“These pages are my obsession with birds. The Backyard Bird Chronicles contains excerpts from hundreds of pages gleaned from nine personal journals filled with sketches and handwritten notes of naive observations of birds in my backyard. I was sixty-four when I took drawing classes for the first time, followed by nature journaling field trips, both led by John Muir Laws. The classes were not strictly about drawing. If anything, they had just as much to do with being curious, allowing us to return to childhood wonderment, when everything was seen as new.”
Those are some lines from the preface to Amy Tan’s book The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Many of you will recognize the name Amy Tan from her novel The Joy Luck Club. This is a very different sort of book.
In 2017, in an effort to destress her life, Tan began drawing lessons with the express intention of chronicling the birds that came to her backyard. Over the next six years, she spent thousands of dollars filling a variety of bird feeders with bird food…mealy worms, suet and seed, in an effort to draw a variety of birds to her backyard. And as the birds came, she chronicled observations in her journal about their coloring and behavior, posed questions, and sketched them.
Each short chapter is a fleshed-out narrative of her observations and includes the actual journal page. The last five pages are a list of all the birds she identified in her yard as of December 15, 2022, many more than the original three birds she started with!
If you aspire to or are already a backyard bird lover, then you must read The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan.
