‘Birdability’: Ex-teacher touts birding for mobility-impaired
She’ll take part in bird count and says others in wheelchairs should.
A few years ago, out on a nature trail, Virginia Rose, enraptured by birds she was tracking through her binoculars, grew separated from her birding group.
She was all alone, happily listening to bird songs and searching out their sources, when, eventually, a woman tapped her on the shoulder: “How did you get here?” “What do you mean, ‘How did I get here?’” she said to the woman, as if the answer was self-evident. “On my wheels.”
Rose, 59, has used a wheelchair ever since a horseback riding accident when she was 14.
The woman, explaining that she wished her own mobility-impaired brother spent more time outside, suddenly grew teary.
The episode gave Rose, an avid birder who is on the board of directors of Travis Audubon, the idea to start an organization to help people with mobility impairments experience nature. She’s calling it Birdability. “The mobility-impaired can do more than they think,” she says.
To that end, she’s assembled a list of more than 30 parks in the Austin area that are accessible to paraplegics like her. And Sunday, she will engage in a dawn-to-dusk bird count to raise awareness of how people with disabilities can participate in birding.
A recently retired teacher — she spent the last 15 years of her career at Cedar Park High School, where she taught Advanced Placement English — Rose prepared for a recent interview by writing what amounted to a lesson plan: On yellow, college-ruled paper she had written Birdability’s goals in a neat cursive:
“People with mobility chal-