Project: Dabble

In ‘The Backyard Bird Chronicles’, Amy Tan turns her garden into a living classroom. Her illustrated nature journals reveal what it means to embrace lifelong learning with curiosity, courage, and delight.

Most readers know Amy Tan for The Joy Luck Club, but her newest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, opens an unexpected window into her creative world.

Compiled from nine handwritten journals, Tan’s latest work of nonfiction is filled with musings and sketches of the birds who frequent her Sausalito backyard to bathe in shallow saucers of water, hop among Meyer lemon trees, and sample the latest offerings from “Amy’s Bistro.” Tan recorded most of her observations from her dining table overlooking the patio. The entries, dated from September 2017 to December 2022, capture both the joy and heartbreak of birdwatching.

Tan’s yard is “very birdy,” as visiting birders like to say. Nestled within an oak woodland habitat, the garden draws hummingbirds to its fuchsia shrubs and passionfruit vines. Jasmine, freesias, and narcissus form a soft understory that birds slip through as they search for food and shelter. Yet even in this backyard Eden, the harsher realities of nature were ever-present. Tan documents how the birds grappled with predators, wildfire smoke, window strikes, and outbreaks of disease.

Backyard birdwatching also became a window into the wider world for Tan during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Thanks to the birds, I have never felt cooped up staying at home,” Tan writes. “So much remains new, so much can be discovered…when I watch birds, I feel free.”

I felt a similar comfort during my own brief foray into birdwatching as a Cub Scouts den leader early in the pandemic. Our troop made feeders by slathering toilet paper rolls in Crisco and rolling them in bird seed. When meetings moved online, the boys completed a backyard birdwatching project.

My son and I used A Pocket Naturalist Guide: Eastern Backyard Birds to identify a red-winged blackbird. He captured its glossy black plumage and the flash of red and yellow on each shoulder in a careful crayon sketch. Even now, whenever I see a red-winged blackbird, I’m reminded of my son at 7-years-old proudly sharing his drawing on Zoom. Nature has a way of helping us connect and carry on, even in tough times.

For Tan, one of the first birds she learned to identify was the California Scrub Jay, a species she admits to having a complicated relationship with. “They scare away the smaller birds by landing like a bomb and devour their food,” she writes.

By the time the book was published, she could identify more than 60 species in her backyard, including the oak titmouse, Anna’s hummingbird, Bewick’s wrens, pygmy nuthatch, and the great horned owl.

I read The Backyard Bird Chronicles with great interest, not only for birdwatching insights, but for clues about the acclaimed author’s learning process. Tan’s journals reveal an enthusiastic lifelong learner who cultivates new skills and knowledge with initiative, courage, and delight.

Amy Tan’s Learning Journey

Tan didn’t set out to become a naturalist. Her fascination with birds began after she took a drawing class from naturalist and artist John Muir Laws. That class reawakened her sense of childhood wonder and connection to nature. She set out on a self-directed learning path, committing to a daily practice of putting in “pencil miles” as she sketched the steady stream of birds visiting her garden over the next half decade.

Learning, for Tan, is something she actively seeks out – no excuses. Unable to drive, she transformed her backyard into a living classroom for studying avian life. She stocked up on inexpensive sketchbooks so she could make quick studies of head shapes and neck lengths without worrying about wasting good paper. She also read voraciously to understand which foods and feeders best served her winged guests.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles illustrates how Tan’s understanding of bird behavior evolved through daily observation as well as her growth as an artist. She acknowledged that her early drawings show a “general negligence about accuracy.” Yet even as her sketches became more detailed and precise, she challenged herself with new goals, including capturing backgrounds and rendering birds in motion.

“I have a long way to go,” she writes. “It is not about getting better at drawing branches or leaves. It is drawing with more knowledge of the bird and its very particular place in the world.”

Tan’s journals also show that she approaches learning with a notable degree of courage. Being a beginner at age 64 takes nerve. She admitted to feeling embarrassed when comparing her early sketches with those of her classmates, but she kept showing up. Eventually she posted her drawings in the Nature Journal Club Facebook group, albeit anonymously, sharing every sketch “no matter how bad I thought they were.” 

Her courage also appeared in her willingness to experiment. She tested different drawing materials, stored thousands of live mealworms in her refrigerator, and explored a succession of ingenious feeder designs meant to outsmart squirrels and rats. In another experiment, she tried to distinguish individual birds within a species by sketching templates of juncos in advance so she could quickly color in their unique patterns in the field. That system didn’t work, but she wasn’t discouraged. For Tan, obstacles aren’t deterrents. They’re invitations to keep learning.

Tan doesn’t gloss over the heartbreak that often occurs with birdwatching. Seventy-five percent of fledglings don’t survive to adulthood. When she saw a Pine Siskin puffed up and dazed at her feeder, she realized it wasn’t a chubby fledgling. It was sick. Wildlife officials confirmed a deadly salmonellosis outbreak among Pine Siskins. She took down the feeders and water bowls so as not to spread the disease. Despite her grief, Tan sat down to draw the bird from a photo she had taken only hours before its death, using the attention of her pencil to honor its short life.

Curiosity drives Tan’s learning as much as courage. Laws encouraged his students to wonder in depth and “be the bird.” This came naturally to Tan as a novelist. Throughout her nature journals, she peppers her entries with questions: What do the birds think when they see her? Do they experience emotions such as trust, embarrassment, or pride? How do they establish their pecking order at the feeders?

This curiosity often led to touching moments of discovery. When a drainage pipe released 4,500 gallons of water down a wall, she watched a California Towhee ride the rushing stream like a water slide. Soon other towhees joined in, while Golden-crowned Sparrows splashed through the spray like “city kids in the summer running through the spray of a broken fire hydrant.” The scene delighted her. She wondered what it is about rushing water that thrills both birds and kids.

Sometimes she posed her questions to her mentors, including the esteemed naturalist Bernd Heinrich and ornithologist David Allen Sibley as well as her teenage birder friend Fiona Gillogly. But often there is no answer, and the reader is left to share in her wonderment. 

“By disposition, I am an observer,” she writes. “I want to know why things happen. I need to feel the gut kick of strong emotions. I am drawn to see details, patterns, and aberrations that suggest a more interesting truth.”

Above all, Tan’s learning is fueled by joy. Birdwatching, she says, is like a real-life game of Where’s Waldo? Her journals include not only lifelike renderings but also playful comics, complete with speech bubbles. A mother crow scolds her fledgling after a mishap with a “Squirrel Buster” feeder. Scrub jays complain about eating junco leftovers. And a tiny Bewick’s wren guards the suet with a firm “Mine!” Unlike writing novels, which she calls “torment,” creating The Backyard Bird Chronicles was “pure fun, spontaneous, a bit of a mess, come what may.”

Tan’s motivation to learn is entirely intrinsic. She observes birds not for any external reward, but for the fleeting, personal connection she feels when a bird meets her gaze. “Each bird is surprising and thrilling in its own way,” she writes. “But the most special is the bird that pauses when it is eating, looks and acknowledges I am there, then goes back to what it is doing.”