In September 2017, hummingbirds visited the “Lilliputian” nectar feeders that celebrated novelist Amy Tan had placed in her backyard. She put out her palm with a feeder in it, and a hummingbird landed and drank. Over a handful of years, Tan paid close attention to the birds that came, drawing and writing about them in nature journals, portions of which were published last year as The Backyard Bird Chronicles. So far, Tan has spotted 70 different birds in her yard.
This interview, conducted over Zoom, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
This interview appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Why did you start nature journaling?
I got into it in the first place because of what happened in 2016 with an increase in divisiveness, especially racism that was directed toward Asians, which increased when COVID came around. I needed to get away from all this hatred and the feeling that our country was doomed by going into nature and learning to do something. Studies have shown that your cortisol levels go down when you are out in nature and that your endorphins increase. It was like an instant therapy hit. The other reason was doing something that had meaning, purpose, and enjoyment.
What’s the most surprising thing that you learned from bird-watching?
There’s so much that I feel that I have missed about the natural world, about wildlife, and there are incredible mysteries there. There’s astonishment in what animals do, and there is amazement over how much we are connected and what they teach me. When you consider birds, most people say, “Oh, they’re pretty,” which is what I would have said. Now, what I think about these birds is that they descend from dinosaurs. They migrate thousands and thousands of miles, and they understand things about weather and magnetic forces and sun and stars and alignment, and they have incredible memories.
It makes me think, What else do I not know about other animals or plants? Everything in nature has these incredible mysteries that I can explore for the rest of my life. That is pure pleasure.
Does observing bird dramas affect how you think about character in fiction?
It did emphasize the importance to me of observing small details over time. Field-research scientists will be out in the field doing this for years and watching the same birds in the same location, identifying individuals. They’re looking for patterns, and that’s what I’ve learned is really important, both in observing birds and understanding them, and it’s also a reminder that that is the situation [when writing] characters in a novel.
One of the things I get into when looking at birds is questions of morality. Those are questions that are always important to me when I’m writing fiction. I found myself applying that to how I was looking at birds. It was more my fiction skills that led to the way that I was observing birds.
You drew and wrote stories, even as a small child. Why do you draw and write today?
In [keeping] this backyard bird journal, I was not as focused on what public opinion might be. When they said they were going to publish it, I said, I don’t care if somebody doesn’t like it; I did it for my own reasons. It’s the same thing when I write fiction. I do it for my own reasons, because it’s meaningful at the time I’m doing it, in the writing of those sentences, way before it’s ever published.
I want to make sense of my life in the larger picture of humanity. The writing, the drawing, the journaling—it all has to do with keeping a record and seeing the patterns in my own life. That is the meaning of my life, to find what is true. And what’s true has nothing to do with facts. It has to do with—and I think every writer knows this—whether you have been able to capture something in a story, in an image, and capture the state of what our humanity is, what human behavior is, what motivation is, what feels true. When you can write something and represent what it emotionally feels like, what the emotional memory feels like, then I think you’ve captured truth.•
Join us on Thursday, September 18, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Amy Tan will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest John Muir Laws to discuss The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
