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.
Pages 44-125Chapter Summaries & Analyses
January 10, 2019–December 21, 2019 Summary
Tan notes that birds are highly habit-forming when it comes to food. After changing out a seed feeder for a new one, the finches look at the new feeder without eating, confused about the change. When she moves one feeder to a different part of the yard, most birds continue to search for it in the old spot. Hummingbirds, however, are quick to come to a feeder in a new spot, though they still check for the old one. This is true even if it is the same feeder; the hummingbirds treat an old feeder in a different location as something entirely new.
Tan also confronts some of the more challenging sides of nature. Her initial love for California scrub jays and their flashy personalities wanes when she realizes that they eat eggs and hatchlings. She tries to discourage jays from coming to her yard by installing feeders that are meant to deter them, but the new feeders instead encourage the smartest jays to come to her yard. When a lesser goldfinch with conjunctivitis forces Tan to close her feeders once more to avoid further spread of disease, birds tap at her window as if demanding food. The writer finds it difficult to get the picture of the sick finch out of her mind.
When she sees two song sparrows making a nest, she worries that the roaming neighborhood cats may harm them. Cats are responsible for an approximate 2 million deaths of birds each year. Tan feels a close relationship with the birds and wonders what would happen if cat owners spent more time paying attention to them. The death of a hermit thrush that crashes into a window is particularly troubling for Tan. She decides to use the bird for study and then freezes it so that it can be taken to Cornell.
Bird behaviors occupy Tan’s thoughts: “I am controlled by birds” (63). She finds herself spending more time looking at birds than writing. Each morning, she calls out, and they erupt into song. She likes to think that they are calling to her as though to someone they know, a friend. The male Anna’s hummingbird is her favorite because it trusts her and continues to eat from her hand. When she leaves for two weeks on a trip, she comes back to find that Anna’s hummingbirds are slow to return. She wonders if they are nesting, but she also considers that their absence may be related to her own. When the hummingbirds finally return, she cannot help but wonder if these are the same birds that were there before her departure.
As her obsession grows, the writer begins to think about the year as structured by the cycles of birds: “My view of seasons no longer follows the Earth’s spin axis. Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter have been replaced by Spring Migration, Nesting Season, Fledgling Season, and Fall Migration” (78). She begins diversifying food sources to bring in more birds and to grow her understanding. Soon, she is buying 5,000 live meal worms a week. She enjoys watching an oak titmouse appear confused by the wriggling larvae before happily consuming them and bringing them home to her young.
When Tan sees a bird she does not recognize, she begins sketching. While sketching one unusual sparrow, she realizes that she had studied it before when she visited New York, on the opposite side of the country. She is astounded to discover an American tree sparrow in her backyard. Another small bird is looking about, uncertain. As she draws, certain aspects of the bird’s shape feel familiar to her, as though she had drawn it before. When an adult dark-eyed junco lands next to the fledgling, she realizes she has been sketching a baby junco. The bird mimics its parent by pecking at a seed on the ground, but it does not know how to crack the shell of the seed.
The birds engage in a continuous process of learning. A hermit thrush spends hours trying to break into feeders despite an abundance of feed on the ground. Tan wonders if ground feeders can be trained to eat from perches. She devises an experiment in which she gradually introduces ground feeders to perches. Over time, the California towhees and fox sparrows join the other birds at the feeders. However, Tan notes that birds that begin eating at feeders now refuse to eat from the ground.
Tan, too, is still learning, and she often at times feels frustrated by the limitations of her artistic ability. Birds are particularly challenging. In one drawing on Page 113, Tan attempts to show the viewer what observing birds really feels like. The bodies of many different types of birds fade into an explosion of camellia leaves. The birds are indistinguishable from one another and noticeable in the leaves only because of their dark eyes. Tan explains that birding can often feel like trying to make sense of a complex visual maze. She recognizes that many of her drawings reflect her own bias: her perception of what the birds look like rather than their reality. She tries to stretch the limitations of what she can do, developing a color-coding system for identifying individual juncos and allowing the art to lead to further questions.
Pages 44-125 Analysis
An important part of Embodiment as Creative Practice is embracing both the dark and light sides of life. In this section, Tan deals with multiple tragedies, including sick and dying birds. These experiences help connect Tan to her feathered subjects and to understand their behaviors as part of complex experience. Her drawing of birds in a camellia bush is an important moment for Tan—it reveals her context as the observer and the reality of looking for birds that are often indistinguishable from their surroundings. It also inspires her to think about the contexts of the birds themselves, asking how she fits into their lives.
Tan’s observations and notations become more inquisitive and scientific, showing her growth in The Art of Paying Attention. She begins performing experiments to gain new insight into the behaviors and lives of the birds in her backyard. Her knowledge of birds and art are linked. As her skills as an artist grow, so does her understanding of birds and their behaviors. While sketching a junco fledgling, unsure of what it is, she is first struck by the familiarity of the movements of her pencil across the page, as though she has drawn those shapes before. It is her artistic memory that kicks in first, well before her brain can identify the bird. Her visual literacy makes her a more adept birder, stepping in where memorization fails. Knowledge of what adult birds look like, for example, often goes out the window when observing fledglings, as baby birds are often smaller, fluffier, and duller in color.
The baby dark-eyed junco symbolizes the learning process. It tries to mimic the actions of its parent, which is feeding on the ground. First, the fledgling pecks at nothing on the ground. Then it picks up a seed. Tan notes that the bird does not know how to break the shell on the seed to swallow it and looks around for help. Tan often observes the learning process of birds and even attempts to create environments in which that learning can happen. She wonders if she can train ground feeders to eat from perches, and she constructs an experiment involving a series of gradual steps to accomplish her goal.
These observations of learning mirror Tan’s own internal process. Like the birds looking to parents for guidance, she reads birding books and joins online and in-person communities. She increases exposure to birds by putting out more feeders and spending more time observing them. Her recordings become more finely crafted, and the specificity of her observations increases over time. She discovers a way to distinguish between individual dark-eyed juncos.
Tan’s entries in this section resonate with Inquiry as a Path to Understanding. She ruminates on the golden-crowned sparrows that return to her yard, wondering if the reason they come to the window ledge first each morning is because they know she will feed them and are trying to remind her. In many of her entries, she allows questions to spill across the page, each leading to another.
For example, when attempting to identify the individual juncos, she wonders about their variances in coloration: “Do darker-colored individuals displace females and younger males? If two males are competing, is there anything about their coloration that other males recognize as belonging to the more dominant male?” (96). These scientific questions soon give way to more existential territory. Tan’s work as a writer and her focus on embodiment connects these questions to even deeper ones, inquiries that bring her observations into a larger context: “Is my inability to recognize birds similar to white people thinking all Asians look alike? Do birds recognize individual birds of their own kind in the same vicinity? What details do they see that we humans don’t?” (97). As Tan considers how color plays a role in the lives of the birds in her yard, she cannot help but see correlations to how humans think about visual stimuli and derive meaning from it.
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