16-year-old Mya-Rose Craig is a young British Bangladeshi birder, naturalist, conservationist, environmentalist, activist, writer and speaker. Based near Bristol in the UK, she uses her Birdgirl blog to write posts about birding, conservation and environmental issues from around the world. And talking about ‘the world’, a Rock Bunting seen in Spain on a half-term holiday this year took her life list to a staggering 5000 – she’s the youngest person ever to have seen that many bird species.
But while Mya’s perhaps best known as a ‘world lister’, that’s not why I wanted to speak to her. She’s also a courageous advocate for human rights, talks about the need to get VME or Visible Minority Ethnic people access to the countryside, is President of an organisation called Black2Nature which she set up when she was 14, and has organised nature camps for children and teenagers since 2015. She’s also blunt about the failure of conservation NGOs to accurately represent the diversity of people in the UK, and is passionate about climate change.
I talked with a slightly weary Mya-Rose the day after she’d got back home after spending the weekend in London as part of the Extinction Rebellion protests – but we began – how could we not – with birds…
• Birdgirl UK (external link)
• Mya-Rose on twitter (external link)