Who is ornithologist Mya-Rose Craig?

Mya-Rose Craig is only 24. And yet impressively – or annoyingly, depending on your outlook on life – she’s already an author, a doctor, an ambassador, an in-demand speaker and an award-winning ornithologist and environmentalist.

Later this month Craig joins us as part of our Letters to the Future weekend to lead a conversation about the climate crisis with Green MP Hannah Spencer, author Kieran Andrieu and environmentalist Alex Montgomery. And so this felt like the opportune time to offer an introduction to this prodigious talent, before her achievements get too vast to list.

She’s been bird-watching her entire life

Born in 2002, Craig grew up in north Somerset’s Chew Valley and has been into birds and birding as long as she can walk, possibly even earlier. At the age of seven she appeared in a BBC Four documentary, Twitchers: A Very British Obsession, and a few years later, at the start of 2014, the then 11-year-old Craig began her own blog Birdgirl. It has now surpassed four million views.

She’s observed more than half the world’s birds

How many different bird species do you think you’ve seen in your lifetime? A few dozen? A few hundred maybe? (How many different types of pigeon are there?) Well, at the age of 17 Craig saw her 5,000th bird – a rock bunting in northern Spain. Later that year, near Manaus, Brazil, she observed her own holy grail of birds, a harpy eagle, a sighting which also meant that Craig had witnessed half the world’s bird species. She was, and still is, the youngest person to reach this milestone.

She’s a big deal in Bristol

Well, she’s a big deal everywhere these days, but they’ve long been particularly proud of Craig’s achievements in her home city. At the age of 12 she appeared on a list of Bristol’s 24 most influential under 24s along with musician Goerge Ezra, actress Maisie Williams and poet Vanessa Kisuule. When Bristol became the European Green Capital in 2015, Craig served as an ambassador, and was also nominated for a Bristol Young Hero award in 2016. And in 2020 she received an honorary doctorate of science from Bristol University.

She’s long been an advocate for greater diversity in naturalism

In 2015 Craig read an American Birding Association article on the need for more people of the Global Majority to get out into nature, something she has since described as ‘a lightbulb moment’. A British-Bangladeshi, Craig had ‘noticed that there were no people like me and my family outside in natural spaces’, and so she set out to address this imbalance, firstly through organising a Race Equality in Nature Conference and then by founding the group Black2Nature, to lead the fight for equal access to the natural environment. It’s a cause she continues to lead and champion.

She has become an in-demand voice on all things environment

Through her work with Black2Nature and associated campaigns, plus her ambassadorship in Bristol, Craig began to establish herself as a leading voice on both diversity and representation in environmentalism as well as wider climate issues. In 2017 she spoke at Hay Festival and led a Ted Talk at the University of Western England and by 2022 Craig was appearing on a panel alongside fellow activists Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai at Cop26. In 2023 she joined Thunberg again, on stage here at the Southbank Centre for The Climate Conversation (below), part of our Planet Summer series.

Her activism has taken her to the top of the world

Craig has already held more ambassadorial roles than a minor royal, including positions with environmental organisations such as the RSPCA, the National Trust, Oxfam and Greenpeace. With the latter, in 2020, Craig staged the world’s most northerly climate strike, by protesting on an Arctic ice floe north of Svalbard, Norway to highlight the urgent need for climate action ahead of a United Nations summit on biodiversity.

She’s an author three times over

Craig published her first book in 2021. We Have a Dream explores issues of climate justice and representation through profiles of 30 young indigenous people and people of colour working in environmental activism around the world. In 2022 she followed this with the memoir Birdgirl, a reflection on her experiences as both a birder and environmental activist, which is ‘lyrical, poignant and insightful’ – not our words but those of Margaret Atwood. High praise indeed. And in 2023 Craig published the illustrated children’s book Flight, which looks at bird migration and the natural world from a bird’s perspective.

And she’s won a wealth of recognition

It’s not just the people of Bristol and Margaret Atwood who have been quick to champion Craig. Among her many awards to date are the 2018 National Biodiversity Network Gilbert White Youth Award for recording terrestrial and freshwater wildlife and The Muslim News‘ Malcolm X Young Person’s Award for Excellence. She has featured on a BBC Women’s Hour power list of ‘women protecting our planet’, and an Evening Standard list of women changing the world as well as being selected as a National Geographic Society Young Explorer. And she’s also been lauded for her writing with Birdgirl winning the Somerset Maugham Award and Flight being named Edward Stanford Children’s Travel Book of the Year.

 

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But she’s never forgotten her first love

Throughout all of her many achievements to date, Craig has never stopped birding. Earlier this summer she was among the twitchers in Pembrokeshire catching sight of the first Western Reef Heron ever to be spotted in the UK. And throughout the past year she’s been on hand to give her expert guidance on all things birdwatching to Hollywood actor Sean Bean, for his podcast Get Birding (– there’s a sentence we never expected to write).