Bird Coffee Blend
We strongly believe in celebrating the past, present, and future of exploration through our social media content, blog posts, podcast conversations, and celebrated coffee blends.
As much as we would love to have every single explorer featured in our coffee bags this is simply not possible so we have developed our Standard Selection and Limited Edition Coffee Blends for you to enjoy on your next adventure.
The Bird Coffee Blend is one of our standard coffee blends, aimed at celebrating her contribution as a naturalist, writer, photographer, and first woman elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.
Isabella Lucy Bird
(15 October 1831 – 7 October 1904)
Isabella Lucy Bird was a nineteenth-century British explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist. With Fanny Jane Butler she founded the John Bishop Memorial hospital in Srinagar. She was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Bird left Britain again in 1872, going initially to Australia, which she disliked, and then to Hawaii (known in Europe as the Sandwich Islands), her love for which prompted her second book (published three years later). While there she climbed Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. She then moved on to Colorado, where she had heard the air was excellent for the infirm. Dressed practically and riding not sidesaddle but frontwards like a man (though she threatened to sue the Times for saying she dressed like one), she covered over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains in 1873. Her letters to her sister, first printed in the magazine The Leisure Hour, comprised Bird’s fourth and perhaps most famous book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.
After her husband John Bishop’s death in 1886, Bird studied medicine and resolved to travel as a missionary. Despite being nearly 60 years of age, she set off for India. Arriving on the subcontinent in February 1889, Bird visited missions in India, visited Ladakh on the borders of Tibet, and then traveled in Persia, Kurdistan, and Turkey. In India, the Maharajah of Kashmir gave her a piece of land on which to build a hospital with sixty beds and a dispensary for women; there she worked with Fanny Jane Butler to found the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in memory of her recently deceased husband who had left funds for this purpose in his will.
The following year, she joined a group of British soldiers traveling between Baghdad and Tehran. She remained with the unit’s commanding officer during his survey work in the region, armed with her revolver and a medicine chest supplied – in possibly an early example of corporate sponsorship – by Henry Wellcome’s company in London.
In 1891, she traveled through Baluchistan to Persia and Armenia, exploring the source of the Karun River, and later that year she gave a speech in a committee room of the House of Commons on the persecution of Christians in Kurdistan, on which she had made representations to the Grand Vizier of the Turkish Empire.
Featured in journals and magazines for decades, Bird had, by then, become a household name.
In 1890, she became the first woman to be awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Two years later, she became the first woman allowed to join the Royal Geographical Society. She was elected to membership of the Royal Photographic Society on 12 January 1897.
Her final great journey took place in 1897, when she traveled up the Yangtze and Han rivers in China and Korea, respectively.
Later still, she went to Morocco, where she traveled among the Berbers and had to use a ladder to mount her black stallion, a gift from the Sultan.
Please look through our online store and find your perfect blend. Remember we roast and ship once a week on a Tuesday to ensure you get the freshest coffee for your next adventure.
We look forward to shipping our coffees to your doorstep and you sharing your expedience’s with us. Remember with every bag of coffee we sell 10% of the sales price goes towards the Curiosity Fund
Sending you off on your next adventure, coffee in hand.
John & Team