Published in 2022
9 hours and 30 minutes
Mya-Rose Craig, also known as Birdgirl, is a 20-year-old British-Bangladeshi birder, environmentalist, and diversity activist. She campaigns for equal access to nature and to end the climate and biodiversity loss crises, issues which she believes are intrinsically linked, while promoting Global Climate Justice. She also fights for the rights of indigenous peoples, is an Ambassador for Survival International and has previously written a book in the UK amplifying their voices.
At age fourteen she founded Black2Nature to engage teenagers of color with nature and at seventeen she became the youngest Briton to receive an honorary Doctorate, awarded by Bristol University for this pioneering work. Also at seventeen she became the youngest person to see half the world’s bird species and shared a stage with Greta Thunberg, speaking to 40,000 protestors. In September 2020 she held the world’s most northerly Youth Strike, traveling with Greenpeace, for whom she is an Oceans’ Ambassador, to the melting pack ice of the high Arctic.
What is this book about?
Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby, or a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life, so tightly woven in that there’s no way of pulling it free and leaving the rest of my life intact.
Meet Mya-Rose—otherwise known as ‘Birdgirl’. Birder, environmentalist, diversity activist. To date she has seen over 5,000 different types of bird: half the world’s species.
Every single bird a treasure. Each sighting a small step in her family journey—a collective moment of joy and stillness amidst her mother’s deepening mental health crisis. And each helping her to find her voice.
Since she was young, she has visited every continent to pursue her passion, seeing first-hand the inequality and reckless destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And the simple, mindful act of looking for birds has made her ever-more determined to campaign for all our survival.
This is her story; a journey defined by her love for these extraordinary creatures. Because large or small, brown, patterned or jewelled, there is something about birds that makes us, even for just moments at a time, lift our eyes away from our lives and up to the skies.
