The Backyard Bird Chronicles, written and illustrated by Amy Tan (Knopf, 2024).
Amy Tan is the first to admit that she’s obsessed with birds. In fact, it’s right there at the beginning of her preface to The Backyard Bird Chronicles: “These pages are a record of my obsession with birds. My use of the word obsession is not hyperbole.”
Tan (best known as the author of The Joy Luck Club and other renowned novels) demonstrates this fully in the following pages, a reproduction of the bird journals she kept from September 2017, when she first started paying attention to the hummingbirds in her yard, to November 2022. During those five years, Tan transformed her backyard into a bistro/playground/paradise for birds of all kinds. She monitored their activities, invested heavily in their favorite foods, and spent countless hours drawing them, resurrecting a passion for art that had been largely dormant since her childhood. Dozens of her exquisite drawings (a sample of which you can see above on the book cover), some rough and some highly polished, are scattered throughout the book, along with her journal entries.
Tan’s curiosity about the lives of birds is boundless. She constantly finds herself wanting to know more about what they do and why they do it, consulting with friends and mentors and Facebook groups. But it’s her own time spent watching them that teaches her the most. She learns all about the patterns they tend to follow, but is always delighted to find one deviating from the norm, as when a Bewick’s wren splashes around in one of her birdbaths or an owl wakes up in the daytime.
To be honest, the journal format means that at times the book feels rather long. Tan’s observations of her feathered friends’ habits are so meticulous and detailed that it’s easy to get a little tired of reading about how many of which species were lined up waiting for mealworms on a given day.
But then, birds do tend to have that effect on those of us who fall under their spell. (Ask anyone who’s listened to me go on and on about the way our local cardinal fledglings shake their wings when their parents feed them.) For such readers, just when the book is starting to lag, a new bird anecdote or fun fact will perk us up and pull us right back in. And for me, as an East Coast resident, it was especially interesting to be introduced to the similar yet different world of birds—California Scrub Jays instead of blue jays, Bewick’s wrens instead of Carolina wrens, oak titmice instead of tufted titmice, and so on—that Tan knows as a West Coaster.
Make no mistake, birds do have a world all their own, and Amy Tan effectively conveys through her writing and her art what a privilege it is to play even a small part in it. As she puts it when discussing her drawings: “They are not illustrations of species of birds. They are portraits of individuals who looked at me whenever I looked at them, who acknowledged and accepted me as part of their world.”
(Cover image copyright Knopf.)
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"They are portraits of individuals who looked at me whenever I looked at them, who acknowledged and accepted me as part of their world.”
Perhaps some critics would accuse her of anthropomorphism. Having watched birds make intimate offerings of food with their avian family members… Well that was what put me onto thinking these robins were family members even when they looked similar in age. I remember when one, standing off eyeing me, seemed to be trying to communicate with me. Then it looked at my feet, and I looked: there was a worm there, so I stepped aside gently and walked away.
Tan's illustrations are 'portraits of individuals', I love that!