Wild Talks: Birdgirl

Birdgirl

with Dr Mya-Rose Craig

A journey defined by love for birds.

Dr Mya-Rose Craig, otherwise known as ‘Birdgirl’, is a birder, environmentalist and diversity activist. By the time she was 17, she had seen over five thousand different types of bird, half the world’s species.

Find out about her story, in which every single bird is a treasure. Each sighting a small step in her family journey – a collective moment of joy and stillness amidst her mother’s deepening mental health crisis. And each helping her to find her voice.

Mya-Rose is the youngest British person to be awarded an honorary doctorate from Bristol University and, by age 18, she had written three award winning books. Her first book ‘We Have A Dream’ highlights the work of 30 global young environmentalists of colour fighting for our planet. Her second, the memoir ‘Birdgirl’, has been translated into seven languages and is due out as a graphic novel next year, and her third, a children’s book called ‘Flight’, is about bird migration.

Discover more about Mya-Rose’s moving and life-affirming memoir. It promises to be a thought-provoking and entertaining talk exploring 22-year-old Mya-Rose’s life as environmental activist as well as her three books.

Joining Mya-Rose for the final edition of our Wild Talks series will be Manchester Museum’s Curator of Entomology, Diana Arzuza.

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Dr Mya-Rose Craig

Young British Bangladeshi Dr Mya-Rose Craig AKA Birdgirl, from the Chew Valley near Bristol, is a prominent birder, naturalist, conservationist, environmentalist, race activist, writer, speaker and broadcaster, writing the Birdgirl Blog since January 2014 when she was 11 years old, which is extremely popular with both adults and children and now has over 4 million views.

She has travelled all her life, visiting all seven continents when she was 13 years old, giving her a global perspective on conservation and the needs of indigenous peoples. She writes posts about birding, nature, stopping climate breakdown, conservation and stopping species loss, other environmental issues, and racism from around the world.

Diana Arzuza

Diana is the recently appointed Curator of Entomology at Manchester Museum and has a degree in Zoology from Colombia. She has worked on several conservation and environmental education projects in Colombia as well as three-year project repatriating and documenting museum records of Colombian birds from regional collections, Europe and North America. Diana also has extensive experience working with natural history collections in Ecuador, Peru and the UK. 

At Manchester Museum, she looks after 2.5 million insects in one of the largest museum collections in the UK. As well as curating responsibilities, she also supports teaching, for example, of collection and preservation methods for undergraduate courses, as well making the entomological collection accessible, especially for researchers, biological recorders, artists and students. 

Diana has supported constructing narratives around insect collections for exhibitions and art projects. She is currently working with an artist celebrating women in science and with a wider team on Wild.