Armchair Birding: The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan
~ Anne Kilgannon
Amy Tan—yes, that Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and several other great reads—works from her dining room table, but it’s a wonder she gets anything down on paper. Her table faces several large windows and just outside is a bird’s paradise of delectable feeding stations including hummingbird feeders, facilities such as bird baths, and other inducements to attract bird life. Amy Tan loves birds—all kinds, shapes and sizes, no favorites, all welcome.
Her open-air buffet features live mealworms that she keeps fresh in her refrigerator, suet balls, sunflower seeds, and other goodies as needed. She contrives multiple and various water dishes, some for drinking and some for bathing. She offers perches and bird-houses, safe places, and lots of window decals to ward birds away from the glass that allows her close observation of all the action. It’s a feast for them and a love fest for her.
Amy jumps up from her writing table to record regulars and chance visitors, new fledglings and migrating passers-by. Her list of birds is enviable. Her chronicle opens in September of 2017 and closes December of 2022 with a recorded list of sixty-one different species. Her enthusiasm and curiosity are so infectious though, that instead of envy, this reader felt simply joy for her as well as inspired to improve my own offerings for my local birds.
The Chronicles are her invitation to join her in her quest to learn everything she can about birds and about how to make their survival and life journeys a little easier. Amy shares helpful details of her efforts and experiments to provide seeds and other amenities for her birds, meanwhile frustrating squirrels and rats from pillaging her supplies. She’s philosophical about predators, loving the hawks and owls even while mourning the losses of their smaller prey birds. While offering imaginative and helpful tips for readers to try in their own backyard, it is her abounding interest and knowledge of birdlife that captivates; we not only want to adopt her practices but also her fascination, diligence, and awe.
Amy’s bird knowledge is visceral; she understands bird bodies on a deep level. Her path is one she urges others to adopt: she has learned so much about birds by learning to draw them. And drawing begins with really seeing birds beyond their identification; behavior and personality shape a bird as much as field marks. The book is replete—stuffed—with portraits of the birds she has seen and studied. The shape of a beak, the shading of colors, the splotches, wing bars, crests, and short or long tails all reveal the bird hopping around her feeder table. Her drawings, though, depict more than shape and size and markings; her pencil captures their very nature. She shows it in their eyes; each bird looks right back at you. Each bird is so alive. It gives you a shiver to look back. She provides information on classes and materials for learning this skill and recommends everyone adopt this way of knowing birds, of really seeing them and recognizing their character as well as characteristics.
Amy wants to know everything she can about her backyard birds. She poses thought-provoking as well as delight-provoking questions as she observes certain bird behaviors: “Are they having fun? Do birds play?” Watching jays work out how to retrieve food meant for smaller birds, Amy exclaims, “Mensa members of the neighborhood Chess Club for Scrubs came to my yard for laughs.” In all her seriousness, she is undoubtedly having fun, too. Birds’ ways of showing dominance, their courtship and parental behaviors, peculiar eating habits, and other adaptations are an endless source of intrigue and entertainment. What are they doing today? Who is that new bird that just arrived? What happened to the fledglings recently emerged from the nest? What will become of this injured bird? We too want to see and know.
Amy models bird watching on a highly elevated level but also brings her readers along, sharing her methods, urging everyone to join her in knowing their backyard birds. She does it with such joy and love; she literally shows us how to engage in this quest and the rewards awaiting us. Read this book for inspiration—and fun! After all, how many birding books have you laughing and jumping up to look out your window?
