Today we’re joined on the show by Jennifer Grant, a Chicago author of books for children and adults. I’ve loved Jennifer’s work for years and was delighted to pick her brain about her newest work, Consider the Birds, a lovely picture book filled with wonder.

Jennifer talks all things children’s books, birds, and faith, including how her faith compelled her to take a stand against certain governmental practices in Chicago this autumn. Jennifer is a gentle soul and a wise guide, and I know you’ll be just as enriched by our conversation as I was.

Check out more of Jennifer’s work on her website, including fabulous books for adults like my favorite, Dimming the Day.

Gina and I became friends over social media a few years back. Then we became good friends when she started regularly texting me photos of Northern Cardinals. I live in California, you see, and those red beauties rarely make it out past the Rocky Mountains. What a gift!

It was only then that I picked up Gina’s book: Dorothy & Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis. and discovered that she is not only a generous cardinal photo-sender, but she’s a phenomenal writer as well. I learned so much from this book about two authors I’d admired for years but hadn’t known very deeply.

Join Gina and me for a conversation about these two saints of the evangelical church, the power of friendship, and why cardinals just might be the world’s best birds. Plus, check out her fantastic SubStack, Dear, Strange Things and her fun blog about Charles Dickens.

Birding is for everyone, or so the popular saying goes. And it really is! You can bird if you’re young or old, bored or busy, a city-dweller or a rural homesteader. There are blind birder’s groups and those for the hearing-impaired. You can bird if you have mobility issues or disability of any kind. It’s always possible.

Bu sometimes it’s more difficult than others. If you have any sort of physical limitations, you may need to know how flat the trail is. Is it wheelchair accessible? If you can’t hear well, you’ll need a birding guide to turn around when she speaks to the group so that you can see her lips move. There are a thousand ways to make birding more accessible. That’s where Freya MacGregor comes in.

Freya is a consultant at Access Birding, a researcher at Virginia Tech whose work centers on improving access and inclusion for disabled birders. She’s also the author of the forthcoming book by Princeton University Press, A Field Guide to Accessible Birding in the United States. Originally from Australia, Freya comes to us from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Whether you’re currently disabled, love someone who is currently disabled, or are looking toward your older years when disability is even more likely, this interview will be a gift to you. Freya’s joy is infectious, and her simple solutions for helping include everyone in the joy of birding are things I’ve already started to put into practice wherever I can.

Do you have a disability or love someone who does? What strategies have you found for making birding more accessible?