Donna Posont Helps Blind People Become Birders—and Whatever Else They Want To Be

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To be clear, Donna Posont loves Red-winged Blackbirds. She does a killer impression of their song—conk-la-REEEE!—and welcomes their heartening message that, chill be damned, spring is coming. But right now, she really just needs the squawking birds to shut up. The 35 or so people she has gathered around an outdoor wood stove can barely hear Rick Simek, the soft-spoken naturalist demonstrating how maple syrup is made. “Hey, you guys,” she yells at the hundreds of raucous Red-wings, “hold it down over there in the trees!”

Hearing is important for this crowd: Most are blind, like Posont, or otherwise visually impaired. A sighted person might struggle to admire the brown earth, black trees, and steel-wool clouds of this cut-and-paste March day, but during Simek’s lesson, the assembled take in the scene through other senses. They hear geese, chickadees, and woodpeckers amid the din of lusty blackbirds and feel a blast of shin-roasting heat as Simek opens the stove door. They smell the caramelly aroma of boiling sap and taste the profound sweetness of just-made syrup when the samples are ready. Sam Rau, who was born blind, is having the time of his life. “It’s all right here,” he says. “You don’t have to go very far to find miracles.”

Until recently, Rau didn’t know much about birds. The conventional notion of birdwatching—visually parsing teensy distinctions in shorebird shapes or the supercilia of waterthrushes—is not an option for him. But he is undoubtedly a birder. That’s thanks to Posont’s program, Birding by Ear and Beyond, which has brought visually impaired participants to the University of Michigan-Dearborn Environmental Interpretive Center most months since 2009. Rau, who began attending about a year ago, now finds himself identifying species he hears and thinking about how they are a part of the ecosystem around him. He has fallen hard for birdsong. 

Posont’s initiative fits within a growing movement to make the outdoors more accessible and sweep away antiquated ideas about whom birding is for. At the same time, however, she is something of an outlier. Skeptical of certain special accommodations for the blind, Posont pushes the Bird Brains—as her group’s members call themselves—to navigate the world independently. Truth be told, the program isn’t really about birds. Its ultimate purpose is to help participants build fundamental skills. “It’s about helping them gain confidence to live life as a blind person,” she says. 

This self-reliance ethos is on display in the day’s “Maple Magic” program. Posont explains how to find a maple tree in leafless woods without visual cues: feel for a diamond pattern in the bark, and for opposite, not alternating, branches. She passes around tree-tapping tools for all to hold, then leads the group out of the classroom. Michael Solomon, a sighted naturalist, will help them choose a tree, but it’s the Bird Brains who’ll take turns hand-drilling a hole in its trunk and hammering home a spile from which sap will ooze. 

Posont entrusts the job of carrying the tools to Jerusalem Crawley, who is visually impaired and has attended these events since he was a child. Back then, he didn’t realize birds came in different species. “I’m like, they’re all the same. They’re just birds,” he says. “This has opened up my eyes.” 

Like some people she mentors, Posont was a late-blooming birder. She doesn’t recall hearing birds as a child, or seeing them before her sight began to fade the summer after second grade—though she grew up on a West Virginia farm. (“So I guess I heard a chicken.”) She was born with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa. People with RP gradually lose their peripheral vision until, in many cases, they’re legally blind. Now in her 60s, Posont retains some light perception—she knows if it’s day or night and can sometimes discern windows—but has no usable vision. 

When she left home for West Liberty University, just a few miles away near Wheeling, she wanted to study biology. But she quickly ran into a harsh reality: The school was unequipped to teach science to a blind student. And Posont, who had not yet learned to read Braille or use a cane, couldn’t find her classroom, let alone navigate a chemistry lab. Disappointed, she earned her degree in social work instead.  

After college Posont worked at a school for the blind and later started a small business that sold snacks at government buildings. (The 1936 Randolph-Sheppard Act gave blind people, who face high unemployment, priority for vending contracts on federal property.) In 1987 she and her then husband, who is also blind, moved to Michigan, where they continued selling snacks and raised five children. Family life did not feel limited or defined by blindness, says their son Paul. His parents shepherded him and his siblings to sports and school activities, relying on buses, taxis, and friends to get around. They ate home-cooked dinners together and attended church twice a week. “She instilled some really good values in us,” he says. “Show up and show love and compassion.”

Nor did having blind parents mean the kids could get away with anything. “Sighted parents see their children going into the kitchen, but I hear the cookie jar opening or juice pouring into a cup,” Posont told Family Circle in 1999. “I smell toothpaste when my kids have brushed their teeth, soap when they’ve washed their hands, and candy on their breath.”

As her children got older, Posont got antsy. She began volunteering at Camp Tuhsmeheta, an outdoor education facility established by the Michigan School for the Blind. (Its name is short for “touch, smell, hear, taste.”) There, she enjoyed helping attendees experience traditional summer camp activities like swimming and canoeing but also became captivated by the nature she could sense all around her. Why, she wondered, wasn’t there more emphasis on learning about animals and plants?

Posont never lost her desire to study science, and now she wanted to learn all about the environment and pass that knowledge on to other blind folks. In 2008 she enrolled at UM-Dearborn, near her home. She wanted to prove she could learn biology, and this time she would not be deterred. 

Her inquiries at the career office led her to Orin Gelderloos, then director of the university’s Environmental Interpretive Center. She explained her ideas about teaching others but admitted that she didn’t yet know much about science. “And I said, well, I don’t know much about how blind people operate, but I’d like to learn more about that,” Gelderloos says. “So I guess we’re a team.” 

It was during a 2009 internship at Camp Tuhsmeheta that Posont landed on birds, ubiquitous and vocal, as an ideal vehicle for making nature vivid and accessible. She began learning everything she could and, back at school, convened other blind people, mainly children, to share her new obsession. Some species, like Black-capped Chickadees and Eastern Phoebes, are “name-sayers,” she taught them, using plush Audubon birds that play recorded sounds. English words could help them remember other songs, like the Northern Cardinal’s Wit, wit? Cheer, cheer cheer! (A cardinal’s calls, she says, evoke marbles clacking together.) If a bird sounds like an American Robin with a sore throat, that’s a Scarlet Tanager. If a robin has taken singing lessons, it’s a Rose-breasted Grosbeak.

The group began meeting monthly, and Posont called it Birding by Ear, later adding “and Beyond” to reflect its widening scope. She grew more confident as a nature educator, drawing on mentorship from Gelderloos. “When we would study trees in class, she wanted to feel every tree trunk and the shapes of the leaves,” he says. “She was very, very persistent.” By the time Posont took his field biology course in 2012, the two had become a team, just as he’d said. He was nearing retirement and had lost much of his high-frequency hearing with age, so on class outings she would name the birds she heard, and he would tell the students about what they were seeing.

With the Bird Brains, Posont also went beyond species identification to discuss nesting, foraging, and migration—then trees, amphibians, and entire ecosystems. She blended these nature lessons with exercises to build skills and confidence: Participants made bat houses, baked pumpkin pies, and started campfires to cook s’mores. “I didn’t know I was a teacher for a long time,” she says, “but I am.” 

Though the group was small, the university took note. The interpretive center hired Posont as a naturalist as soon as she graduated in 2015 with a major in environmental studies. And a minor in biology.

Compared to earlier gener­ations of visually impaired people, Posont’s protégés face fewer obstacles to learning about and enjoying birds. It was a different world when accessibility consultant Jerry Berrier was in college in the 1970s. Berrier, who has been blind since birth, may never have discovered his lifelong passion had a biology professor not loaned him a vinyl set of bird recordings and based his final exam grade on how many species he could identify. Berrier considers it one of the great gifts of his life. “I miss a lot of the beauty that’s right there for the taking for people who can see it,” he says. “Birding has given me a way to get some of that beauty that I would otherwise miss.”

Now anyone can download apps like Larkwire, Merlin, and the Audubon Bird Guide to learn birdsong. They can find a wealth of audio and other resources online. It can still be tricky for blind people to find birding companions, but advocates are working to change that. Berrier leads inclusive outings and has helped Mass Audubon design more 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 courses. And since 2018 an initiative called Birdability has provided tools and information to help make birding more inviting and accessible to people with disabilities. 

Birding by Ear and Beyond stands out, though, for programming that has continued consistently for a decade and a half. “That’s awesome, because it’s a shame to get someone excited about a hobby and then not have the infrastructure to continue supporting that hobby,” says Freya McGregor, an occupational therapist and a researcher and consultant for inclusivity in birding. “You can keep building on community and keep building on skills.”

Posont’s approach to the program also reflects a philosophical divide within the disability community. Hers is a perspective rooted in nearly half a century as an active member of the National Federation of the Blind, which calls itself “the only organization that believes in the full capacity of blind people.” In seeking to raise expectations about what the roughly 1 million blind people in the United States can achieve, the NFB has taken policy positions that might surprise an outsider. The organization resisted the spread of audible pedestrian signals in the 1970s, for instance, “arguing that they reinforced the image of the blind as helpless people who can’t figure out from the sound of traffic when the light has changed,” Andrew Leland writes in The Country of the Blind. The NFB also initially opposed the Americans with Disabilities Act, throwing its support behind the 1990 law only when an amendment was added that allowed blind people to refuse special accommodations. 

Attending her first NFB national convention, in 1979, is what convinced Posont to quit muddling through with what vision she still had and begin using a cane, which she has come to regard as an essential tool and emblem of empowerment. She believes in meeting people where they are in their experience of blindness, but chafes at interventions that, in her view, erode independence. As an example, she mentions birding trails that have guide ropes, a category that includes trails Berrier helped design. “Life doesn’t have ropes,” she says. “If somebody’s newly blind and they want to go out there and have that experience—well, it’s a journey of blindness. But if they stay stuck on following the ropes, they’re stuck, in my opinion. They could take in and witness so much more if they just put the cane in their hand and go.” 

Berrier belongs to a smaller organization, the American Council of the Blind, that more fully embraces accessibility measures; the ACB was on the other side of the pedestrian-signal issue. The NFB, he says, regards blindness more as an inconvenience than an impediment. “I have never for one instant thought blindness was only an inconvenience,” he says. “It is a major disability that poses major challenges.”

As firmly as Posont believes that blindness need not limit anyone’s potential, you won’t hear her talk about it, the way some advocates do, as a superpower. Yes, she can pick out birds that her sighted companions miss. But it’s still frustrating when, to use a recent example, they see a Great Horned Owl swoop so silently over a meadow that she can only take their word for it. 

The different perspectives on disability embodied by the NFB and ACB underscore the reality that visual impairments come in many forms and that blind people have varying preferences about how to navigate the world. “There’s more than enough space for both perspectives,” McGregor says. “If you’ve met one blind person, you’ve met one blind person.”

At its 2024 convention in July, the NFB recognized Posont with its Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award, which is named for the first physician born blind and honors those who empower blind individuals to forge their own paths. It came with a $5,000 prize, but perhaps more important was the recognition that the Bird Brains have begun to accomplish what they set out to do. “There’s a narrative that goes around that nature is a sighted thing,” says Crawley, who has been in Posont’s orbit for 15 years. “We wanted to show the world that you can be blind and you can also have a connection with nature.” 

Outside of the monthly meetings, Posont has also taught people about birds through events at libraries, at science camps, and online. She figures she’s reached hundreds of people, all told. She would love to inspire a younger generation to expand the model across the country and make it their own. These days, though, there’s plenty else to keep her busy. She leads her local NFB chapter and travels occasionally to Capitol Hill to advocate on its behalf; in recent meetings she pushed for making websites and medical devices more accessible. She loves gardening and playing euchre (with Braille cards) and, most of all, spending time with her 12 grandchildren. 

Besides, her strength is not in managing a sprawling organization, Posont says, but in building one-on-one connections. And none has been stronger than the one she’s formed with Crawley, who also has RP. He’s found steady work packing and shipping items at an Amazon warehouse and aims to start college classes soon. He hopes to become an urban planner, helping the city of Detroit continue its economic rebound: “It has a lot to offer the world, and I really want to be on that stage and be part of that comeback.” He especially wants to ensure that access to nature for all is woven into the city’s future and credits Birding by Ear and Beyond with giving him the confidence to believe he can help make that happen.

Before the pandemic, Crawley and a few other young Bird Brains would sometimes stay at Posont’s home for a night or two on weekends when the group met nearby. She feels a little sheepish about it now, like maybe she overstepped. But some of the kids faced challenges at home, and Posont—a devout Christian and loving mother—couldn’t help but nurture them. She wanted to make sure they ate nutritious meals and got to soak up the sounds, smells, and textures of a thriving garden. More than that, she felt compelled to demonstrate that someone like them could own a home, cook good food, and grow herbs and flowers. “I wanted them to see that it was okay to live life as a blind person,” she says. “I wanted them to know that they could go as far as they wanted to go.”

This story originally ran in the Fall 2024 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.