the times Saturday June 11 20228Weekend
M
ya-Rose Craig was nine
days old when she was
bundled into the car
and taken on her first
birdwatching trip to
the Isles of Scilly. Her
father had heard about
a rare lesser kestrel visiting from Europe.
Her older sister, Ayesha, held her up to the
telescope while her mother pointed out
the birds, but it would be another year
before she could officially record her
first sightings.
In her first few weeks at primary school
Craig was mesmerised by a nuthatch on a
bird feeder in the playground. By the age of
six she was joining her parents on a “Big
Year”, seeing as many birds as possible in 12
months. On New Year’s Day they saw 24
species including a yellowhammer. The
next day they drove four hours to Corn-
wall and spotted a snowy owl, a purple
sandpiper and a rock pipit before heading
for Yorkshire and discovering a very rare
glaucous-winged gull. They saw 325 birds
in a year; the highlight being the black-
browed albatross. “We were in Cornwall,
looking out to sea in the middle of a terri-
ble rainstorm, when this enormous visitor
from the southern hemisphere flew to-
wards us and looped round our heads,” she
says, “but no one believed me.” She set up
her Birdgirl blog when she was 11 to show
that girls can be birdwatchers too.
Now aged 19 and at Cambridge Univers-
ity, she is the youngest ornithologist to
have seen more than half the world’s 10,738
birds and everyone takes her avian obses-
sion seriously. She’s also the youngest per-
son to receive an honorary doctorate, for
setting up Black2Nature, an organisation
that introduces children from diverse
backgrounds to the natural world. She has
just published her first book, Birdgirl, after
a ferocious bidding war, and is friends with
David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg,
Bill Oddie and Chris Packham, campaign-
ing alongside them on the environment,
conservation and race issues.
Her parents live in a small cottage in
West Country hills outside Bristol, covered
in climbing roses and brambles, but Craig
meets me by the Serpentine lake in
London. “In lockdown home was perfect,
there was a kingfisher in the duck pond,the sound of ravens
cronking woke me up,
red kites swooped above
the fields, the cuckoo
called and a red-necked
phalarope arrived at
Chew Valley Lake.”
She has visited every
continent with her
parents, travelling from
the Amazon to the Ant-
arctic, but she still loves
British birds. “I don’t think
anyone would claim they
are the most glamorous.
But LBJs, little brown jobs,
are like having a family
member — they are part
of my life. Robins, blue tits,
great tits and long-tailed
tits drop in all the time on
our bird feeder at home. I
also love the plain wren,
with its tiny body, sticky-up
tail and strident song.”
Her mother, Helena, is British-Bangla-
deshi and grew up in Bristol, meeting her
father, who was always obsessed with
birds, at a nightclub. “There wasn’t one
eureka moment when I fell in love with the
birds, they were always an intrinsic part of
my life. My mother was birdwatching with
me when she was pregnant. A few days ago
my grandmother said, ‘I really don’t know
how they would have coped if you didn’t
like birds. I’m not sure you had a choice. It
felt predestined.’ ”
What does she love most about the
birds? “It’s not feeling or touching them
but seeing and hearing them that I love.
Even pigeons.” As we chat she is watching
crows, swans and magpies out of the cor-
ner of her eye. “Now that I’m at university
I am always waiting for the migrants to ar-
rive — there are swallows’ nests in all the
nooks and crannies of the colleges.”
Craig wanted to write the book so that
readers could understand why people
would want to birdwatch. “Birding is seen
as a boring hobby, very old-fashioned like
stamp collecting or train-spotting, a dull
way of wasting your spare time. But it’s not
just lists and counting, it’s a passion for the
outdoors and wildlife, the places, the
drama and the competition.”My mum was
sectioned. Watching
birds calmed her
mind — mine too
At 19, Mya-Rose Craig, aka ‘Birdgirl’, has published a
memoir. She talks to Alice Thomson about the reasons
behind her passion for twitching
Her book reads
like a cross
between a travel
diary, an orni-
thologist’s guide
and a thriller.
“Even when we
were going
round the UK I
loved seeing all the nooks and crannies,
and I know most service stations. But it
can be brutal. My family wanted to get to
the birds just after the sun rose, so the
alarm would go in the middle of the night.
Winter twitching was easier as you get up
at 5am but in the summer it could be 3am.
As a kid it was fine as I’d dress in my ther-
mal clothes the night before and my
parents would carry me to the car half-
asleep. I do think back to my poor dad do-
ing so much driving. I don’t know how he
did it, but it was just dramatic and exciting
for me. It was like a massive treasure
hunt... I didn’t even need to see the bird, it
wasn’t a waste as I was with my parents.”
Being young, female and mixed race, she
always stood out among the birding com-
munity. “Now there are more birding tod-
dlers, families and couples, but it used to be
a bloke hobby. I had my first binoculars in
plastic at three, but it was only when we
went for six months to South America
when I was seven that they bought me a
tiny light pair. It was thrilling. I felt like I
was a true birder.”
For years Craig barely talked to her
school friends about her trips. “They were
like, ‘What did you do in the holidays?’
They went to the beach or an attraction,
and I’d think, we were in the jungle for four
weeks. We never went to see many monu-ments or museums. One day at 13 I asked
to go on a beach holiday and after three
hours I said, ‘This is the dullest thing we
have ever done,’ so we went to find some
birds. My first hummingbird was more ex-
traordinary than sunbathing.”
But she still found birdwatching embar-
rassing. “I think if I had been even a frac-
tion more confident in my hobby people
wouldn’t have cared that much what I was
doing in my spare time. But it was this
weird contrast between being very shy and
awkward at school and simultaneously do-
ing all this public stuff online. By sixth
form it turned out people liked chatting to
me about birds.”
Now whenever she thinks of a bird it re-
minds her of a place she has visited. “We
have met so many extraordinary people, a
lot of locals who have shaped the way I
think about conservation, activism and
climate change. I would be a very different
person if my family hadn’t travelled
obsessively.”
But there is another element to her
book: her mother’s deteriorating mental
health. “My parents were very busy when
I was young, then my mother got ill and
quit her job, and nature seemed to help so
we’d save up all our money to travel and
see birds. It means we have become a very
tight family unit.”
Eventually her mother was diagnosed
with bipolar disorder after repeated manic
and depressive episodes. “After my mum
was sectioned, therapists would ask how I
felt about her being diagnosed and I would
say she’s the same she has always been —
it just has a name now. She had a lot of
energy, she had a lot of projects, first it was
work and law cases, then the local fête,li
b d t a “ w rlovedseeingallthenooksMya-Rose in 2013, with some
crimson rosellas in AustraliaWe’d save up
all our money
to travel and
see birds. It
means we’ve
become a tight
family unit