For my birthday this year, a dear friend gave me a copy of The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by best-selling author turned birdwatcher Amy Tan. (Thank you, Lena!) In this beautiful book, Amy recounts not only her day-by-day sightings of the birds in her yard but also her poignant observations on how birding connects to the messy business of being human. Best of all, this book includes actual pages from Amy’s nature journal, showing her skilled, loving, and often humorous drawings of the birds around her, as well as some of her more professional artwork. However, the true value of this book lies in the practices that it encourages us to emulate—habits you can develop to not only increase your knowledge of the birds in your yard, but also hone your habits of attention, awareness, and loving curiosity.

1. Ask questions

At first, as Amy admits, she knows almost nothing about these creatures. But throughout the pages of this book, she approaches birdwatching with an infectious beginner’s enthusiasm that she never trades for complacency. Her questions proliferate on the pages of her journal, everything from “How does a bird sleep?” to “How does a bird define bravery?” Some of her questions could be answered by science, some by the birds themselves, and some only by herself, as she unwraps how birdwatching enlarges and refines her own sense of who she is.

Those of us who have watched birds for many years know how easy it is to become dulled by familiarity. Like so much of life, birding can lose its shine when we forfeit our wonder and begin to relegate the ordinary birds around us to the role of background characters. But as Amy shows, cultivating a perennial sense of wonder is as simple as continuing to ask questions. Curiosity, attention, and awe keep us questioning—and growing.

2. Record your sightings

Amy’s book is not an abstract summation of acquired knowledge; instead, each dated entry invites the reader to experience a specific day and a particular bird. Amy’s sightings record includes not only what birds come to her yard but what their habits are, where they nest, what foods they prefer, and her feelings about the encounter. The drawings help to further crystallize the moment.

You may look at Amy’s meticulous notes and detailed drawings and feel intimidated. (So do I!) But you don’t have to rival Amy’s writerly and artistic abilities to benefit from recording your experiences. Keep track of your sightings in a small notebook or even quick notes in your phone. And practice drawing the birds you see—not because you’ll create portraits of stunning artistic excellence, but because the practice of drawing helps you remember what you saw and notice otherwise unremarkable details about the bird.

3. Be true to your home patch

All of the sightings detailed in The Backyard Bird Chronicles are just that—backyard birds. These are the daily, domestic species out Amy’s window, on her land, in a habitat that she has specifically made friendly for birds.

That’s not to say you should only bird in your backyard, but let your sense of wonder and awe start there. Don’t seek so fervently for far-flung species that you overlook the glory of what’s right outside your window.

My Review: 5/5 stars

Brilliantly simple in structure and deceptively understated in its wisdom, this book combines extraordinary observation, exceptional art, and unrivaled prose. So, pick up a copy of this gorgeous book, and let it inspire you to pay attention to your backyard birds. Listen to them. Notice them. Appreciate them. They may have more to say than you ever dreamed.

Your Turn!

Have you read The Backyard Bird Chronicles? If so what did you think?

If you’re looking for some practical tips to begin your own bird journaling, here are a few starting point questions you might consider:

• What’s your favorite bird you’ve seen lately and why do you love them?

• What’s a bird you’ve seen lately that has surprised you? Why?

• What’s the first bird you remember seeing?

• What’s a bird behavior you’ve always wondered about?

• If possible, watch and sketch birds engaged in this behavior.

• Can you form any creative hypotheses about why they might do it?

• What do you think your yard looks like to a bird?

A Gift for You: Journaling Pages

I've created some printable journaling pages for you to explore your observations in the natural world and record your bird sightings! These pages are available to my paid subscribers as a way of thanking you for your support and generosity. I hope that they spark new adventures in ways of being present in nature for you.

Read more

It’s August, and the world is weary.

If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the time when summer has dragged on too long to be fun anymore, but autumn feels as if it’s still miles away. The green, springing things that flourished so vibrantly at the beginning of the growing season are now gasping in triple-digit heat, desiccated and dull. Even the sky, once shimmeringly blue, is now the color of a foggy mirror. Everything seems to be gasping for its breath in this slow stretching toward fall, toward September, toward anything new.

I find these same strains echoed in my internal world. August is a month of tension as I tug between challenging decisions, one foot in each season of my heart. A lot of difficult no’s blend with exhilarating, heady yes’s. I’m juggling a handful of potential futures yet stuck in a season I can’t move on from just yet.

The birds, I realize, are weary too. Some species are still finishing up their annual feather molt, furtively tucked within trees and bushes as they undergo this demanding process of renewal that is just as hard as renewal always is. Still others have just begun their fall migration, winging their way into the most challenging, dangerous and energy-depleting season of a bird’s life.

In this season, I look out the window at my backyard birds, many of whom are panting in the heat or preening dulled feathers or simply huddled, exhausted, on a limb. I remind myself to take a deep breath, for both them and me. It’s all right, I tell myself. Fall will come.

And in the meantime, I want to remember how to stay in this season. I’m not rushing ahead, not lagging behind, but taking time to appreciate even these last hot summer days and to give myself the rest, the support, and even the uncomfortable tension that will lead me into what comes next.

One Thing for Birds: Fill a Birdbath

There are still triple-digit days for birds to survive as they prepare for the arduous migration season, so this month, let’s lighten the burden on backyard birds by providing water.

Just as for a humans, birds’ primary cooling strategy is evaporation; they pant to allow water vapor to escape from their upper lungs. If they can’t replenish the water lost through evaporation quickly enough, they become dangerously dehydrated.

Providing water for birds is as easy as setting out a shallow dish or birdbath with clean, fresh water. Avoid metal containers (they heat quickly in the sun!), and fill the dish to two inches or less (birds can’t swim). Adding a few rocks inside the birdbath gives birds a place to perch out of the water and helps them feel safer.

Birds can utilize this water for drinking, bathing, and just splashing for fun! For added appeal, consider adding a fountain or other moving water feature to your birdbath. Birds are naturally drawn to running water, and it can help keep the water cleaner as well. In either case, be sure to change the water frequently to maintain freshness.

Your Turn!

Where do you feel pulled between seasons? What birds are you seeing out your window? Tell me in the comments!

Also—if you comment with a picture of your birdbath, you’ll be entered to win a one-year free subscription to my poetry Substack, Wild Goose Words!

Birding Destination: Bois D’Arc Lake

90° Fahrenheit

Sunny, breezy (5-10 mph S)

11% waning crescent moon

37 species seen (trip report here)

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Birding Journal

Bois d’Arc Lake flashed like a mirror in the July sun, fringed by the thick-kneed cypresses that appeared to have waded out from the shore. The place held the contented silence of a peaceful refuge—and apparently, the birds agreed with me, many species having chosen this location for the precarious work of nesting. Iridescent gallinules cackled to their fuzzy brown offspring, guiding them to the cover of thick reeds.

Walking by a stand of cattails, I flushed a stripy brown bird that flapped into a convenient cypress, hunched on a limb, and gave me a very disapproving look: my first Yellow-crowned Night Heron, a juvenile trying out its world.

And all around and behind our other sightings were hundreds of cattle egrets raising massive colonies of offspring. Accompanied by their unearthly mix of grunts and hoots and yammers, their lithe white forms sliced through the air, gliding and returning and gliding again. Their numbers seemed to be most concentrated in a thick stand of cypress, where the branches literally sagged with birds. Trying to count them for our official checklist, I turned for help to Jesse,1 a grizzled birder with long hair and eyes as blue as the July day. He squinted through his scope. “At least three hundred. Probably four. And we haven’t even counted the thousand we’ll see on the other side of the water!”

If there were truly a thousand adult cattle egrets present, then the tally of nestlings must have been staggering, because each adult was nestled on an untidy wad of sticks that passed for a nest. When they moved ever so slightly, I could see the grey fuzz of their hapless offspring beneath them. Jesse shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to have the nest on the bottom. Them alligators will come right up and take those young out of the nests.”

Jesse is no stranger to the challenges that young birds face. In this spot years ago, he took a photo of which he is still proud: a Yellow-crowned Night Heron with a juvenile Western Cattle Egret in its beak. He’s told the story before, many times, but his obvious pride in his quick photography trigger, his serendipitous timing, his observational eye, is still so apparent that I let him tell me again. I even force myself to look at a photo that I find more than a little disturbing as he recounts, again, the details I’d rather not imagine. Just grabbed it right out of the nest and tipped his head back; I was surprised he could swallow it, really, with the size of...

Jesse has always come alone to the birding trips before, but he’s brought his wife today. It doesn’t take me long to realize something isn’t right about this arrangement. Her face is cemented into a hard blankness somewhere between sullenness and confusion. She shuffles with an odd gait, lagging far from the group of birders. I never hear her speak. Once, as Jesse looks behind him and startles. “Laura!” She’s standing behind their vehicle, in the middle of a gravel road, looking out of place in her world. He moves quickly but cautiously toward her and motions comfortingly to the vehicle. “Come on. Let’s get you in the car.” His tone sounds as though she’s a rare bird he doesn’t want to scare away.

At our next stop, we’re standing on an overgrown roadside, scanning for an elusive Swainson’s Warbler, when Jesse turns to our group leader, Susan. “Susan,” he says with no preamble, “I told you my wife has Alzheimer’s, right?”

Susan takes it in conversational stride. “No. You didn’t.”

“Well, she does.” He says it with finality, as though it’s a fact he wrestled with for so long that it comes easily now. “And as part of that, she can’t really communicate at all. So—” For the first time he looks uneasy. “If she says something weird or seems rude or people think she’s ignoring them—”

Susan is watching him with a steadying gaze. “It’s all right. We understand.”

The Swainson’s Warbler isn’t there. We continue to the next inlet of the lake.

But now, my vision is changed by my newfound knowledge. I watch Jesse, the patient heartache in his blue eyes. I watch the way he watches his wife, even though it’s obvious she doesn’t remember what his name means to her. I watch the way she turns away from him to smoke a cigarette, that angst deep-carved on her face. I watched the way she throws the butt down when she’s finished, and I watch the way Jessie scoops it up for disposal, holding it carefully in his hand, as if it might help him find something he’s looking for.

I don’t have anything to say that will help the situation, nothing that will thaw out the frozen confusion on her face or heal the deep aching sadness in Jesse’s. So I look through my binoculars again, focusing once more on those reckless and heart-wrenchingly brave birds, those cattle egrets balancing on their cypress limbs as though walking a tightrope between life and death. We have never lived in a safe world, but what a risk birds take, building nests and laying eggs and reenacting hope over and over. And what a risk we take each time we let our lives intertwine, knowing that the predators of time and age and disease and betrayal and heartache can come out of nowhere and wreck our tidy nests—but still choosing to sing.

As he’s leaving, his wife a statue in the passenger seat, Jesse tells us of a place not far up the road where he’s seen a family of Yellow-crowned Night Herons. We creep down yet more cramped dirt streets and find a pocket of woods bordering the lake, where a juvenile Night Heron sits at stunningly close range with a protective adult hunched in the tree above it.

As we watch, another adult swoops from a hidden perch and soars over the lake, wings strong, gaze set forward. We watch until it blurs into the shine of sun on the water. The other two Night Herons seem unperturbed by its disappearance. They know that no distance flown can strain the threads that bind them to each other, that they have agreed together to live this grand experiment in hope.

“But there are no birds around me!”

It happens…you see the bird photos on social media, you read the accounts of some intrepid explorer coming across an exotic species in South America…and then you go outside and find one pigeon. And when that happens, it’s easy to make the assumption that you’re in the wrong place for finding birds.

Not true!

Birds exist literally everywhere. (Except on the moon. I guess.)

🥶 Polar ice caps? Yep.

🚢 Middle of the Atlantic Ocean? Check.

🌴 Remote tropical jungle in Brazil? Absolutely.

🏡 Your neighborhood? 100%!

Birds are there…it’s usually a matter of knowing what to look for. Here are the best tips for spotting the birds that already exist around your area…

🐦 Check at different times of day. Have you tried looking early in the morning? At evening? During your lunch break?

🐦 Look in places you might not expect. What about under the edges of bushes or inside old barns?

🐦 Try adding birdfeeders, birdbaths, or other attractive elements to your backyard.

🐦 If you can, visit a nearby birding hotspot. A birding hotspot is a location where other birdwatchers have reported a significant number of diverse species. Check ebird.org to explore hotspots near you.

🐦 And finally…appreciate the birds you do see! Even the most “commonplace” bird can unlock curiosity and wonder.

QOTD: What birds have you discovered around you lately?