41 pages • 1 hour read
Amy TanThe Backyard Bird Chronicles
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword–PrefaceChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide.
Ornithologist David Sibley’s first birding memory is spotting a yellow-headed blackbird sitting on a wire in California at seven years old. David and his older brother began keeping a life list, tracking all the birds they’d seen throughout their lives. Soon, Sibley’s interest in birds merged with another practice: drawing. Putting the images of the birds he encountered on paper forced Sibley to sharpen his way of seeing; by drawing birds, he got to know them more intimately. He enjoyed identifying patterns in the behaviors of the birds he studied, but he was also delighted when he noticed a break in that pattern, such as a Bewick’s wren suddenly bathing in water.
During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, birdwatching became increasingly popular as people sought safe ways to connect in outdoor spaces. Sibley explains that one reason may also have been a desire to return to the cyclical rhythms of the natural world instead of the falsely simulated passing of time indoors. Birdwatching is about seeking patterns and trying to make sense of them, connecting the observer to a larger sense of being. A nature journal is a way of recording those patterns. Tan’s nature journal takes this further, as her work blends personal connection to observation.
Preface Summary
Amy Tan is obsessed with birds and has filled nine journals with hundreds of pages of sketches and observations of her avian friends. When she began, she thought she might record the ordinary behaviors of birds, but soon she was discovering something far more complex. Tan emphasizes that she is an unreliable narrator when it comes to chronicling the lives and behaviors of the birds she observes. When she began, she could only identify three birds.
Tan had always enjoyed nature as a child, spending time in a creek near the suburb where she lived. She recalls looking down—peering into the creek for polliwogs—rather than looking up for birds. Still, her time by the creek taught her an important lesson: how to observe. It showed her how to enjoy herself without worrying about being judged or producing something; neither birds nor polliwogs expected anything from her. The creek also provided her refuge from a troubled life at home, where her mother would sometimes threaten death by suicide. Tan’s time in nature was about both desire and need.
Although the author spent her life immersed in nature, she did not begin to pay attention to birds until she was 64, when she enrolled in a drawing class led by John Muir Laws, whose books emphasize birds and nature journaling. Although Laws taught principles of drawing in the course, he also emphasized other skills, like curiosity and observation. Tan continues to carry one piece of advice from Laws close to her heart: “As you look at the bird, try to feel the life within it” (xvi). As a fiction writer, Tan was familiar with imagining herself as the character, but she had never applied this skill to animals.
Tan explains that The Backyard Bird Chronicles shows her journey as a learner. Her own backyard became the sanctuary where she recorded the Chronicles—her daily report on her feathered neighbors. When she began nature journaling about the birds in her yard, she could only identify three species. Now she can identify 63.
She practiced what Laws referred to as “pencil miles”—elevating the time spent practicing drawing over the final product. Her teacher also advised limiting the materials the students carried with them on their field trips. Tan did not heed this advice at first, taking a wide variety of art supplies with her. Her early entries are inaccurate, and the sketches were done quickly. While she kept the journal, she had no intention of publishing it. This allowed her to feel free to explore and create without worrying about a final product. Approaching drawing and nature journaling with a sense of liberation was extremely important to the author. She intentionally bought cheap materials so that she would not feel bad about wasting them or worry about making mistakes.
Tan feels her early drawings lacked wonderment. While on her second field outing with the class, Tan became attached to Fiona, a 13-year-old girl who exhibited both great knowledge about nature and a profound sense of wonder. Fiona was mesmerized by everything around her, so Tan followed her, taking note of everything Fiona did. Soon, through observation and pencil miles, Tan learned to relate to birds in new ways.
Foreword–Preface Analysis
The foreword by David Sibley addresses how The Art of Paying Attention can offer a new way of seeing the world: “Drawing requires you to absorb details and then to combine them into a simplified and unified whole […] the drawing is, in a way, like discovering the birds anew” (viii). Sibley emphasizes noticing patterns as part of this process of observation. Paying attention to patterns helps to clarify focus and derive meaning from what is observed. Sibley describes this as a type of return: recapturing the sense of wonder and curiosity of childhood. Instead of a new way of seeing, Sibley views the art of paying attention as a learning to see again.
As a fiction author, Tan instinctively incorporates narrative and deeper meaning into an everyday record of the birds around her. Her work provides the opportunity for multiple critical analyses, as its blend of art and writing allows the reader to examine the text both as a record of Tan’s journey as a learner and as a memoir.
When writing, Tan utilizes Embodiment as Creative Practice. She imagines herself as the character, moving around inside the character’s body, and living as the character she writes. Advice from John Muir Laws leads Tan to consider embodiment in other aspects of her creative work. Observing the birds in her backyard through the same approach, she discovers that empathy leads to better art. By trying to get inside the head of the birds, she discovers new things about their behaviors that she never noticed before and acknowledges the richness of their lives.
As she observes a dark-eyed junco, she feels as though she is the bird, that their lives and beings are intrinsically interconnected. The same skill that she had finely tuned as a writer—inhabiting the lives of her characters—is now becoming a part of her drawing and journaling. What Tan describes in this passage is a central theme in nature writing as a whole and is essential to discovery. Nature writers like Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others have described the feeling of oneness with nature in their writing: an overwhelming flash of merging into a larger, collective existence. Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess describes this experience as engaging with one’s ecological self.
By incorporating ecological understanding, or embodiment, into her practice of nature journaling, Tan joins a tradition of nature writing. As she sketches the birds, sometimes for long stretches of time, she reflects on them and imagines herself as being one with them. She describes this feeling in her Preface, showing how important the shared experience of being is to all forms of art. As an author, Tan is used to inhabiting the mental and emotional states of her characters, allowing herself to become absorbed into them. However, it was a new experience for her to apply this skill to birds, to imagine herself as them. Engaging in this practice has made her a more adept artist, more aware of the complex lives of the inhabitants of her yard, and more connected to her own place in nature.
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