To be clear, Donna Posont loves Crimson-winged Blackbirds. She does a killer impression of their tune—conk-la-REEEE!—and welcomes their heartening message that, chill be damned, spring is coming. However proper now, she actually simply wants the squawking birds to close up. The 35 or so folks she has gathered round an outside wooden range can barely hear Rick Simek, the soft-spoken naturalist demonstrating how maple syrup is made. “Hey, you guys,” she yells on the tons of of raucous Crimson-wings, “maintain it down over there within the bushes!”
Listening to is essential for this crowd: Most are blind, like Posont, or in any other case visually impaired. A sighted individual may wrestle to admire the brown earth, black bushes, and steel-wool clouds of this cut-and-paste March day, however throughout Simek’s lesson, the assembled take within the scene via different senses. They hear geese, chickadees, and woodpeckers amid the din of lusty blackbirds and really feel a blast of shin-roasting warmth as Simek opens the range door. They odor the caramelly aroma of boiling sap and style the profound sweetness of just-made syrup when the samples are prepared. Sam Rau, who was born blind, is having the time of his life. “It’s all proper right here,” he says. “You don’t should go very far to search out miracles.”
Till lately, Rau didn’t know a lot about birds. The traditional notion of birdwatching—visually parsing teensy distinctions in shorebird shapes or the supercilia of waterthrushes—will not be an possibility for him. However he’s undoubtedly a birder. That’s due to Posont’s program, Birding by Ear and Beyond, which has introduced visually impaired individuals to the College of Michigan-Dearborn Environmental Interpretive Middle most months since 2009. Rau, who started attending a couple of yr in the past, now finds himself figuring out species he hears and serious about how they’re part of the ecosystem round him. He has fallen arduous for birdsong.
Posont’s initiative suits inside a rising motion to make the outside extra accessible and sweep away antiquated concepts about whom birding is for. On the identical time, nevertheless, she is one thing of an outlier. Skeptical of sure particular lodging for the blind, Posont pushes the Chicken Brains—as her group’s members name themselves—to navigate the world independently. Reality be informed, this system isn’t actually about birds. Its final function is to assist individuals construct elementary expertise. “It’s about serving to them achieve confidence to reside life as a blind individual,” she says.
This self-reliance ethos is on show within the day’s “Maple Magic” program. Posont explains the best way to discover a maple tree in leafless woods with out visible cues: really feel for a diamond sample within the bark, and for reverse, not alternating, branches. She passes round tree-tapping instruments for all to carry, then leads the group out of the classroom. Michael Solomon, a sighted naturalist, will assist them select a tree, nevertheless it’s the Chicken Brains who’ll take turns hand-drilling a gap in its trunk and hammering residence a spile from which sap will ooze.
Posont entrusts the job of carrying the instruments to Jerusalem Crawley, who’s visually impaired and has attended these occasions since he was a baby. Again then, he didn’t notice birds got here in numerous species. “I’m like, they’re all the identical. They’re simply birds,” he says. “This has opened up my eyes.”
Like some folks she mentors, Posont was a late-blooming birder. She doesn’t recall listening to birds as a baby, or seeing them earlier than her sight started to fade the summer season after second grade—although she grew up on a West Virginia farm. (“So I assume I heard a rooster.”) She was born with a genetic situation referred to as retinitis pigmentosa. Individuals with RP steadily lose their peripheral imaginative and prescient till, in lots of circumstances, they’re legally blind. Now in her 60s, Posont retains some gentle notion—she is aware of if it’s day or evening and might typically discern home windows—however has no usable imaginative and prescient.
When she left residence for West Liberty College, only a few miles away close to Wheeling, she needed to check biology. However she shortly ran right into a harsh actuality: The college was unequipped to show science to a blind pupil. And Posont, who had not but discovered to learn Braille or use a cane, couldn’t discover her classroom, not to mention navigate a chemistry lab. Disenchanted, she earned her diploma in social work as an alternative.
After faculty Posont labored at a college for the blind and later began a small enterprise that bought snacks at authorities buildings. (The 1936 Randolph-Sheppard Act gave blind folks, who face excessive unemployment, precedence for merchandising contracts on federal property.) In 1987 she and her then husband, who can also be blind, moved to Michigan, the place they continued promoting snacks and raised 5 youngsters. Household life didn’t really feel restricted or outlined by blindness, says their son Paul. His dad and mom shepherded him and his siblings to sports activities and college actions, counting on buses, taxis, and associates to get round. They ate home-cooked dinners collectively and attended church twice every week. “She instilled some actually good values in us,” he says. “Present up and present love and compassion.”
Nor did having blind dad and mom imply the youngsters might get away with something. “Sighted dad and mom see their youngsters going into the kitchen, however I hear the cookie jar opening or juice pouring right into a cup,” Posont told Family Circle in 1999. “I odor toothpaste when my youngsters have brushed their tooth, cleaning soap once they’ve washed their fingers, and sweet on their breath.”
As her youngsters obtained older, Posont obtained antsy. She started volunteering at Camp Tuhsmeheta, an outside training facility established by the Michigan Faculty for the Blind. (Its identify is brief for “contact, odor, hear, style.”) There, she loved serving to attendees expertise conventional summer season camp actions like swimming and canoeing but additionally grew to become captivated by the character she might sense throughout her. Why, she puzzled, wasn’t there extra emphasis on studying about animals and vegetation?
She needed to show she might be taught biology, and this time she wouldn’t be deterred.
Posont by no means misplaced her need to check science, and now she needed to be taught all concerning the atmosphere and go that data on to different blind of us. In 2008 she enrolled at UM-Dearborn, close to her residence. She needed to show she might be taught biology, and this time she wouldn’t be deterred.
Her inquiries on the profession workplace led her to Orin Gelderloos, then director of the college’s Environmental Interpretive Middle. She defined her concepts about educating others however admitted that she didn’t but know a lot about science. “And I mentioned, properly, I don’t know a lot about how blind folks function, however I’d wish to be taught extra about that,” Gelderloos says. “So I assume we’re a group.”
It was throughout a 2009 internship at Camp Tuhsmeheta that Posont landed on birds, ubiquitous and vocal, as a perfect automobile for making nature vivid and accessible. She started studying every little thing she might and, again at college, convened different blind folks, primarily youngsters, to share her new obsession. Some species, like Black-capped Chickadees and Jap Phoebes, are “name-sayers,” she taught them, utilizing plush Audubon birds that play recorded sounds. English phrases might assist them keep in mind different songs, just like the Northern Cardinal’s Wit, wit? Cheer, cheer cheer! (A cardinal’s calls, she says, evoke marbles clacking collectively.) If a fowl feels like an American Robin with a sore throat, that’s a Scarlet Tanager. If a robin has taken singing classes, it’s a Rose-breasted Grosbeak.
The group started assembly month-to-month, and Posont referred to as it Birding by Ear, later including “and Past” to mirror its widening scope. She grew extra assured as a nature educator, drawing on mentorship from Gelderloos. “Once we would research bushes in school, she needed to really feel each tree trunk and the shapes of the leaves,” he says. “She was very, very persistent.” By the point Posont took his discipline biology course in 2012, the 2 had turn out to be a group, simply as he’d mentioned. He was nearing retirement and had misplaced a lot of his high-frequency listening to with age, so on class outings she would identify the birds she heard, and he would inform the scholars about what they have been seeing.
With the Chicken Brains, Posont additionally went past species identification to debate nesting, foraging, and migration—then bushes, amphibians, and whole ecosystems. She blended these nature classes with workout routines to construct expertise and confidence: Members made bat homes, baked pumpkin pies, and began campfires to prepare dinner s’mores. “I didn’t know I used to be a instructor for a very long time,” she says, “however I’m.”
Although the group was small, the college took be aware. The interpretive heart employed Posont as a naturalist as quickly as she graduated in 2015 with a serious in environmental research. And a minor in biology.
Compared to earlier generations of visually impaired folks, Posont’s protégés face fewer obstacles to studying about and having fun with birds. It was a unique world when accessibility guide Jerry Berrier was in faculty within the Seventies. Berrier, who has been blind since start, could by no means have found his lifelong ardour had a biology professor not loaned him a vinyl set of fowl recordings and primarily based his last examination grade on what number of species he might establish. Berrier considers it one of many nice presents of his life. “I miss plenty of the sweetness that’s proper there for the taking for individuals who can see it,” he says. “Birding has given me a solution to get a few of that magnificence that I’d in any other case miss.”
Now anybody can obtain apps like Larkwire, Merlin, and the Audubon Bird Guide to be taught birdsong. They’ll discover a wealth of audio and different assets on-line. It will probably nonetheless be tough for blind folks to search out birding companions, however advocates are working to vary that. Berrier leads inclusive outings and has helped Mass Audubon design greater than a dozen all-persons trails. Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, an Audubon chapter in Madison, has partnered with the Wisconsin Council of the Blind and Visually Impaired on birding-by-ear programs. And since 2018 an initiative called Birdability has supplied instruments and knowledge to assist make birding extra inviting and accessible to folks with disabilities.
Posont’s strategy displays a philosophical divide throughout the incapacity neighborhood.
Birding by Ear and Past stands out, although, for programming that has continued constantly for a decade and a half. “That’s superior, as a result of it’s a disgrace to get somebody excited a couple of pastime after which not have the infrastructure to proceed supporting that pastime,” says Freya McGregor, an occupational therapist and a researcher and guide for inclusivity in birding. “You possibly can preserve constructing on neighborhood and preserve constructing on expertise.”
Posont’s strategy to this system additionally displays a philosophical divide throughout the incapacity neighborhood. Hers is a perspective rooted in practically half a century as an energetic member of the Nationwide Federation of the Blind, which calls itself “the one group that believes within the full capability of blind folks.” In looking for to lift expectations about what the roughly 1 million blind folks in america can obtain, the NFB has taken coverage positions that may shock an outsider. The group resisted the unfold of audible pedestrian alerts within the Seventies, as an illustration, “arguing that they bolstered the picture of the blind as helpless individuals who can’t determine from the sound of site visitors when the sunshine has modified,” Andrew Leland writes in The Nation of the Blind. The NFB additionally initially opposed the Individuals with Disabilities Act, throwing its help behind the 1990 regulation solely when an modification was added that allowed blind folks to refuse particular lodging.
Attending her first NFB nationwide conference, in 1979, is what satisfied Posont to give up muddling via with what imaginative and prescient she nonetheless had and start utilizing a cane, which she has come to treat as an important instrument and emblem of empowerment. She believes in assembly folks the place they’re of their expertise of blindness, however chafes at interventions that, in her view, erode independence. For example, she mentions birding trails that have guide ropes, a class that features trails Berrier helped design. “Life doesn’t have ropes,” she says. “If someone’s newly blind and so they need to go on the market and have that have—properly, it’s a journey of blindness. But when they keep caught on following the ropes, they’re caught, in my view. They may absorb and witness a lot extra if they simply put the cane of their hand and go.”
Berrier belongs to a smaller group, the American Council of the Blind, that extra absolutely embraces accessibility measures; the ACB was on the opposite aspect of the pedestrian-signal situation. The NFB, he says, regards blindness extra as an inconvenience than an obstacle. “I’ve by no means for one instantaneous thought blindness was solely an inconvenience,” he says. “It’s a main incapacity that poses main challenges.”
As firmly as Posont believes that blindness needn’t restrict anybody’s potential, you gained’t hear her speak about it, the way in which some advocates do, as a superpower. Sure, she will pick birds that her sighted companions miss. However it’s nonetheless irritating when, to make use of a latest instance, they see a Nice Horned Owl swoop so silently over a meadow that she will solely take their phrase for it.
The totally different views on incapacity embodied by the NFB and ACB underscore the truth that visible impairments are available in many kinds and that blind folks have various preferences about the best way to navigate the world. “There’s greater than sufficient house for each views,” McGregor says. “When you’ve met one blind individual, you’ve met one blind individual.”
At its 2024 conference in July, the NFB recognized Posont with its Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award, which is known as for the primary doctor born blind and honors those that empower blind people to forge their very own paths. It got here with a $5,000 prize, however maybe extra essential was the popularity that the Chicken Brains have begun to perform what they got down to do. “There’s a story that goes round that nature is a sighted factor,” says Crawley, who has been in Posont’s orbit for 15 years. “We needed to indicate the world that you would be able to be blind and you too can have a reference to nature.”
Exterior of the month-to-month conferences, Posont has additionally taught folks about birds via occasions at libraries, at science camps, and on-line. She figures she’s reached tons of of individuals, all informed. She would like to encourage a youthful technology to increase the mannequin throughout the nation and make it their very own. Today, although, there’s a lot else to maintain her busy. She leads her native NFB chapter and travels often to Capitol Hill to advocate on its behalf; in latest conferences she pushed for making web sites and medical units extra accessible. She loves gardening and taking part in euchre (with Braille playing cards) and, most of all, spending time along with her 12 grandchildren.
Moreover, her energy will not be in managing a sprawling group, Posont says, however in constructing one-on-one connections. And none has been stronger than the one she’s fashioned with Crawley, who additionally has RP. He’s discovered regular work packing and delivery objects at an Amazon warehouse and goals to begin faculty courses quickly. He hopes to turn out to be an city planner, serving to town of Detroit proceed its financial rebound: “It has lots to supply the world, and I actually need to be on that stage and be a part of that comeback.” He particularly needs to make sure that entry to nature for all is woven into town’s future and credit Birding by Ear and Past with giving him the boldness to imagine he may help make that occur.
Earlier than the pandemic, Crawley and some different younger Chicken Brains would typically keep at Posont’s residence for an evening or two on weekends when the group met close by. She feels a little bit sheepish about it now, like possibly she overstepped. However a number of the youngsters confronted challenges at residence, and Posont—a religious Christian and loving mom—couldn’t assist however nurture them. She needed to verify they ate nutritious meals and obtained to absorb the sounds, smells, and textures of a thriving backyard. Greater than that, she felt compelled to exhibit that somebody like them might personal a house, prepare dinner good meals, and develop herbs and flowers. “I needed them to see that it was okay to reside life as a blind individual,” she says. “I needed them to know that they might go so far as they needed to go.”
This story initially ran within the Fall 2024 situation. To obtain our print journal, turn out to be a member by making a donation today.