A conference by Henry Holmes Croft, a University College teacher, spurred him into collecting his first specimens.
In addition to working as a typographer, he owned a small shop where he sold specimens and taxidermy material.
Before moving to Montreal in 1870, he spent a year (or three) in Ottawa, what exactly he did is not known (possibly he studied spiders), but he wrote several short papers in The Canadian Entomologist during that period.
He traveled several times more to Côte-Nord, once having to return because his commissioned specimens were lost on the way home, and later collected with Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau.
In 1880 he started publishing The Canadian Sportsman and Naturalist, which would stay in publication for 3 years until lack of time forced him to discontinue it.
Couper's work is little known, both because good chunks of his life are left entirely in the dark and because many of his publications have become exceedingly difficult to locate, particularly The Canadian Sportsman and Naturalist.