In deciding to write a personal memoir at the age of 20, the ornithologist and activist Mya-Rose Craig has shown considerable courage. On the one hand, she has a straightforward, if unusual, tale to tell about her life as a bird lover. She first came to attention online as the youngest person to have seen more than half of the world’s known bird species. Not only has she travelled the length and breadth of Britain, she has visited every continent on Earth, rising at dawn, sleeping on ice, walking up mountains and baking in deserts in order to view over 5,000 different birds. Throughout the book, her passion for these animals takes centre stage, and leads her to an environmental activism that feels both necessary and urgent.
On the other hand, there is a more difficult story about the parents who took her on these journeys. The book begins with their first meeting in a Bristol club. Her father Chris, a middle-class white man who studied engineering, had watched birds from an early age, while her mother Helena, a young lawyer from a fairly strict Muslim family of Bangladeshi origin, had no interest in them. Gradually, the birds they began to discover together came to underpin their love. “My parents understand each other better when they’re birding – this was true then and it’s true now. They share a special language.”
