The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Tan’s journal opens with a hummingbird sitting in a hand. After some trial and error, she learns the proper ratio of water to sugar and finds the right kind of feeders to bring hummingbirds to her yard. She wants to lure one to sit on her hand and drink from a Lilliputian hummingbird feeder. She is surprised when a hummingbird takes to it quickly and repeatedly before hovering in front of her face, looking her directly in the eyes. Tan thinks about John Muir Laws’s advice to “be the bird” and wonders how the hummingbird knows that she is trustworthy: “Was he curious? Was he being aggressive, warning me that he owned the feeder? Whatever his meaning, he had come back. He had acknowledged me. We have a relationship. I am in love” (4).

Another encounter with a pine siskin is less enchanting. While watching the bird on the feeder, Tan notes that its plumage is coming off in tufts the way a juvenile’s does. She realizes the pine siskin is sick from a salmonellosis outbreak. When she tries to draw the bird later, she feels the final sketch lacks the aliveness of the bird she observed. Her original joy has been lost to what she now knows about the bird.