To them, she isn’t a best-selling novelist, but simply “the flightless creature” — and, most important, a reliable source of food.
They would not know her at all, nor she them, if not for the garden created around the home in Sausalito, Calif., that she and her husband downsized to in 2012. Areas of lawn went away in favor of flowers and some wildness, and the birds came.
Now Amy Tan is bird-watching, and the birds are watching, too. They may not have read “The Joy Luck Club” or any of her other novels, but they have their eyes on her.
“I’m a dependable human,” Ms. Tan writes in her newest book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles.” “Every bird says so.”
She also writes: “I am controlled by birds.”
Not that Ms. Tan is complaining. She is grateful for every episode of “new bird tachycardia” — the pulse-quickening sight of a pair of bald eagles soaring overhead or a great blue heron landing on the roof — and grateful, too, for the company of her regulars.
“The Backyard Bird Chronicles” is not fiction, but drawn from entries in nine journals and a dozen sketchbooks that Ms. Tan began filling once the birds got her updated landscape on their radar, and she increasingly got them on hers.
Just as she develops characters for her works of fiction by imagining herself as each individual, she explained recently, so she conjured the pygmy nuthatch, oak titmouse, orange-crowned warbler and other players in this book, in words and drawings.
Her approach, she said: “Be the bird.”
Ms. Tan, who is now 72 and a board member of American Bird Conservancy, wonders how it was that as a lifelong lover of nature she had never really paid attention to birds. Her doors of perception flew wide open when she began to study drawing at 64, something that had delighted her as a child.
Before that, she could identify only three species in her backyard: crows, California scrub jays and Anna’s hummingbirds. Now she can name 76.
Once she began logging what her teacher, the naturalist and artist John Muir Laws, calls “pencil miles,” she found that some days she was spending more time watching and drawing birds than writing, she acknowledges. And she shifted her work space from her “very nice office” to the dining room, which affords the best view of the garden’s birdlife.
From those she connected with while brushing her teeth in the morning to others observed while making supper, her preoccupation was birds, birds, birds.
‘The Reciprocation of Love’
Ms. Tan describes the home that she and her husband, Lou DeMattei, a retired tax lawyer, built just downslope from their previous one as feeling like a treehouse. They are in an oak woodland habitat, the house nestled among four old California live oaks (Quercus agrifolia) with outstretched, overlapping canopies of gnarled, lichen-encrusted limbs that provide ample perching and nesting sites.
The landscape is “a little bit more wild on purpose” than their former garden, she said, but there are hints of formality: A green roof is planted with a living mosaic of flowering succulents, and what was once an oval swath of lawn is now a pair of paisley-shaped beds, also of succulents.
And there are feeders, so many feeders — some inside homemade cages of wire-mesh panels lashed together with zip ties to thwart hungry squirrels. Ms. Tan manages to monitor the food service even when she is on book tour, checking in with the humans back home to be certain that the supply of live mealworms, a customer favorite, isn’t running low.
Another customer favorite: a line of oversized, glazed terra-cotta saucers of water, set atop a wall along the patio, a low-tech but luxurious invitation to come splash and drink. The saucers offer an escape from reality in the drought-plagued region, and many birds joyfully indulge, sometimes multiple species at a time.
“The popularity of my birdbaths,” she writes, “feels like the reciprocation of love.”
Her illustrations of the birds that partake are not the precise portraits found in a Sibley Guide (although David Allen Sibley wrote the foreword for Ms. Tan’s book). Instead, they are depictions of individual birds — specifically, birds who have returned her gaze — that she sometimes refers to as “cartoonlike sketches.” Yes, some have thought bubbles with imagined avian musings scribbled inside, but they are more tender and soulful than cartoonish.
“They are portraits of individuals who looked at me whenever I looked at them, who acknowledged and accepted me as part of their world,” she writes.
Apparently, no move goes unnoticed by Ms. Tan’s ever-alert, winged audience.
“One of the most exciting things that happened to me was realizing the birds always see me,” she said. “If I was starting my exercises in the dining room, where 10 feet away are the feeders, the birds would start to line up on the fence, knowing that I would come out later with the food. And that was a recognition that they knew I was the source of that food.”
The Owl Eyes of Her Binoculars
Ms. Tan’s 76-species tally includes only birds who enter the garden proper or fly into the vertical space above it — not those farther off, even if they are within view. “I don’t count the birds that I see off in the distance that are over the bay,” she said. “The cormorants or the gulls or the pelicans, and birds like that.”
She also doesn’t count the ones captured by the Merlin Bird ID app, unless she sees them. Her list and artwork are all about relationships: about seeing and being seen.
This is not about friendship, though, she is quick to point out.
“I’ve never thought that they believed that I am their friend,” she said. Rather, they size her up and gradually, over multiple sightings, may habituate to her presence, as long as she avoids sudden moves.
“If I’m very still outside, they will remain,” she added. “They look up at me, and then they go back to what they’re doing. And the first time I noticed that, my heart just burst, because I felt as though I had been accepted.”
A word of advice: Don’t go for the binoculars.
“Every time I picked those up, they would scatter,” she said. Were they seeing what looked like owl eyes, she wondered, which presumably meant danger or death?
An owl — the great horned — is now the bird she calls her favorite, thanks to a series of extended visits that began in July 2022. A mother and her male offspring made the garden home for several months, and “they were reliable every single day,” she said. “My husband would get up before I would, and when he came in with my coffee, I’d say, ‘Are Junior and Mom out there?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And it just started the day.”
If they weren’t anywhere in view, one needed only to consult the corvids — the scrub jays and crows — who were likely screaming at whichever tree the owls were in. “Whenever I heard that, I would go and look and just follow where their bills were pointing,” she said.
“There are many things in my life that make me feel I am very, very lucky,” Ms. Tan wrote in a journal entry. “I can now add a pair of owls living in my yard as among them.” (The corvids may beg to differ.)
The female departed in October; the juvenile stayed into April. And in late fall, he returned “with a girlfriend,” she said.
Whoever shows up, Ms. Tan is dedicated to the role of witness, and questioner — one who allows her curiosity to steer her. “I love that the questions are out there, and I can keep looking,” she said.
What are the birds thinking when they catch a glimpse of her? And do they experience anything approaching human feelings like trust, embarrassment, pride or love?
They do seem to have a healthy capacity for fear. Well, most of the time.
“Why is it the tiniest birds that seem to be the most fearless?” Ms. Tan wonders when the pygmy nuthatches fly out to the freshly filled feeders and make a little call, signaling for others to come. Joining them promptly are the chestnut-backed chickadees, oak titmice, Bewick’s wrens and Anna’s hummingbirds — all the little guys.
She muses, too, over how they determine who is in charge out there, when various species hammer out a pecking order at the feeders or water bowls.
“It’s like the kindergarten playground in some ways,” she said. “You see who’s the leader, who’s brave, who bullies another kid, who’s cooperative, all of that.”
One thing is certain: She must be content if there are never answers to such questions or many of the others her watching elicits.
“They do what is beyond my ken, what I can only imagine,” she writes, “unless science or reincarnation enables me to become a bird.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
If you have a gardening question, email it to Margaret Roach at gardenqanda@nytimes.com, and she may address it in a future column.