The Backyard Bird Chronicles

The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a series of journal entries written and illustrated by acclaimed American fiction writer Amy Tan, the author of novels including The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Valley of Amazement (2013), and others. 

Although Tan had spent her life immersed in nature, she did not begin paying attention to birds until she enrolled in a drawing class in her sixties. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a collection of excerpts from Tan’s journal from 2017 to 2022. The writer approaches her study of the birds in her backyard in the same way she writes characters in her story: She attempts to inhabit the lives of the birds. Each entry highlights a different species, such as a hermit thrush, a thieving rat, or a bold Anna’s hummingbird. Her observations help her gain a greater understanding of the natural world and herself. Tan’s drawings and musings about the birds in her yard focus on three central themes: The Art of Paying Attention, Inquiry as a Path to Understanding, and Embodiment as Creative Practice.

This guide utilizes the 2024 softback edition published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death by suicide.

Plot Summary

When Amy Tan was in her sixties, she took a drawing course to learn the art of nature journaling. In this class with teacher John Muir Laws, Tan learned observation, curiosity, and a sense of wonder. The course connected her with feelings she’d had as a young girl exploring a creek near her home. Tan turned her attention to the birds in her backyard, recording notes and sketching images of avian visitors. The Backyard Bird Chronicles contains excerpts from nature journals spanning six years. The book is organized as a journal, with entries presented according to individual dates. Many entries are accompanied by Tan’s illustrations. In the Preface, Tan emphasizes that the writing and drawing in her sketchbook appear as is, without editing or polishing. The point of the work was to engage with nature journaling by focusing on the process rather than worrying about how the final product would come out. This idea relates to John Muir Laws’s theory of “pencil miles,” the concept that the time spent drawing is more important than the output itself. 

In the Foreword, ornithologist David Sibley offers an explanation for how drawing can lend itself to scientific understanding. He praises Tan’s work and her focus on exploring different contexts and patterns. In the Preface, Tan explains that enrolling in Laws’s nature journaling class helped her to regain a sense of wonder in nature that she had not experienced since she was a child. When she began nature journaling about the birds in her backyard, she could only identify three species. The process has given her far more than the ability to identify birds, however. It has offered insight into both bird and human behavior, allowing the fiction writer to expand her ability to embody the experiences of others.

In entries spanning September 16, 2017, to December 30, 2018, Tan sets off on her birding adventure. She invites hummingbirds to feed from her hand and mourns the death of an ill pine siskin. She delights over the arrival of baby California quail and laughs as a baby crow shows fear of a swinging bird feeder. Tan approaches these early entries with a sense of childlike wonder, captivated by and questioning everything she sees. The individual personalities of birds begin to take shape. Scrub jays are brash and quarrelsome, while finches are always ready for a fight.

Entries from January 10, 2019, to December 21, 2019, reveal Tan’s growth as an artist and observer. Birding grows into an obsession. She finds herself preferring birding to writing and spends approximately $250 per month on feed and mealworms. She begins to relate the experiences of the birds she sees to her own. For example, she places a crow decoy in her yard to deter the birds from taking over her feeders, but when a murder of crows gathers around the seemingly dead bird as though in mourning, Tan cannot help but wonder if crows have the ability to mourn the loss of other crows they do not know personally, just as humans mourn tragedies they hear about in the news. As Tan recognizes more birds and establishes new feeders in her yard, her knowledge of them grows. She learns that they develop habits with food and are uncertain about change and how to distinguish between individual juncos.

Then, from January 1, 2020, to December 9, 2020, Tan grapples with the realities of COVID-19 and takes refuge in watching the birds in her yard. Wildfires send new species to her yard, and concerns about disease mirror worries in her own life. Tan considers how different contexts contribute to the birds’ experiences as well as her understanding of them. She recognizes that she is also a context in the birds’ lives and grows increasingly aware that, as she is watching them, they are watching her.

Final entries from January 17, 2021, to December 15, 2022, show Tan weighing how science and art relate to one another. Her artistic skills grow as she expands her understanding of ecology and context, and she adds bird sounds to her knowledge base. As she meets new birds and experiences personal tragedy, she determines that wonder, curiosity, and magic are as important as accuracy.