Birdability: because birding is for everybody and every body!

Once upon a time, a woman with a spinal cord injury who uses a wheelchair to get around discovered birding. Along with the joy of the actual birds, she discovered the fun of being part of a like-minded community, the perfect kind of exercise (that doesn’t really feel like exercise), and the health and wellness benefits of being in nature. She also discovered a huge sense of empowerment and feeling of accomplishment when she could go birding on an accessible trail, by herself, without someone there to help her over roots or up a step… And that empowerment stayed with her off the trail and came with her into her everyday life.

I can do this. I can do this! I can do this.

She realized that anybody with a mobility challenge, whether because they use a wheelchair, or they have grumpy joints that slow them down, could get the same sense of empowerment out of going birding. So she set about finding those people in her hometown of Austin, Texas, and introducing birding to them.

Her name is Virginia Rose, and she called her effort “Birdability”.

Virginia Rose, founder of Birdability. Photo: Mike Fernandez, National Audubon.

That was in 2018. Fast forward two and a half years, and the stars aligned. National Audubon had heard about her efforts, birding and disability magazines interviewed her for articles, and she began a network of Birdability Captains all over the country — people who wanted to be actively engaged in this work. Birdability Week happened in October 2020, and as of January 14th 2021, Birdability is now a registered non-profit, with a national (and international!) scope, and a full-time staff member at the helm! (That’s me.)

I started out as a Birdability Captain. Virginia ‘promoted’ me to Admiral because of my work coordinating Birdability Week… and following up with all the wonderful interest and engagement that came after it. As an Occupational Therapist (OT), my job is to enable people to participate in the activities of everyday life that are meaningful to them, despite any limitations caused by an illness, injury, disability or mental health concern. (A friend recently summarized OTs as professional problem-solvers and professional optimists, and that’s it, I think!) And as a Certified Interpretive Guide (CIG), I know how to tell stories, engage my audience, and provoke a response. I also know how easy it can be for interpreters to be intentionally welcoming and inclusive.

This work with Birdability fits in perfectly. Its not a traditional, clinical role for an OT (in a hospital, or a pediatric therapy clinic, for example), but we’re modifying the environment, adapting equipment and teaching new skills, so it’s definitely OT! And what everyday activity could be more meaningful than birding?!

Birdability focuses on removing barriers to access for birders with mobility challenges, blindness or low vision, intellectual or developmental disabilities (including autism), mental illness, being deaf or hard of hearing and other health concerns. We do this through educating the birding community about disability (because the social environment must support participation), and how to be welcoming and inclusive birders. We educate, advocate and consult on the physical environment of birding — how accessible is that trail? (Hint: there’s a lot more to it than just being paved.) Does the nature center have accessible bathrooms? What about the bird blind? Can wheelchair users get in there too?

Wide, flat, concrete trail, benches, interpretive signs with an audio feature, and plexiglass barriers so everybody can see through or over: some of the accessibility feature of Echo Spring River Trail, Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Photo: Freya McGregor.

We also work to bring the joys and empowerment of birding that Virginia experienced to people who have disabilities or other health concerns. Not just the fun of seeing or hearing birds, or the social benefits of being part of a like-minded community, or even the health and wellness benefits humans receive from spending time in nature. But when someone can get out — on their own — and get totally absorbed on a trail or not have to worry about asking someone for help, there is so much empowerment to gain. Especially for folks who oftentimes need some help doing everyday things like showering or dressing — there is so much potential for independence and growing in self-confidence outside, through birding. And we want everybody to have the opportunity to experience that.

Our website is full of resources and information to educate and empower anyone who wishes to join us in this work. There’s information on:

• What features make up an actually accessible trail;
• Ideas for you to be a more welcoming and inclusive birder;
• Tips and resources for birders who are blind or have low vision;
• Links to articles and webinars to learn more about birding with a disability;
• Our upcoming events (including monthly virtual accessible field trips, held in partnership with Georgia Audubon);
• The Birdability Map (a crowd-sourced map of accessible birding locations, with details of the accessibility features of them);
• Ways you can get involved and support our work, and much more.

Participants on a Georgia Audubon and Shepard Spinal Center spring birding retreat. Photo: Melanie Furr, Georgia Audubon.

We are so excited to do this work, and have received so much amazing feedback already. “Thank you for starting this conversation; I finally feel seen and cared about,” said one birder with a disability. An able-bodied birder said, “I’m so grateful for you sharing all these resources. I want to be inclusive, but I didn’t know how. Thank you for showing me how to better serve my community.” The icing on the cake is that although we’re focusing on birding, our work applies to so many other nature-based activities, and the carry-over into everyday life is huge. Interpreters, regardless of their focus, can apply so much of our recommendations to their audiences, and keep inclusion and access as a priority in their work.

So sign up for our monthly newsletter, follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, donate if you’re able… And together, let’s make sure that birding and the outdoors truly is for everybody and every body!

Freya McGregor, OTR/L, CIG is the Birdability Coordinator and Occupational Therapist. Birding since childhood, her ‘dodgy’ knee often creates an accessibility challenge for her, and she is passionate about enabling all birders and potential future birders to enjoy birding and nature as much as she does. You can follow her on Instagram @the.ot.birder

Embracing Diversity: Baby Steps

Hispanic Family Enjoying the South Carolina Botanical Garden Event: Keeping Cool in the 19th C

The South Carolina Botanical Garden is a free public garden on the campus of Clemson University, we are open dawn to dusk 365 day a year. By default, then, we are open to everyone who wants to come and visit, and we truly value our openness and accessibility to the public. Last year, however, we decided that being open is not enough, and we started to make some more active steps towards affirming the diversity of our visitors. We hope the Garden will be a more inclusive space for all. Most recently, our effort has focused on Hispanic visitors to the Garden. We have begun to translate our interpretive signs and promotional materials into Spanish. I, a non-Spanish speaker was given this task. (Yikes! no one on our staff speaks Spanish and, since I created our interpretive signs, I got the job). I thought it might be helpful to share how I went about this project, but also to solicit advice from others who may have engaged in similar tasks.

The Hispanic population in South Carolina is growing quickly, in fact, according to the US Census from 1990 to 2009 the state’s Hispanic population grew by over 460%. In the upstate, according to the Census Bureau’s fast facts, most counties have a Hispanic population of approximately 5% of the whole, but Greenville County, containing the nearest large city to us, has a population of almost 10%. When I visit the Garden on the weekends and after hours, it is clear that many Hispanic families visit and enjoy the Garden. We would like to make this population feel more welcomed and included.

Nov. 1, 2019 – A Vibrant Celebration of Life: Day of the Dead. Traditional community altar, mariachi, food trucks, activities for children, t-shirts for sale, and displays. Event was held at SC Botanical Gardens.

This process of translating materials was initially prompted when we were lucky enough to be chosen to partner with some campus and community organizations to host a Día de los Muertos Festival, at which the Mexican Consulate for the Carolinas was the honored guest. This event proved immensely popular, and through it we have been made aware of how many Latino people in the community are willing, and excited, to share their culture and traditions with others. The festival was a cooperative venture between the Garden, Clemson University’s Commission on Latino Affairs, the Division of Inclusion and Equity, the Hispanic Alliance, a local school district, and Hispanic arts organization.

Since I do not speak Spanish, my first step was to locate resources. I am immensely lucky in that we are on the campus of Clemson University which has a language department.  One of the professors, who is very fond of our Garden, volunteered to translate for us, and she worked very quickly to make the first translations. (I did consider asking the high school Spanish teacher at my children’s school to see if he would be willing to help out – this may be an additional resource).  This first translation was of the signs in our desert garden.  When a second project came up, to translate our Friends Program Brochure into Spanish, it was on an extremely tight schedule. The ask was made just a week before the second Día de los Muertos Festival this year. In this case I felt I had to take a different route to get materials translated, particularly since this was at the end of term, and the professors were busy with exams, grading and other activities. I used Google Translate and then asked for Facebook for volunteers to help proof the result. I highly recommend this route, since many people seemed thrilled to volunteer themselves, or knew others that they thought would be willing to help.  This has the added benefit of making the public aware of our desire to be more inclusive. Ultimately, I found a friend and a member of the festival committee who read the google translation, and I was pleasantly surprised that this translation only needed a very few small corrections. I was able to produce a flyer for the Festival with such wonderful support, with one day to spare!

Our Friends Brochure, translated into Spanish

Page 2 of Our Friends Brochure

Both these projects happened very quickly, and I did not have a great deal of time to research the correct way to undertake such a project. However, in the process I did come across a resource that gave me some guidance and might be useful to share with others who might be interested in reaching out to the Hispanic community.

https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-51LatinoCommunicationsGuide.pdf

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Now, the problem I face is how to incorporate the translations into our pre-existing interpretive signs, seen below. It seems ungainly to add the text in a separate, smaller, sign, but expensive and time-consuming to replace the signs with bi-lingual signs.  If anyone has any thoughts or experience with this issue, I would be most grateful for any input. Happy holidays and Feliz Navidad!

Sue Watts

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Our Existing Monolingual Signs – my question now is how to incorporate the Spanish?
Any ideas welcomed!!

It’s All About Perspective (and Communication)

One constant found throughout interpreting any part of the past, “it is all about perspective”.  From the private soldier’s view of a military campaign to a student at Kent State in 1970.  Depending on what perspective you examine, it will dictate how your audience views the event being presented.  As interpreters, we know this bias and counter it by presenting multiple viewpoints in order to tell as complete a story as possible.  Have you ever considered the same may be true for our outreach into the education system?  Could schools/teachers be reluctant to efforts from museums, parks, aquariums for reasons other than lack of funding?  Let’s take a moment to examine this issue.

Recently I decided to take what no spare time I have available to get a doctoral degree in education in order to become a better interpreter.  Going into the program with a completely different perspective than all the teachers and administrators, it creates an interesting dynamic.  While I try to keep my perspective/personal feelings in check, occasionally them come out.  In a recent class, an exchange took place between me and another student who is a superintendent of a local school district.  In our online discussions I said this in response to a comment about the need for more research on students learning:

As someone who does works outside the framework of a school, I tend to be more vocal in the issues seen within the brick and mortar of educational institutions.  For museums, parks, etc we are always constantly evolving, changing and pushing the envelope due to the individuals who comprise our peers, but also we are given greater leeway to experiment in the field and not constrained by having to teach to test.  We rabble rousers though have a hard time effecting real change in schools because we sometimes take a little too confrontational attitude towards K-12 education.

As you can see it was semi-confrontational yet got my point across.  I felt my thoughts were correct in stating them.  Here is the response I got:

There are rabble-rousers in from the education world as well.  Just ask!  The ALSDE is very aware of my bias, concerns, and passion.  But they always know I am in it for what is best for students.  Many times outsiders forget that those inside the education world love and want what is best for students probably more than anyone, so we get defensive when we perceive that someone from the outside thinks they know better than we do and almost assuming that if we don’t know that we must not want what is best for students.  But educators are blinded often and need help, a push, or an idea from those who have not always be in the school world.  I think the idea that is important to understand is that we need to work together and try to understand each other.  Covey’s principle of “Seek first to understand before seeking to be understood” applies very well here.

As my new 10-year-old stepdaughter would say “BOOM! ROASTED!”.  This individual showed me how just one perspective can cloud your judgment.  It is only through communication between a museum and a school administrator can progress be made in educating K-12 students.  Communication between our sides is desperately needed to get a complete story of how to best complement each other to educate the next generation.  Without each side talking to each other the students do not benefit from a museum, in this case, and our programs are designed to what we want and not to want is desired from the school/curriculum.  Be sure to get the whole story not only in your interpretation but in how to you engage schools about programming.

A Community-based Approach to School Programs

I don’t know how it is at your site, but here at Land Between the Lakes, our public events and our school programs operate very differently. With our public events, many different partners often get involved. For example, at our annual Hummingbird Festival at the Woodlands Nature Station, groups such as a local beekeeping association, a master gardeners club, a nearby national wildlife refuge, the local university agricultural extension office, and others all get involved and participate in the event. These various partners bring resources, support, and experience that we can not provide on our own, and they gain a venue with a large audience to promote their causes and their services. Many of our public events work in this fashion.

However, with school groups, it’s a different story. We tend to manage our school programs fairly single-handedly with our own staff. There have been a few exceptions, but for the large majority of cases this is how our school programs typically have run.

Until recently.

A few years ago, our living history farm, the Homeplace, started a community partnership with the local school system that has been an amazing experiment to watch develop. I wanted to share this story because I find it to be an inspiring and impressive example of how community involvement can bring a whole new type of meaningfulness to a program.

The story begins about 5 years ago. At that time, one of the interpreters from the Homeplace had been participating as a guest presenter in an annual event at the local elementary school, a special day for kindergarteners called Pumpkin Patch Day. She noticed that while it was a great event, the grounds were a bit small, and the topography was hilly and a bit awkward for some of the activities. So, she decided to suggest to the event coordinator the idea of possibly holding the event at the Homeplace in the future. And the event coordinator thought the suggestion sounded interesting.

The following year, in 2014, they decided to try this out. And they decided to offer the event on two different days: one for each of the elementary schools in the school system. Unlike typical school programs, this wasn’t simply a program that our staff was planning on their own and inviting schools to attend. Rather, the school system was playing an integral role in planning the program, and working with our staff to make it work well at our site. Well, it turned out to be a huge success! In fact, both our staff and the school system liked it so much that they have expanded on this structure so that now we offer similar programs like the Pumpkin Patch Days for about 5 different grade levels, each its own grade-level-appropriate topic.

What is so unique about these programs, and different from our traditional school programs, is how involved the whole community becomes. At the Pumpkin Patch Days, about 25 high school students who are members of the high school leadership club help lead the groups of kindergarteners, and some of them even run some of the activities. For example, several students led an activity for the younger kids where they learned the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. The local Kiwanis Club donates snacks for all the kids. Their members also lead an activity in which one of them does storytelling in the character of Johnny Appleseed, and the kids learn about this legend. Teachers from the school system plan most of the logistics of the day, as well as provide the pumpkins for the pumpkin patch. And our staff lead several activities in which the kids learn about their agricultural heritage, such as learning where wool comes from by getting to meet our sheep, touch real wool, and watch it get spun into yarn.

Because the program has been set up as a community event, tons of parents attend. You can see the parents both happy to see the little kids having such a great day, as well as being proud of the high school students for taking on such a leadership role. As an observer of the program, it was so inspiring to see how so many members of the community came together at our site and enjoyed an experience that both connected them to their local heritage as well as brought them together as a community.

And now that this model has expanded to multiple grade levels, this kind of program is taking place numerous times throughout the year at the Homeplace. It feels really good to see that our site and our interpreters can offer something that the community really wants and enjoys.

And by the way, did I mention that it’s not that hard either? Because the community is so invested in it, many other people besides just our staff take on a lot of the planning work, supply many of the materials, and even lead many of the activities!

Now, maybe we’re behind the times here at Land Between the Lakes and many of your sites have been working with this kind of community partnership model for some of your school programs for years. I don’t know. If so, good for you! But it’s something that has recently taken root here, and it seems to be a really great thing, and I thought I would share the experience. Maybe it will give you a different way to look at your school programs and some possible opportunities for the future.

 
Aviva Yasgur
Executive Director, Friends of Land Between the Lakes

Picking pumpkins from the pumpkin patch

Learning where wool comes from

Storytelling with “Johnny Appleseed” from the Kiwanis Club

High school students leading old-fashioned outdoor games

High school students teaching kindergarteners about fruit and vegetables

Resource Protection vs. Adventure Recreation

by Cindy Carpenter

When you can’t beat them do you join them?

This is a question that I can’t get out of my mind when thinking of a recreational experience I had this past summer. It was in a place I have visited and enjoyed since I was a kid, a private resort in the Pennsylvania Poconos where my grandfather built a cottage in the 1920’s. When most people were on the golf course or playing tennis my siblings and I were in the woods. A favorite walk is still to a trio of waterfalls, none more than 20 feet high or so, but collectively an impressive scene of cascades and trout pools in a steep-sided gorge. Often we’d be the only ones there and pretend that it was ours alone. I truly love the place.

A few times, when the volume of water was low enough that we felt the right mixture of confidence, cautiousness and adventure, we would cross the stream on large rocks and ease along the bottom of the lowest pool’s rock edge with plenty of foot and hand holds. We could find more foot and hand holds in the next series of rocks far enough from the stream to not be slippery to get to the edge of the middle pool. Here we could enjoy the sight and sound of the waterfall above and the one below. I don’t remember ever climbing up to the highest falls. Was it risky? Maybe, but we knew the limits of our bravery and had respect for rocks and water.

I confess I don’t feel confident to do the same now, decades later. So last summer when my sister suggested we go on the property’s new “waterfall ramble” up these falls I was ready for the adventure. The ramble is a series of ropes tied to trees up the steep wooded side slope that takes the hiker to the upper pools without picking one’s way up the large rocks. But at the first sight of it I was appalled. Across the stream was a gully along the mountainside with the first white and red striped rope lying there, ready to support more feet scrambling up the steep slope. In recent years I had witnessed this slope showing signs of climbers, but never had the damage looked so severe.

Well, we went. My sister said it was very slippery the last time she climbed it when the weather had been rainy. Most of the ropes were helpful even in the dryer conditions to scramble up the slopes, tier after tier, with short walks in between. Each segment has a label attached to a tree, such as “Electric Slide” or “The Tug of War.” Boulders lie everywhere in the woods. In one section we had to squeeze between two flat-sided boulders in a place labeled “The Toaster.” There are a couple other imaginatively labeled features along the way. One sign interpreted the glacial history of the area by an upper pool where I had never stood before.

“Across the stream was a gully along the mountainside with the first white and red striped rope lying there, ready to support more feet scrambling up the steep slope. “

I admit I had fun. I felt I had gotten some exercise, seen lovely sites, and was entertained also. But I am still haunted by that question. I did not have the opportunity to query the property’s current management about the origin of the ramble, but I know interpretive nature-oriented experiences are being de-emphasized. More energy is being put into fee-based adventure recreation, though there is no fee for this ramble.

Is there a problem being solved here? Did they fear for the safety of the increased urban clientele around the waterfall? Seeing the user-made trail getting more and more obvious, did they throw up their hands and decide they may as well make it safer with ropes? Did they weigh this against the resource damage? Are they thinking of the sustainability of this outdoor adventure? How deep will the gully be when I next visit this waterfall, this place in my heart? What will it look like in a few more summers after more and more feet have scrambled up and down? Have you, oh blog reader, heard of a situation like this? Are waterfall rambles a trend? And then the question to myself, will I go on the ramble again?

Interpretive Holidays

Nature Santa

This is the time of the year when we are having time to evaluate or programs, reflect on what we have done this calendar year and try to figure out what we want to accomplish next year. On my desk there was a sheet that one of my interpreters left from her “Holiday Nature Scavenger Hunt”.

The first item to search on this scavenger hunt were two “turtle” doves”, the next one was “Partridge” in a “pear” tree, and so on. On the back of the page there were some hints about where to find the items or how would they  “translate” to native items that they could find in our Nature Preserve.

Participants were fascinated because they have heard this song and probably sung it at some point without even thinking about the meaning of some of these items. They related the song to the holidays but had no idea what they were or where they came from.

In North Carolina we were looking for Mourning Doves instead of “turtle” doves. Partridges are related to the local Bobwhite Quails, English Ivy is a very aggressive invasive plant towards native species compared to our local poison ivy which you do not want to use for decoration!

At the end program participants not only understood where the roots of this song were but also how it could translate to native plants and animals in the Carolinas. After the program they could not wait to go back and share with others all the stuff that they have seen while hiking and singing along the trails.

Remember that every time you make your theme relevant visitors will remember and hopefully care about the resources while having fun.

Happy (interpretive) Holidays!