Dara McAnulty grow up in a family were books, music, long walks, and endless questions about birds, insects, and trees were common routine.

His dad was a conservation scientist, and everyone in the family except him - his mum, his brother, his sister - is autistic too. Nobody treated that as unusual. It was simply who they were. Dara once said his family felt "as close as otters."

As a small child, he noticed things other people walked past. A single feather could hold his attention for an hour. Birds, beetles, blackbirds singing at dawn - all of it made sense to him in a way people didn't.

He could talk for ages about black holes or acorns, but that didn't help him fit in with kids talking about football or Minecraft. He was bullied, sometimes badly.

Regular life was loud in a way that wore him down - noise, crowds, too much happening at once, and his brain couldn't filter out what mattered.

When his family moved from Belfast to a quieter part of Northern Ireland in 2013, things changed. He found calm, wildlife-rich places, and for the first time his thoughts started coming out - first as words in his head, then on paper. Talking to people outside his close family had always been exhausting. Writing turned out to be a way in.

At twelve, he started a blog about nature.

Online, away from the classroom, he found others who cared about the same things he did: forests, birds, the health of the planet.

Joining Scouts was a turning point. Suddenly he was around other kids who actually wanted to be outside, camping and exploring, and his interests weren't strange there, they were the whole point. That gave him real practice talking to people, built around something he already loved, and not a lesson in pretending to be someone else.

His family never tried to talk him out of his intensity. They leaned into it - museums, libraries, music, time outdoors, whatever kept his curiosity fed.

That blog eventually became a book.

Diary of a Young Naturalist, written when he was fourteen, covered one hard year - moving house, changing schools, losing a forest he loved, dealing with bullies, and slowly finding steadiness again outdoors. It wasn't a tidy success story. It included fear, sensory overload, family struggles, and real joy too.

The book won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing - making him the youngest person ever to win a major UK nature-writing award.

He also became a conservation campaigner - raising money to protect birds of prey, speaking about biodiversity loss, encouraging other young people to care about wildlife. At fifteen, he became the youngest person ever to receive the RSPB Medal for conservation work.

None of this came easily. Public appearances made him physically sick with nerves - heart racing, sometimes needing a paper bag just to breathe. Afterward he'd need total quiet, a dark room, and a Harry Potter book to recover. He kept doing it anyway, because the message valued more than the discomfort.
In 2022 he received the British Empire Medal for his work on nature and autism awareness. He's now studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge - still following the same thing that pulled him forward as a small boy watching a feather on the ground.