The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan: Why you should season your bird feed with red-hot pepper

I am in danger of becoming even more obnoxiously bird proud,’ the novelist Amy Tan gloats after posting a video of a Bewick’s wren splashing about in a pool in her garden. In the birding world this is the equivalent of a paparazzo shot of the Princess of Wales in a bikini, since this is a bird that has rarely been seen to bathe in water.

Tan is a full-blown bird obsessive, though curiously until she was in her mid-60s she had little interest in them.

That changed when she started taking nature drawing classes with a teacher whose advice was: ‘as you look at the bird, try to feel the life within it’. Tan saw the parallels with her job as a novelist, because ‘I always imagine I am the character I am creating’.

As her drawings improved, so did her ability to recognise the birds. It dawned on her that she didn’t need to venture into the countryside to observe birds; she had her own wildlife paradise right in her garden in California.

Tan’s house is nestled among four ancient oaks that are a ‘community hub’ for dozens of types of birds. Her garden is full of things birds like: dense tree cover, a

nectar-bearing fuchsia shrub, passion fruit, jasmine, ivy, lemon trees and plenty of water. If she were selling this house to a bird, she muses, she would point out the rain runoff from the roof terrace, ‘on which a little bird and its growing family can perch while drinking and enjoying a view of San Francisco Bay’.

Her journal entries, starting in 2017, track her fascination with the comings and goings of her avian visitors. Soon she is noting down the names of more than 60 types of birds in her garden, from finches, sparrows and thrushes to hummingbirds, woodpeckers, owls, hawks and waxwings.

Tan doesn’t just enjoy the birds, she has a novelist’s curiosity to work out what the dynamics of their relationships are and she frequently imagines conversations between them. Her anthropomorphism means that at times this book veers perilously close to tweeness, but this is more than offset by Tan’s bird drawings, which capture them in all their feathered splendour.

She puts up more and more feeders throughout the garden and constantly experiments with the best food with which to lure the birds. They love suet but so do the cunning, acrobatic squirrels. Eventually she discovers suet studded with hot pepper – ‘inferno-strength stuff’ – that has no effect on the birds but is loathed by the squirrels.

Mealworms are also a big success, and soon Tan has 3,000 living in a container in her fridge, along with a bird corpse in the freezer (a local university wants it for their scientific collection). ‘I have a very understanding husband,’ she writes.

Tan tries to persuade her nine-year-old neighbour to set up a mealworm-breeding business so she can source them more cheaply. Disappointingly, his mother vetoes the idea.

Even if some of the bird names are unfamiliar to a British reader, this is a lovely book for anyone with even a passing interest in birds. You can understand why she finds observing the birds in her ‘backyard’ such an all-absorbing pastime.

If she has learned one thing, it’s that ‘each bird is surprising and thrilling in its own way’.