Birdability

Freya McGregor

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.

Freya (she/her) is the staff person at Birdability, responsible for resource creation, programming, communications, fundraising, administration, and operations. As an occupational therapist, she understands ways to modify the physical and cultural environments, adapt tasks and equipment to enable participation, and public health programming, and her background is in blindness and low vision services. As such, much of Birdability’s work is done through an occupational therapy lens.

Her ‘dodgy’ knee often creates an accessibility challenge for her when she’s trying to go birding. In her spare time she works as the Outreach Coordinator for the radio show and podcast Talkin’ Birds: a radio show and podcast about birds and conservation. You can follow her on Instagram @the.ot.birder