Birdgirl's Interview for BBC Radio 4 "You and Yours" Programme

Young Birder Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig in her garden
Photograph taken by and copyright Chris Craig

During the Easter holidays, I was contacted by a journalist, Jess Quayle, from the 'You and Yours' consumer programme from Radio 4. They were planning a feature about the number of people feeding birds in their gardens and how this had increased massively in recent years. They wanted me to answer a few questions on the topic and talk about how I feed my garden birds.

Young Birder Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig in her garden
Photograph taken by and copyright Chris Craig

Young Birder Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig in her garden
Photograph taken by and copyright Chris Craig

The only problem was that I was away skiing and then was going straight to Paris to spend a week with my grandmother in Disneyland.

Luckily, the programme wasn't due to be aired for couple of weeks, so after I was home, I got up at 7 am midweek to record the last bit of dawn chorus in our garden in the Chew Valley, south of Bristol. If I am ever up at 5 am for ringing or twitching, hearing the dawn chorus is a truly fantastic experience. I was too tired to actually talk then, so fitted the recording in at Chew Valley Lake after school. The only problem was that the Bristol Water gardeners were out cutting and strimming the grass, so I had to do my recordings in between the noise. I always learn a lot about being a presenter, every time I have to do anything like this so is a brilliant experience.

It was amazing to have my first interview for BBC Radio 4 aired last Friday 5th May 2017, which you can still hear on BBC IPlayer for the “You & Yours” programme in the section about the increase in people feeding the birds in their gardens. I am at 10:45 into the programme on http://bbc.in/2qeC28M with images at http://bbc.in/2qMuXts.

Young Birder Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig in her garden
Photograph taken by and copyright Chris Craig

Young Birder Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig in her garden
Photograph taken by and copyright Chris Craig

About the Author

Birdgirl Mya-Rose Craig in Antarctica
Photograph copyright Young Birder Birdgirl Mya-Rose Craig

Mya-Rose Craig is a 14-year-old young British Bangladeshi birder, naturalist, conservationist, environmentalist, activist, writer and speaker. She is based near Bristol and writes the successful Birdgirl Blog, with posts about birding and conservation from around the world. She loved seeing Mountain Gorillas in East Africa and Penguins in Antarctica over Christmas 2015, her 7th continent.

Mya-Rose was a Bristol European Green Capital Ambassador along with Kevin McCloud, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Tony Juniper, Simon King, Miranda Krestovnikoff and Shaun the Sheep! See the full list of Bristol Ambassadors. She has also been listed with the singer-songwriter George Ezra and actress Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones as one of Bristol's most influential young people. She is an Ambassador for World Shorebirds Day, See It Her Way and a Charter Champion for The Charter for Woods, Trees and People. She organised a conference, Race Equality in Nature, in June 2016 aiming to increase the ethnic diversity in nature and plans to run her third Camp Avalon camp in 2017. She has also set up Black2Nature with the aim of working with organisations to increase the access to nature of Black Asian Minority Ethnic people. Please connect with her on LinkedIn (Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig) so that she can invite you to join the Race Equality in Nature LinkedIn Group and be part of the change. She has been awarded the Bath and West Show Environmental Youth Award 2017 for Bristol for her Black2Nature work EYA 2017. Please also like her Birdgirl Facebook Page and follow her on Birdgirl Twitter.