The most famous photo of Mya-Rose Craig, the woman who saw half of the world’s bird species before she turned 18, was taken in the Arctic, an inhospitable place with low bird wealth. Well bundled up and in a setting of drifting ice, Mya, as she calls herself, held a cardboard banner with the legend Youth strike for climate. “I signed up for that trip without thinking, they told me two weeks before and I left, I thought I was 17 years old and that before I reached 35 the Arctic would have disappeared, like many of the species of birds I have seen, which are at risk of extinction,” he reasons.
That feeling of urgency, very latent among her generation, and the frustration at the lack of change, have led Mya-Rose Craig to deepen her work as an activist and to resituate her passion for ornithology, which she inherited from her father. She gave herself the nickname Birdgirl (‘Bird Girl’) when she opened a blog with that name at the age of 11 and now, at 21, it is the title of her second book, the first of a biographical nature.
With the subtitle of My family, birds and the search for a better future, the surprising thing about Birdgirl (from the publisher Errata Naturae) is that Mya-Rose Craig has enough and interesting material to write a memoir. She has always been precocious, with her blog or with the charity she created, Black2Nature, to be able to facilitate experiences in nature to ethnic minorities who normally do not have the facility to access it. Her resume in the first two decades of her life takes your breath away: she obtained a license as a bird bander at the age of 16, she has already received an Honoris Causa doctorate in Science from the University of Bristol, she spoke at the COP26 climate summit alongside Greta Thunberg, has written for numerous British media outlets and has participated in several television programs, is an ambassador for Survival International and belongs to organizations such as Greenpeace.
“Before I didn’t stop doing things, I was busy all the time and it’s not that I intended it, but I saw it as something natural, I did what I wanted, it’s now that I’ve started to appreciate that I want to slow down my pace, take things more calmly,” says the bird watcher and activist in a Zoom interview with La Vanguardia. Mya-Rose Craig responds from a room at the University of Cambridge, where she is studying the last year of her Political Science degree, studies that she considers very “demanding.”
The fact that she has chosen this academic path instead of opting for subjects more closely linked to zoology or biology indicates that the ‘bird girl”s priorities are changing. She still loves spending hours and hours watching birds and believes that it is a hobby that will accompany her throughout her life, but “I preferred to train in something that helps me facilitate change, in transforming society, I think that in my life I have already done enough work in nature,” he asserts.
Not that the birdgirl wants to stop being one. But she has grown up and wants to change the world. “I know that the two spheres can be connected, that of nature and that of people, but I cannot be passive if I want to help birds and people.” And also, she acknowledges, she needs time to live, “to be and exist, I am very interested in doing campaigns, trying to improve things, and I believe that all of that is connected to nature, it is different than being an ornithologist, in my book I talk about how to use birds as an escape and as a form of healing and that is a way of enjoying nature that I hope I can use for the rest of my life.”
Mya-Rose Craig, whose father is British and mother Bangladeshi, as reflected by her slightly oriental features, is in love with hummingbirds, her favorite bird for the brightness of their colors and “extravagant beak”, although she enjoys spending months in Central America in search of harpy eagles and other species: “I’m not tired of birds, the truth is, I will be 90 years old and I will continue looking for them, because it is precisely a very slow activity, in the middle of nature, without rushing and it will be a counterpoint to my work, a passion that will force me to go outside, calm down, take the time to see things.”
In Birdgirl, the naturalist author demonstrates a powerful narrative capacity that goes far beyond simple journals of field notes and bird sightings. For Mya-Rose Craig, it has meant closing the circle of childhood and she feels very fortunate for the education she received, always living in the countryside and very far from what boys and girls of the same age received as her. As she gracefully explains in her prose, it was her father who instilled a love of nature in a mother who had not seen an uncaged bird before meeting him. With that very British irony and that wisdom so worthy of the endearing naturalist Gerald Durrell, Craig tells how he grew up amid the designs of a father who suddenly felt the impulse to dedicate himself to ‘a great year’ – in ornithologist jargon, setting the goal of seeing a calendar year as many birds as possible -, and a mother with incomprehensible emotional ups and downs that were finally diagnosed as bipolar disorder after years and years of suffering.
That atmosphere is what Mya-Rose Craig describes with astonishing precision in ‘Birdgirl’, a vitalistic memoir capable of transmitting emotion for a world unknown to most people. “My connection with birds is not understood if I don’t talk about my life, so I went to see my mother and asked her if she would be okay with me talking about her mental health problems and she was very enthusiastic about it, more so than me. ”recalls the new writer. “Because in the end, being in contact with nature was very therapeutic for my mother and writing the book has been very therapeutic for me,” she adds.
Likewise, Mya-Rose Craig received help from her father, “who helped me a lot with questions related to birds, but also to remember anecdotes and the people we met, to share those experiences and help me relate them.” “But in general I am trying to slow down my life and that is why I am no longer chasing records, I have a lifetime to try to see the other half of bird species that I have not seen, without rushing. I am young and free,” she exclaims.
Mya-Rose Craig has a hard time defining her future. She’s still thinking about it. Although she sees herself more invested in journalistic work than in any other field. She assures that she is now focusing on being able to delegate her charitable work to people she trusts. Like many young people, she is still not clear about what she would like to be when she grows up. “Next summer I will volunteer in political issues, when I finish university, and I would like to travel, I am young and free,” she says. The trips still hold the promise of mixing bird watching with activism, social commitment and the vocation to tell about it through social networks and the media. “What I like is writing,” she admits.
What Mya-Rose Craig is clear about is that “we have to try as hard as we can” to fight climate change. “Because the most frustrating thing is that we have the science, the understanding and the technology to reverse it, and it is very simple to know what we have to do, a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, change to a green economy, consume and produce in a sustainable way, but many people and governments do not want to do it.”
She has met the famous Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who is a year younger than her, several times, but she would not like to achieve her fame. “Greta is very nice to deal with, I don’t know how she manages to withstand so much pressure, she feels that change is her responsibility and I, personally, don’t know if I could dedicate my entire life to it, maybe it’s selfish of me, but I feel that way.”
Mya-Rose Craig spent her adolescence among blue-billed peacocks, torories and other beautiful creatures that fly through the skies. Before she came of age, she embarked to star with Greenpeace in the northernmost environmental campaign ever organized. And at 21 years old she has earned recognition as a writer and naturalist. The lesson learned and that she recommends is that young people mobilize, look for people with similar concerns and get going. “If you do things you will have a purpose, in the end the changes are related to the attitude we have towards nature and the planet,” she values ??with that maturity that Cambridge has helped sculpt after a wild childhood.
