Duke University Press in the 2022 scholarly journal, liquid blackness, author Nicholas Mirzoeff explores the historic legacy of the bird when viewed through the lens of race.

“For the planter and colonist, it was often a pest, eating seed or fruit,” Mirzoeff wrote. “For the poor and enslaved, it was a significant source of food, made into a commodity by mass killing.”

Birding while Black became a national conversation in May 2020, when Christian Cooper, an Emmy Award winning Black birdwatcher was confronted by Amy Cooper, a white dog walker who falsely claimed to police that Mr. Cooper had assaulted her. The incident happened weeks before the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd ignited a racial reckoning across the United States.

Cooper, in addition to being a birder, is a gay activist and Marvel comics writer and editor. His memoir, "Better Living Through Birding: Notes From A Black Man In The Natural World," was published last year. Last month, he hosted a feature story, “What You Never Knew About Pigeons,” for CBS Sunday Morning.”

Perkins said activities like Just Us Birding are offshoots of Black Birders Week, a nationwide event that for the past five years has highlighted Black nature enthusiasts and Black birders.

“I want to help reconnect people to the nature in their neighborhoods and be more observant,” Perkins said after the Just Us Birding tour ended with the birders taking a group photo.

“So, there’s a desire to get people to embrace the wild spaces around them, and also just kind of embrace the wildness within themselves, and kind of fully accept themselves and the natural spaces and natural creatures around them.”