THE BACKYARD CHRONICLES

THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES by Amy Tan

I recently finished Amy Tan's Backyard Bird Chronicles. For all my nature journalers and bird lovers, this is going to be right up your alley.

Tan is a backyard bird watcher. She spends hours daily observing which birds come to her feeders eating what types of food. She notices behaviors and details jotting everything down in her journal. She pays attention to color variations and differences between the birds adding beautifully sketched illustrations to her pages of notes. The compilation is a masterpiece. Real life fills the entries: the joy of watching, relationships made, the sadness of illness, periodically a loss, the occasional run to the bird sanctuary in an attempt to save a bird, etc.

This book was fun for me to read over the past couple of weeks while I feed my own backyard birds (over a hundred acres of mainly wooded backyard). This is part of my winter routine that helps to bring spots of bright color into days of white and gray. The woods become alive with movement as the birds fly in from the backwoods to the feeders. They chatter and call to each other, hopping and flittering joyously from one feeder to the next, tasting a buffet of different suets and seeds. I get Tan's obsession. I'm a bit obsessed myself!

HEADS UP- This is a lengthy book (about 282 pages). There are approx. 5 uses of profanity, predominately sh*t in place of poop. No f-bombs.