Birdability Birders: Conversations about Birding with Access Challenges. Episode 3: Letícia Soares.

Birdability and American Bird Conservancy (ABC) are co-hosting an online interview series aiming to promote accessibility, inclusion, and representation within the birding community.

Throughout the series, interviewees will discuss their experience with birding, what everyday life is like living with their disability or other health concern, and what they need from the birding community and birding locations for them to feel welcome, included, and able to access birding locations.

The third episode will feature Letícia Soares. Letícia Soares (she/her) is a broadly trained ornithologist. She is a post-doctoral associate at the Advanced Facility for Avian Research at Western University, and was a co-chair of the joint meeting of the American Ornithological Society and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists in 2021. Throughout her career, she has done field research with birds from the Amazon forest in Brazil, where she’s originally from, to the Caribbean and the mixed forests in Ontario. She has battled Fibromyalgia for eight years and is currently learning to live with Long Covid, which causes chronic pain, fatigue, brain fog, among other symptoms. She considers herself a non traditional birder and is passionate about making birding and ornithology more inclusive and accessible. 

Closed captions and an American Sign Language interpreter will be provided. The series is free to attend, but registration is required. Register to attend the third episode here.

New interviews will be held live online on the first Tuesday of every month, 6-7.30pm Eastern, from October 2021 to March 2022. You can read more about the series, upcoming guests and access recorded interviews here.