At least a billion birds migrate through California every year along what is called the Pacific Flyway, a route that stretches from Patagonia to Alaska. If you want to see waterfowl in the tens of thousands, the Central Valley’s wetlands, especially the rice fields, are the perfect place to observe ducks, geese, and swans stopping on their long trip north. There are many feeder birds that use the flyway too—Allen’s hummingbirds, dark-eyed juncos, fox sparrows, pine siskins, and ruby-crowned kinglets, to name a few. A whole bevy of birds stop in Northern California, all of them needing the equivalent of an ultramarathoner’s water-and-fuel station after thousands of miles in the air. You don’t need your own personal wetlands to catch sight of many of them. If you’re lucky—or clever, studying what the birds like to eat, what they do—you can see them in your own backyard.
Amy Tan has a backyard, and she is most certainly clever, curious, and open to finding out what birds like to eat. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is an illustrated diary of her obsession with the winged creatures that come right up to her back porch, some of them seeking sustenance. Culled from thousands of pages of journals, it reads like a set of two-way binoculars—a book that teaches us how to see creatures of the natural world and how to see ourselves as people within it at the same time. The book’s power proceeds from its humility. At the age of 64, Tan was one of America’s best-known storytellers, a National Book Award finalist who’d sold millions of books, but she was just restarting her journey as a visual artist—something she had wanted to be ever since she was a small child. Page by page, we watch as she studies this new craft with rapture and passion by looking at the birds out her window.
The first one is a hummingbird, those “tiny avian helicopters” that spur her to remember her childhood dream that she could “win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me.” She puts a feeder on the patio of her Sausalito home, and just like that, within minutes, “a hummingbird came to inspect, a male with a flashing red head. He hovered, gave a cursory glance, and then left. At least he noticed it. A good beginning. Then he returned, inspected it again from different angles, and left. The third time, he did a little dance around the feeder, approached and stuck his bill in the hole and drank. I was astonished. That was fast.”
Tan might be unhappy with her drawing at this stage, but her observatory prose beats with a vital pulse. “Feel the bird,” her sketching instructor John Muir Laws tells her. “Be the bird.” It sounds absurd, but notice the effects her prose produces. Those short sentences, the diminutive clauses, neatly mimic a hummingbird’s darting ways. Within a sentence, she could be describing the bird or herself—“a good beginning” might apply to its first pass of the feeder. There’s nothing wasted in her lines, astonishing for something originally produced as a diary. Like the birds around her, everything in her prose is deliberate—concise, like putting a thin beak through a tiny hole to drink nectar and consume enough calories to recover from a long trip north. Moments later, she describes another male coming back, only because she’d left the feeder on the table next to her. This one “landed on my hand, and immediately started feeding. I held my breath and kept my hand with the feeder as still as possible. His feet felt scratchy. He was assessing me the whole time he fed. We stared at each other, eye to eye.”
How many of us long for such an encounter? Even if we know it can also be dangerous for wild creatures. The Backyard Bird Chronicles pulses with the dual elements of this nexus of desire and care. Tan is smitten (obsessed, she says) but instantly realizes that her interaction comes with responsibility. The very next diary entry is about a sick bird—a pine siskin—that is behaving strangely. Like the hummingbird, it, too, hops onto her hand. But pine siskins don’t breed where she lives in Sausalito, and they are not known for being so friendly to humans. Something is wrong with it. She calls U.S. Fish and Wildlife and discovers that there is a salmonellosis outbreak within the breed and that this bird is definitely dying. She takes down her feeders, destroys some, gives away the bird food, so as not to become a breeding ground for disease.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a story of wonder and peril. It is dangerous to be a bird. As Tan points out, 75 percent of fledglings don’t survive to adulthood, and of that number, 40 percent don’t make it to three weeks old. They need a lot of food to make it, too. Some go overboard, perhaps. Scrub jays store 3,500 to 6,000 acorns a year in their fever to have enough. Her beloved hummingbirds are not being overcautious. Their hearts pound at 1,000 beats per minute. Overnight, Anna’s hummingbirds drop into a hibernation-like state called torpor, and their heart rate slows to as low as 50 beats per minute, a condition from which they take 15 to 30 minutes to awaken. What an easy snack they’d make. In one startling aside, Tan mentions that house cats kill over a billion birds a year.
What do we owe species that live such brief, imperiled lives? And is owe the right word? Seeing birds as pollinators and key parts of an ecosystem we all depend on is surely too basic. As Barry Lopez wrote in one of his final essays, “only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools.” What if what we must devote ourselves to is not simply our own survival but their mystery—since doing so is, in and of itself, meaningful, important?
The Backyard Bird Chronicles doesn’t channel these questions directly. Rather, with great dexterity, it builds them right into the frame. There are four big frames, actually, in the book. One of these contains Tan’s narration of beginning to learn to look at and identify the birds that come to her backyard. In a second frame, we watch Tan’s journey as an artist, as she learns to draw the birds by learning to observe them. A third frame centers the melodramas that happen among the birds, which Tan both imagines and chronicles as wars, as challenges, as epic family squabbles, a hundred thousand episodes of Game of Thrones in a season. And a fourth frame involves her learning how to lure and take care of the birds, how to present them with the food they want and build feeders that they can use and that protect them from predators. She’s not simply watching the birds; she’s making her backyard more suitable to their needs.
The way these frames nestle neatly one inside the other is one of the marvels of this book’s design. Read it for more than a few minutes at a time and the coherence of their interlocking concerns—a feeling of being in and among the natural—produces intense delight. Also the calm that Lopez describes in one of his books that so many have when they are around birds. You can feel this sense of deep connection in the drawings Tan reproduces throughout the book. As she progresses, the confidence of her pencil strokes, a steadiness of gaze, lends the renderings a stilling, sometimes even awestruck beauty.
She’s in love. She says this early on, and it’s hard not to see all the range of the emotion here. Passion, yes, but also desire, possessiveness, intensity, and lots of courtship. Tan describes the birds wooing one another, while she woos them. She sets up and slowly perfects feeders in four locations around her house: the patio, the veranda, the office porch, and on the other side of her bathroom window. Seeds and suet give way to the caviar of bird diet: live mealworms. She escalates until she is buying and refrigerating 5,000 mealworms a week—at one point, she contemplates starting her own mealworm farm or getting another refrigerator to store them, “but doing either would be time-consuming and pathological”—after all, she is already providing the birds with suet cakes, suet balls, sunflower seeds, millet, nyger seeds, safflower seeds, and butter bark.
The birds reward her with their appearances in droves: chestnut-backed chickadees, pygmy nuthatches, dark-eyed juncos, a hermit thrush, a fox sparrow, an American tree sparrow, a white-crowned sparrow, Townsend’s warblers, goldfinches, crows, and hawks of several kinds—the last of which are not necessarily wanted, since they eat fledglings, but admired nonetheless. Bobo, Tan’s four-pound Yorkie, is hustled inside when the hawks appear. When Tan spies something she doesn’t recognize, she checks on her eBird app or on a Facebook bird group to log her discovery. Sometimes she even calls an expert friend.
Tan’s goal here is not to become a tower of knowledge. She’s a happy anthropomorphizing observer. An exuberant amateur. She has always been a supremely gifted describer of people and their habits; this is what made her novel about a dozen people on a trip to China and Burma, Saving Fish from Drowning, such highbrow comedy, a literary version of White Lotus long before that show became such a hit. Here, she trains all her skills on portraiture of the birds. Songbirds at the feeder on Thanksgiving are like “black Friday shoppers frantic to snap up good deals on worms.” California towhees strolling across the patio resemble “landlords inspecting the premises for damages,” their round tummies like beer bellies.
She is especially interested in birds that do not behave according to their type, and begins to define birds through their ability to behave differently than their type.
“The why is essential,” she writes at one point, as she tries to figure out what a bird is doing by zooming out to perceive her garden as a whole, to observe the day, the time of year. “That behavior in context enables me to understand the bird.” Still, she tilts, and she knows she tilts, the playing field. She deals as best she can with pests—rats, clever squirrels, and yellow jackets (which steal the live mealworms)—without simply killing them. In doing so, she learns something about the finches, which she thought were as messy as teenagers. Every time they visited, they left behind an enormous pile of discarded seeds, and if she didn’t sweep up, the rats descended. Later, Tan discovers from a birder friend that they’re not throwing their food on the ground; they’re testing which seeds have the most oil. They’re not slobs—they’re picky.
Time passes. How hard it is, while living, to feel this as deeply as one can. To feel, beneath our clocks and our daily to-do lists, that an older sense of order requires reservoirs of focus that are hard to tap into in modern life. The best writing about the wild and about the natural world returns us to a different sense of time by encouraging us to rediscover the skills of focus and attention through prose that rewards these efforts. Tan achieves this state of nonfiction nirvana in plainspoken ways. After years of watching birds, for instance, she writes that “my view of seasons no longer follows the Earth’s spin on its axis. Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter have been replaced by Spring Migration, Nesting Season, Fledgling Season, and Fall Migration. The timelines pertain only to birds in my backyard. When I left in mid-September for a month, I knew I might be missing the start of fall migration.”
The focus of this book remains on this soft interior space where we calibrate time and memory, our observations of the world. Halfway through the book, though, COVID comes. “Everything seems like a potential transmitter of disease and death,” Tan writes, finding herself in a predicament similar to that of the ailing pine siskin she introduced us to on the first pages of this diary. She won’t give up her bird-watching, though. “The groceries, a door knob, another person. But not the birds. The birds are balm.” Weeks into the pandemic, she is out shopping with a mask on, socially distancing, to buy bird food and lamenting that she cannot buy more than 5,000 mealworms at a time. Later that same year, wildfires start up, bringing new birds to her backyard—for example, a western bluebird fledgling, maybe driven in Tan’s direction by the serial wildfires that have been burning since August. The context that Tan describes earlier in the book as being essential to understanding the why does in fact extend far beyond her garden.
By this book’s end, a bird’s life doesn’t seem any less perilous, but Tan’s observations have bored one fact of their existence into us: Their supreme—not endless—adaptability is pushed nearly to its limit. We are in the middle of a great extinction event that humans have started, and all of us would be wise to figure out how to do our bit to repair our corner of the wild. Tan shows how rewarding it can be, even if such moments are rare. Three years after the pine siskin arrived sick and dying, when Tan had to tear down her feeders, a new clutch of siskins turned up. Tan is not overly hopeful, nor is she hopeless, about their ability to survive, if we humans change our profligate ways. “It is remarkable what birds can endure,” she says at one point, when another sick bird lands in her backyard. “It is tragic what they cannot. I am hoping this bird is remarkable.”
By training her eye so closely on the migrants and locals that wander into her backyard, Tan has evoked something the most enlightened birders experience: an overwhelming sense that all the birds are remarkable, whether they have the power to survive illness and terrible fights and choked skies or not. California is their state, too, maybe even originally. Whether they spend their whole brief lives there or are passing through, they are citizens. The Backyard Bird Chronicles raises this point by reversing the gaze on nature. This is a book that doesn’t just stare out the window and imagine what birds are up to; it peers back at the eye itself. “I, too, am part of their curricula,” Tan says. “The young birds have always seen me as part of the yard. I am the flightless animal that sits by the big glass doors and sometimes comes out.” With this chronicle of care, she invites us all to see ourselves, too, to sit still, and to see, to really see, the splendors we live among.•
Join us on Thursday, September 18, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Tan will sit down with CBC host Freeman and special guest John Muir Laws to discuss The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
