The Backyard Bird Chronicles

by Amy Tan

“Thanks to the birds, I have never felt cooped up staying at home. So much remains new, so much can be discovered…when watching birds, I feel free.”

With both fiction and birds, I think about existence, the span of life, from conception to birth to survival to death to remembrance by others. I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability. I do that daily, and not with dread, but with awareness that life contains ephemeral moments, which can be saved in words and images, there for pondering, for reviving the bird and my heart.

With every adult bird I see, I think it’s a miracle it is before me, because 75 percent of young songbirds die before the end of their first year.

When I see a bird that has died, I don’t accept the sanguine saying, “It’s the circle of life.” It is good to mourn and wish it weren’t so.