Amy Tan logs her obsession with birds
‘These pages are a record of my obsession with birds,” writes Amy Tan in the preface to “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” and “obsession” is no overstatement. Her new book, culled from “nine personal journals filled with . . . naive observations of birds in my backyard,” is the work of a dedicated hobbyist, the kind whose days are colored and suffused by every minute detail of their subject. Any reader not already smitten with birds might look at this book and back away.
But they would be missing out, because Tan, best known for “The Joy Luck Club” — the iconic 1998 novel of intergenerational Chinese and Chinese-American mothers and daughters — is a tremendously charming emissary from the world of birding. Not because she is an expert on migration patterns or beak shapes, but precisely because she isn’t. “When I started the ‘Chronicles,’ I could recognize only three birds in my yard,” she notes. “What I did not lack was intense curiosity.”
That curiosity, along with a sharp eye and a novelist’s penchant for narrative, has been channeled into an absorbing, quirky book of days focused on the avian ecosystem Tan has established in her Sausalito backyard.
Notes on domestic concerns like live mealworms versus dead and the fraught passage of fledglings to adulthood are interspersed with Tan’s own sketches, from finely shaded, detailed Audubon-like bird portraits to rough sketches of juncos and goldencrowned sparrows in action.
None of this would necessarily make “Backyard Bird Chronicles” stand out from another nature journal, but as a neophyte, Tan also writes about learning about birds, and her observations about the process are at least as sharp as her notes on plumage. About her growing birder skills, she writes, “I am secretly proud when I make the correct ID of a bird in front of others . . . . I am still in a newbie stage, often wrong, often surprised, often puzzled. I know too little to know what’s ordinary.”
Gently defiant, she claims that ignorance as a source of pride and delight. “I have heard experienced birders call the Lesser Goldfinch a ‘trash bird’ because it is so common and numerous . . . . The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people. I am still new to birding, and so every bird is a good bird to see.”
Tan’s love of the natural world is palpable in her warm, compassionate descriptions of the life-or-death struggles playing out beyond her windows. There are the travails of fledgling titmice being forced to acquire their own food: “One parent led the fledglings to a cage and secured a mealworm . . . but took off without giving the mealworm to any of them. The abandoned fledglings cried as they sat on different arms of the feeder station. Tough love.” Her anguished consideration of the yellow jackets caught in a trap she set to prevent them from killing the mealworms meant for the birds is unapologetically earnest: “I wondered if those outside the trap recognized the ones who were drowning,” she writes. “I don’t feel indifferent to any creature struggling to survive.”
But Tan’s curiosity in these journals extends beyond animal behavior to her own, and in doing so, it cuts a wider swath of inquiry. She wonders, at one point, why she has never attempted to recognize individual birds, or to name them, noting that even though she feeds them on a regular basis, “I appreciate that they are wild. They do not belong to me.” She has qualms about endowing birds with human emotions and traits, such as trust or joy, or cunning: “I am aware that I have committed the naturalist’s sin of stereotyping the towhee as jolly and Scrub Jay as conniving. Science would require me to be objective.” (“Thank God I am not a scientist,” she adds.)
Anthropomorphism, in Tan’s view, has the benefit of allowing her to at least begin to look at things from a bird’s perspective, and from that equivalence springs more diverting questions than scientific objectivity might provide. Do fledglings play, as human children do? (She makes a convincing case that they do.) Do they learn by example and observation, as humans can? (Also an apparent yes.)
Besides joy and delight, Tan also chronicles loss and upheaval, as any account of nature inevitably — and particularly in our current age — must. Some losses loom large, such as an epidemic that kills Pine Siskins in droves. Others are smaller, as when a Hermit Thrush dies after flying into Tan’s window. “Some might say one collision death a year is not many,” Tan writes. “To me, the death of even one bird is one too many.”
The intensity of Tan’s love for her visitors makes “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” an unexpectedly moving account regardless of your level of interest in bird-watching. Because while the book is about golden-crowned sparrows and Cooper’s hawks and hummingbirds, it’s also a book about survival, adaptation, and chance. COVID-19 floats among these pages (the journals span 2017 to 2022), as does the death of a beloved friend; the author herself has suffered from latestage Lyme disease, leaving her epileptic and unable to drive. Seventy percent of songbirds don’t live to adulthood, Tan notes. “The reasons are many, from predation by hawks . . . cats, toxins, and starvation to disease and disability.”
But she frames those odds with grim optimism: “For birds, each day is a chance to survive.”