Uniondale-raised Christian Cooper meets with 'Extraordinary Birders' on his new TV show

A Uniondale-raised writer-editor and lifelong bird buff gets to watch his feathered friends and see his name in the title while doing so in Nat Geo Wild’s new “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper,” premiering Saturday at 10 p.m.

“Oh, my God!” exclaims Cooper, 60, with an embarrassed laugh when asked about the title. “First, I didn't pick it. And second, it's not a reference to me. I can tell you that with confidence because I know the extraordinary birders,” he says of the biologists, conservationists and elite bird aficionados he encounters in the six-episode series taking him around America from Hawaii to territorial Puerto Rico to show some of the numerous avian species hiding in plain sight.

“I have my skills and I'm a good birder, but I'm not an extraordinary birder,” demurs Cooper, who while growing up had been a youth board member of the South Shore Audubon Society and is now a New York City Audubon board vice president. “I think the title is a reference, first, to the people we meet in the show who are doing incredible things to protect birds and their habitats. But it's also about the fact that every birder is extraordinary. Because once you start birding, it changes your perception of the world around you. You just can't help but be plugged into it in a different way than you were before. And that’s extraordinary.”

The Manhattan-born Cooper otherwise had an ordinary upbringing on Long Island, as one of two children of the late Francis Cooper, a science teacher, and Margaret Cooper, an English teacher. Younger sister Melody Cooper has written for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and other shows, and is now on two Netflix projects on hold due to the Writers Guild strike.

After graduating from Uniondale High School, Christian Cooper went on to a 1984 bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University, where he was president of the Ornithological Club. In 1990, he joined Marvel Comics, working as an editor on Marvel’s creator-owned imprint, Epic, and on titles starring the Hulk, Ghost Rider, the Punisher and Blade.

He left in 1996, returning as a freelancer later that year to write the licensed “Star Trek” series “Starfleet Academy” for its 19-issue run — introducing the “Trek” universe’s first openly gay human character, Yoshi Mishima. Cooper went on to spend nearly two decades as an editor at Health Science Communications. Divorced, he lives in Manhattan with his partner, John Zaia.

Cooper returned to Long Island last Saturday for a voter-registration drive at Freeport Village’s first official Pride Month celebration, at the invitation of Nassau County Legis. Debra Mulé, a fellow Uniondale High 1980 graduate.

Both the new series and Cooper’s just-released memoir, “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World,” revisit The Ramble, the heavily wooded section of Central Park where birds particularly congregate — and where in May 2020 Cooper shot what became a viral video of a white woman who phoned 911 to falsely claim that a Black man was threatening her, after words where exchanged when Cooper asked her to leash her dog as per park regulations.

“The interesting thing about that,” he says of returning there on an upcoming episode of the series set in New York City, “is how uninteresting it is in that regard. I've been birding in this park for more than 35 years, and this spot is associated with so many memories for me of so many amazing birds. … And it's funny, because as a birder, you almost have a sense memory of places where you saw that bird at that time. So I've got all these memories associated with that spot. And, y’know,” he says, “what happened there on that day just can't compete.”