Virginia Rose says birding is in her DNA. She remembers her grandmother in her green leather coat with birdwatching binoculars around her neck. When her grandmother died, she left Rose her Peterson Field Guide from the 1930s with her notes in it about what birds she saw.

“That’s probably where I got some of my passion,” Rose says, “but my mom was also into identifying birds and plants and trees. There were field guides open all over the house. My dad was a geologist, so my parents were very much into identifying things with books.”

Rose, a retired English teacher and wheelchair user, got her call to birding when she attended a 2003 presentation by the Austin, Texas, chapter of the Audubon Society. “That was really it for me,” she says. “I was so excited about identifying birds and learning about birds and going on field trips and meeting all these like-minded people.”

Today, Rose is the president of Birdability, a nonprofit she founded in 2018 with the mission of “sharing the joys of birding with people who have disabilities, and to ensure birding is accessible for everybody.”

Flying Like an Eagle

Not everyone has birding in their blood. Steven Sanchez discovered his interest in birding by simply looking out his window. Sanchez, a machinist and wheelchair user who sustained a low-level spinal cord injury in 2004 when he was 17, enjoys photography as a hobby. His girlfriend, NM contributor Ashley Lyn Olson, puts lots of colorful plants and flowers on the outside of their Northern California condo, which has the side benefit of attracting various birds. Sanchez started taking pictures of the birds right through the window.

Once he started identifying birds at the condo, he started paying more attention to birds all around him. He had grown used to seeing hawks and even a bald eagle preying on ground squirrels at a nearby park he and his friends frequent, but on one visit something much bigger caught his eye.

He had just arrived at the park, and he noticed a bird out of the side of his eye that looked a lot larger than a hawk. The bird flew around the area, and Sanchez honed it on its distinct markings — streaks of light brown feathers that appeared almost golden against its dominant, darker brown coat. “I was like, ‘Holy crap — that is a golden eagle!’” he says. With a wingspan of seven and a half feet, golden eagles are the largest hunting bird in North America.

A month or two later, Sanchez and his friends were flying their drones and remote-controlled airplanes when the same golden eagle returned and flew alongside them for a while. Sanchez was using first-person view goggles to see from the drone he was flying. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m literally flying with a golden eagle right now!’” he says. “That would definitely be one of my most awe-inspiring moments of birding.”

Bonnie Lewkowicz’s most memorable bird encounter was equally awe-inspiring but on the other end of the size spectrum. Lewkowicz, a program manager for Access Northern California, part of the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program, and a wheelchair user from the San Francisco Bay Area, went to the Santa Cruz Botanical Gardens in search of a rare leucistic Anna’s hummingbird.

“It was a white hummingbird that I had read about. A few friends and I went in search of it thinking, ‘Yeah right, we’re going to see this teeny little bird in this huge acreage of plants,’” she recalls. “Amazingly, I spotted it, and it was this incredible moment of trying to scream as a quad — which wasn’t very loud — to get my friends’ attention to tell them that I found it. There happened to be a photographer also looking for it. He got some great photos and shared them with us.”

Lewkowicz got into birding 25 years ago as something fun to do with her husband. She emphasizes that having the right bird-watching equipment is a big deal. As a quad with no hand function, she can hold binoculars but cannot focus them while she is holding them. Sanchez is building wheelchair-mounted binoculars to help Lewkowicz and others have more control over their view. Another option is to view birds through a telephoto lens (usually 400mm or more) but you’ll need a good mount to stabilize the camera enough for sharp photos.

Lewkowicz would recommend birding to anyone regardless of their level of mobility and skills. “It’s a great way to be out there and participate in something with friends and family, and it is a really easy activity to be integrated into,” she says. “You can join your local bird club. It’s a great way to meet people with similar interests. It’s a community that’s very welcoming, and it’s easy to find people that like to go out birding.”

She says that there are many ways birding can be done. Whether going out in your car or your wheelchair, putting feeders up and letting them come to you, or something called a bird sit, where you find a place and focus on the bird songs to guide your mediation — birding can be whatever you want it to be.

When Rose started, she was the only member of the Travis Audubon Society with a disability. Twenty years later she believes that’s still the case. “It was community, and it was a way to be outside again, and it was just so healthy and positive, and the fact that I was in a wheelchair just had nothing to do with it,” she says of her experiences. “For years and years and years, I just hoofed it along with all the walking people, and I just did whatever I could. Most of the time, we were not on accessible trails. Nobody was thinking about it.”

Getting Out There

Still, depending on your level of function, fitness and what type of mobility equipment you use, it’s not always feasible to get out to all the spots that other birders go. In 2019, Birdability worked with the National Audubon Society to launch a crowdsourced map and database that details the accessibility features of birding locations around the world. The map now includes hundreds of entries in the U.S. and an expanding list of foreign destinations.

In addition to the map, Birdability has other resources and information about accessible birding, including a guide to implementing an accessible birding outing, lists of inclusive organizations and adaptive birding equipment, as well as a blog with posts by different writers sharing their accessible birding experiences. Birdability also provides virtual field trips that follow disabled birders to interesting locations.

Multiple studies have shown the health benefits of getting out in nature, and Rose agrees that the time spent outside is one of her biggest draws to birding. Rose even plans trips around birding. She went to High Island off the coast of Texas to see warblers stop during their migration north. Rose says she loves all the birds she sees, but if she had to pick a favorite breed, it would be warblers, small colorful birds that she described as “like flying Easter eggs.”

“They all come over the gulf, and then they land in the parks where we are,” she says. “So you just get this glorious abundance of migratory birds that are exhausted and hungry. If the wind is not in their favor, they’ll just stop and eat right there in front of you.” She planned to go to Ohio a few weeks later to see the warblers again as they continued their northward journey.

Even as experienced birders, Rose, Sanchez, and Lewkowicz all have more places they want to go and additional birds they want to see. After watching The Big Year, a 2011 movie about birders starring John Cleese and Jack Black, Sanchez hopes to go birding in some of the jungle environments shown in the film. He also puts seeing an albatross and a condor — both known for their size, with wingspans of over 11 feet and 9 feet, respectively — at the top of his list.