The Backyard Bird Chronicles: Amy Tan’s Log of Lore and Love

Sometime in late April a few weeks before the close of another school year, I ask the children, gathered at my feet for a story to close their eyes.

Most of them do, and it’s fun to see who’s peeking.

“Imagine that you’re in your bed in the morning, and you wake up before anyone else,” I say. “Next time that happens, don’t try to do anything. Just be quiet and listen. You might hear something like this.” I play the song of the American robin, commonly known as “cheery-cheerio-cheery-cheer up.” 

Seeing children’s eyes light up at the sound of birdsong is priceless.

We practice saying the robin song’s syllables, then listen again, then say it again, then listen again. 

Just as they are feeling like ornithological experts, I ask them to listen to a different bird, one they might hear in the afternoon when (I hope) they are playing outside. This one is less musical but full of gusto: the “conkeree!”  of the red-winged blackbird.

We practice that one for a while, and then I test their memory by playing the songs without their knowing ahead which one it is, and adding a third that they haven’t heard, so they can also discover the humble joy of saying, “I don’t know!”

All this is part of a counseling unit I’ve created on the multiple intelligences, connected to the ways our “smarts” grow when we are at play. Mental health isn’t all about talk, after all. It’s about fitness, fun, companionship, solitude, spirituality, challenges and much more. The decline of mental health in our nation is due in part to the excessive time we spend on screens at the expense of the many simple things that would lift our spirits instead of bringing them down.

One of those things is bird song.

If bird song grows on you, you may find yourself pursing the sight, sound and identification of birds more and more. You might begin purchasing feeders, birdbaths, and (of course) binoculars.

You could become obsessive about it, learning to sketch each visitor to the haven in your yard. You might keep massive amounts of live mealworms in your fridge for springtime parents to feed their babies. If you’re already an accomplished novelist, you might write everything down, creating a delightful, illustrated chronicle to share with the world.

Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) has done just that, and the result, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, is a bird lover’s feast.

“Creating this journal has been different from writing a novel,” Tan writes in her preface. “A novel is torment….I have to carry a thousand pieces in an increasingly complex configuration toward the luminous vision of a story that remains a mirage….”

“In contrast,” she continues, “creating The Backyard Bird Chronicles was pure fun, spontaneous, a bit of a mess, come what may….I could respect science and also allow playful anthropomorphism and a lot of wild guesses. Unlike fiction, I didn’t need to hope the story pulled together. The story was the moment in front of me, one day, one page, one sketch.”

Tan begins her Chronicles by endearing herself to anyone who ever loved being in nature as a child. “While watching hummingbirds buzz around me,” she writes:

I recalled a fantasy every child has: that I could win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me. I imagined tiny avian helicopters dining on my palm. To lure them, I bought lilliputian hummingbird feeders, four for $10. Hope came cheap enough, but I was also realistic. It might take months to gain the hummingbird’s interest in the feeder and for it to lose its fear of me.

With that, Amy Tan had me in the palm of her hand. Page by page, Tan captivates her readers with an enviable litany of visitors to her California yard – hummingbirds, pine siskins, titmice, chickadees, California quail, downy woodpeckers, dark-eyed juncos and Bewick’s wrens among them – paired with charming sketches and notes capturing the daily drama, scientific tidbits and musings about what her guests might be thinking of each other and even of her, the human who provides daily feasts but sometimes goes on vacation.

She is funny (“Yoo hoo! Tap-tap. I’m starving!” a goldfinch complains after she’s removed the feeders), clever (the “Dusk Special” menu includes Spicy Suet, Nyger Nirvana and Graines Pour Oseaux Savages) and whimsical (“I am aware 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 and to not let personal bias obstruct more accurate observations. Thank God I am not a scientist”).

And there are mournful moments, too.

A Great Horned owl carries off a live baby opossum; a fallen Cooper’s hawk she rescues and takes to Wild Care doesn’t make it:

I cried. I tried to draw her portrait. But I could not capture her spirit. I could not capture the way she must have felt when I briefly held her in my arms and told her I was sorry.

Tan started her journal before she knew much about birds. She says she was feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world. She was simply looking for a project that would bring her peace when the flutter of birds outside her window caught her attention and distracted her from those worries.

Birds have a way of doing that. Luke Burgis (author of Wanting: The Power of Desire in Everyday Life) has written insightfully about his own growing interest in birds, noting the benefits of having a contemplative hobby like birding. He writes:

A passive hobby that pulls us out of ourselves to the point of self-forgetfulness is an antidote to the technological culture in which everything needs to be productive, needs to change, needs to improve, needs to show ‘results.’

I think that’s what Tan discovered while she was searching for something else. The birds pulled her out of herself, lifting her to contemplate them just for the sake of their mysterious beauty.

“The beauty of birds is that they are entirely given to me; I can’t control them, I can simply receive them as they appear to me in my daily life,” Burgis writes. He adds, “Givenness has a healthy sense of alterity built right into it. That’s why I think birdwatching—or any hobby that forces us to accept things for what they are—is probably a very healthy one.”

The givenness of birds lifts us to delight in beauties we can’t control, rendering us for the moment at least, a little more grateful, more humble, more human.

The next time you hear a bird in your back yard or anywhere else you happen to be, take a moment to listen. Then watch for a flash of feathers.

Let songster give you wings.

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You might also enjoy The Blessings of Birding by Ear: Tips for Identifying Birds by Their Song, Nature’s Best Hope: Your Yard and Mine and Tolkien, Trees and a Naturalist’s Notebook: Noticing Nature while Mordor Looms.

I subscribe to the Luke Burgis Newsletter and highly recommend it. Whether he’s writing on birds, books or beauty, his thinking always touches my thirst for wholeness.

Featured photo by Tammy Mild on iStock.