To share personal and intimate stories with a wide, and often critical, readership takes not only courage, but also a bold sense of accomplishment—something I certainly couldn’t profess to have achieved as I somewhat bumbled my way through business school and attempted to keep myself alive on a diet of peas and pasta.

Yet at the tender age of 20, the newly honoured doctorate student Mya-Rose Craig—known colloquially as "Birdgirl"—has never been one to conform. From featuring at New York Times hubs, to the release of her new self-titled book (which is being promoted as “personal memoirs”), she is certainly forging a unique new path, spurred on by peers who are looking to their own cohort to help guide them in a confusing and somewhat nervy cultural landscape.

Craig (or Birdgirl as we will refer to her as hereon) first came to the spotlight as the youngest person to have seen more than half of the world’s known bird species. Raised in the idyllic Chew Valley not too far from the Ubuntu Offices in Bristol, England, she has not only travelled the length and breadth of Britain, but has visited every continent on Earth, all to achieve the feat of viewing over 5,000 different birds.

Having featured on South-West news channel Points West at age eleven, passionately explaining the difference between “twitching” and “birdwatching” (yeah, we didn’t know the difference either), she has since been on a personal quest to “shatter” the preconception that birdwatching is an activity for “white-middle aged men”, and help to improve marginalised communities' access to nature.

Her drive to challenge the long established norms of naturalists has since led her to become a recognised activist, using her own experiences to encourage younger generations to reconnect with nature. In 2015, she founded the charity Black2Nature which seeks to give visibly ethnic minority (VME) children equal access to nature—you can check out this helpful twitter thread to learn more.

Similar to other pioneers we have featured in our spotlight series (including this must-read exploratory piece on Tori Tsui), Birdgirl sees the converging issues we’re facing as a planet as collective issues, not standalone topics.

“We talk about it [climate change] in a vacuum, like it's a single issue, untouched by anything else and we absolutely have to be intersectional when we approach it (...)I think one of the things that people don’t talk about enough is the other issues that we’re dealing with, that our planet is dealing with. (...) We know that we’re losing our wildlife, our nature. Here in the UK, I think people don’t realise, because our countryside has been in such a crisis for so long, but I’ve been very lucky and I’ve travelled a lot, and it is one of the most nature-depleted countries I have ever been to.”

In 2020 at just 17 years old, Birdgirl became the youngest person in the UK to receive an honourary doctorate. That same year, she was pictured in the Arctic holding a sign saying ‘Youth Strike for Climate” to raise awareness and in protest of the melting of sea ice and a result of global warming.

Having achieved so much in her formative years and already established herself as a force for good in the climate movement, it should therefore come as no surprise that her recent book release has been penned as a memoir.

Yet I feel it’s important we remember that for such a young person with so much opportunity ahead, it’s not so much a life story as the beginning of one. I have no doubt that what comes next will not only level with her current accomplishments, but likely surpass them. And if there's one thing we need right now, it's some hope that things can change.

Birdgirl blogs under her moniker ‘Birdgirl’ which you can check out here.