What We Do
Birding is for everybody but it’s not always easy.
Our Scope
Through education, outreach and advocacy, Birdability works to ensure the birding community and the outdoors are welcoming, inclusive, safe and accessible for everybody. We focus on people with mobility challenges, blindness or low vision, chronic illness, intellectual or developmental disabilities, mental illness, and those who are neurodivergent, deaf or hard of hearing or who have other health concerns. In addition to current birders, we strive to introduce birding to people with disabilities and other health concerns who are not yet birders so they too can experience the joys of birding.
… because birding is for everybody and every body!
The three spokes of our work
There are three spokes that make up our work at Birdability. Rather than columns or pillars -- which run parallel to each other -- these spokes are part of a wheelchair's wheel, and they keep feeding into each other as the wheel keeps on rolling.
Improve the physical accessibility of birding locations. This includes trails, bird blinds, observation platforms, feeder stations and car birding routes. Our Access Considerations Guidance Document shares, in detail, what features make up a truly accessible birding location. The Birdability Map is a crowd-sourced map sharing detailed accessibility information for reasonably accessible birding locations, so folks can find out ahead of time the information they may need to plan a successful outing.
Empower a welcoming and inclusive birding community. This covers everything from how an outing leader can promote friendliness and an encouraging atmosphere on a bird outing, to recommendations to organizations about basic disability access needs they can address on an organization-wide level. Check out our Welcoming and Inclusive Birders and our Inclusive Organizations Guidance Documents for more!
Introduce people with access challenges to birding. 'Build it and they will come' might work sometimes, but it's no guarantee. We encourage bird clubs, nature centers, Audubon chapters and everyone else to intentionally reach out to local disability support groups and other organizations and actively invite folks with disabilities and other health concerns to come and share the joys of birding with you! Our Steps to Implement Accessible and Inclusive Birding is the place to start.
We need our physical environment to be accessible, and we need our social, cultural and institutional environments to be welcoming, safe and inclusive for all those potential new birders so they know they are genuinely wanted, and to make sure they come back! We work on these three spokes simultaneously to help ensure that birding truly is for every body.
What we’re looking forward to:
Finding people with disabilities through local support groups to share the joys of birding with: people with spinal cord injuries, amputations, multiple sclerosis, stroke survivors, veterans...
Introducing accessible outings at birding festivals.
Creating Birdability programming at kids' disabled camps.
Collaborating on Birdability programming at rehabilitation hospitals.
Introducing birding at Independent Living Centers and through Easter Seals programming.
Providing Birdability programming at schools for the deaf and blind.
Establishing bird feeding stations at assisted living centers.
Introducing Birdability to Scouting and 4-H groups as a service project for them to provide trail work.
Photo in page header: Rhianyon Larson. Taken during a Tucson Audubon and Southern Arizona Adaptive Sports accessible bird outing at Sweetwater Wetlands in Tucson, Arizona, September 2020.