High flyer

She’s written two acclaimed books, been honoured with a string of prestigious awards and travelled the world spotting rare birds – and she’s still only 20. Mya-Rose Craig, aka Birdgirl, tells Alex Moore why sometimes it’s important to ruffl e a few feathers

“Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby I can pick up and put down, but a thread running

Opening spread and above: Mya-Rose Craig looks out for rare species at Chew Valley Lake, Somerset. The author and activist’s blog, Birdgirl, has been viewed over four million times. Top right: a glossy ibis in flight

While most teenagers spent the pandemic punctuating periods of endless ennui with hours trawling TikTok, Britain’s ornithologist wunderkind, Mya-Rose Craig, used it as an opportunity to write her second book, Birdgirl. Having just been presented with an honorary doctorate from Bristol University – making her the youngest person ever to receive such an award – and on the verge of finishing her A-levels, the then 17-year-old was planning to take a year out to go travelling. At this point Craig had already seen half of the world’s 10,738 species of bird (again, she is the youngest person to have done this), and she was intent on augmenting that tally. But, as with so many of her contemporaries, those hopes were unceremoniously dashed.

Craig has been a prominent figure in the UK’s birding community since appearing on BBC4’s Twitchers: A Very British Obsession in 2010. At the time she was seven and, having seen 324 birds that year – a remarkable and dogged achievement in itself – was beginning to ruffle a few feathers. A small contingent of the twitching old guard disputed Craig’s numbers, questioning whether a young, mixed-race girl like her could, or even should, be as knowledgeable as she was. It was the first sign that birding wasn’t perhaps as inclusive as she’d imagined.

“I had friends who knew I was into bird-watching, and they were fine with it,” Craig says graciously from her parents’ home in the Chew Valley, North Somerset. She’s awaiting her exam results after her first year at the University of Cambridge, where she’s studying human, social and political sciences. “But I didn’t have any friends who shared my passion. So I started a blog [also called Birdgirl] in the hope of building an online community of birdwatchers my age. It was supposed to be a very quiet little corner of the internet for me just to find those people, but suddenly more and more people started to take notice.”

The Birdgirl blog has been viewed more than four million times and has catapulted Craig into the public eye. She has appeared on television alongside the naturalists Steve Backshall and Bill Oddie (who describes her as “a superhero… intelligent, informed, passionate, and persistent”); given over 50 lectures, including a TED Talk on Passion, Priorities and Perseverance; become the youngest member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ advisory committee; and been named Young Conservationist of the Year in the Birder’s Choice Awards 2021.

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“Originally I was just talking about birds and birdwatching and stuff like that, but I realised quite quickly that this platform gave me an opportunity to talk about some of the bigger things going on in the world,” says Craig. “Things like environmentalism, conservation, mental health and racial inequality” – issues that feature prominently in her new book. “People are calling it a memoir, which feels strange given that I was 18 when I wrote it.”

Indeed, it is testament to her precocious empathy that Craig manages to address such weighty issues through the lens of birding. She talks candidly about her mother’s bipolar disorder and how the family has used the meditative and mindful aspects of birdwatching as a tool to aid mental health. She also quickly identifi es that the luxury of the great outdoors isn’t something everyone can take for granted. “I noticed that I never saw anyone else who was Black or Asian out in the countryside, and that made me incredibly sad,” she says. “So I started digging around and quickly realised that there was something much more deeply ingrained going on. Racism and discrimination are interwoven into environmental causes. The question is always, ‘Why can’t we get people to care? Why aren’t people engaging? Why aren’t people out in the street protesting?’ But people have no reason to care about biodiversity loss [for example] if they’ve never experienced biodiversity. What is their frame of reference? And so, if we chip away at discrimination, allowing VME [Visible Minority Ethnic] people to develop a relationship with nature and the outdoors, they will be much more likely to engage with wider environmental issues.”

In 2016, at the age of 13, Craig founded Black2Nature, an organisation that hosts nature camps for inner-city VME children while campaigning to make the conservation and environmental sectors more ethnically diverse. Over the course of a weekend, participants might learn to bird-ring, bat-walk, pond-dip, moth-trap, toast marshmallows and “bio blitz” (a race to fi nd and identify as many species as possible). “One of the reasons I started my charity,” she says, “is that I had this understanding of how important nature is for our mental health and wellbeing, and I just thought how much of a tragedy it was that so many kids weren’t getting access to that resource.”

Like her father, an ardent activist who spent his youth campaigning for animal rights, Craig has been relentless in her own fi ght. She has spent much of the past few years speaking at events and appearing on panels, so comparisons have naturally been drawn with her Swedish counterpart Greta Thunberg – with whom she has shared a stage on a number of occasions, notably at COP26 (which Craig believes was a huge opportunity for the UK to take the bull by the horns, but ultimately fell well short). “Being compared to Greta is a compliment because she’s amazing, but it can also be confl icting,” says Craig. “It has become a lazy media shorthand: the British or the Indian or the African Greta Thunberg. Vanessa Nakate is more than just the Ugandan Greta Thunberg. What we’re all doing is very diff erent and people deserve to be celebrated in their own right.”

Again, representation, or the lack thereof, is a theme that has helped to shape Craig’s unique trajectory. For her fi rst book, We Have a Dream, she met 30 activists who perhaps weren’t getting the platform they required or the recognition they deserved. “I started to become aware that within the climate-change movement you’d only ever hear from the same handful of western voices, over and over again,” she says. “And, of course, they are doing brilliant things, but there are so many other incredible activists that we don’t get to hear from. So I decided to track some of these people down – specifi cally non-white and indigenous activists – and write a book about them.”

Not only did this serve as a crash course in activism, it allowed her to add several megas (birding slang for extremely rare sightings), including the harpy eagle and the swordbilled hummingbird, to her list. For the Craigs, travelling has always been bird-centric. “Whenever I came home from a holiday and my friends asked what we’d done, all I ever said was birdwatching,” beams Craig. “We’ve always chosen the countries we travel to based on how many birds there are.”

In Birdgirl, she admits: “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.” So what exactly is the fascination? “They’re just these amazing, beautiful creatures that are everywhere, all of the time,” she says. “I wrote the book primarily for people who have never really had an interest in birds, because I wanted to help them understand the obsession. If I can get people to notice birds a little more, hopefully they will think diff erently about their relationship with nature and the outdoors – and that would be a wonderful thing.”