Hi, I'm Lale Arakoglu, with another episode of Women Who Travel, a podcast about exploring the world and where we share all sorts of transportive stories.

Today, I'm talking to 21-year-old ornithologist, Maya Rose Craig.

Thank you. ornithologist, Maya Rose Craig. A student at Cambridge University, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University

of Bristol at just 17 for her Black to Nature organisation, an initiative that campaigns for equal access to nature,

especially for communities in the UK that historically have been excluded from the countryside.

Maya's love of the outdoors, and, of course, birds, is thanks to her parents,

Helena, whose family is from northern Bangladesh

and Chris from Liverpool.

My parents were very good at sort of phrasing it like a treasure hunt

or something like that where it was like a big adventure.

She started jotting down all her observations during their travels,

which eventually turned into her blog, Bird Girl.

Now, that blog has turned into a book.

Birdgirl, looking to the skies in search of a better future.

Part travelogue, part family memoir, Maya accounts birdwatching across every continent while exploring the dynamics of

her own family and how their mutual obsession held them together through challenging times.

One of the first bird species to fascinate Maya, the sandpiper.

I spend a lot of time talking about the spoonbird sandpiper in the book for a few reasons.

Like I think for me, sort of personally,

it's almost a bit of a flagship species. But it's essentially a critically endangered species

of bird that breeds up in the Arctic tundra, in Russia, and then every year migrates down the

side of Asia, so like down the coast of China and that sort of direction over Thailand, and then every year migrates down the side of Asia, so like down the coast of China and that

...