Bird Chronicles
There is a shelf in one of my bookcases where books relating to birds are nested. Recently I took out a book published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1922 as part of their Little Nature Library entitled Birds Worth Knowing. It’s a delightful selection from four previous volumes on birds by United States scientific historian and nature writer Neltje Blanchan De Graff Doubleday—wife of publishing giant Frank Nelson Doubleday—who wrote under the pen name Neltje Blanchan. Born in Chicago on October 23, 1865, Neltje Blanchan died in Canton, China on February 21, 1918 while in the service of the American Red Cross. The year before her sudden death at the age of 52, Blanchan penned the preface to Birds Worth Knowing (copyright 1917) in her home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, N.Y.
In her 1917 preface, Blanchan pointed out that “an immense wave of interest in birds has swept over the country when just a generation earlier there was complete indifference to their extermination.” She then talks to her readers about birds worth knowing with the view of interesting what she perceived as an ever-widening circle of new friends in “the most appealing form of wildlife there is still left about us.” As to why this new interest, the author attributed the change in people’s thought to the educative work by Audubon Societies in reaching school children, clubs of many kinds, granges, editors, and legislator. “Everyone,” she advocated, “should join the National Association of Audubon Societies.”
A century later, after renewing my membership in the Audubon Society, I found myself consulting Neltje Blanchan’s chapter on bluebirds in my well-worn copy of Birds Worth Knowing. While visiting Kit at the Lodge where he has been living for the past two years, we’d been on the patio soaking in warm late winter sunlight. Lovely pinkish-purple blossoms had already bloomed on an old plum tree at the end of a grape arbor. Suddenly I caught a glint of blue as a small bird alighted momentarily in a nearby tree; and then it was gone. I was certain it was a bluebird.
To confirm the tiny bird’s ID, I first consulted Neltje Blanchan’s chapter on “The Thrush Family” that includes the bluebird, the robin, and the elusive wood thrush. She describes the bluebird as being “7 inches (about an inch longer than the English sparrow and an inch shorter than a robin). The male’s upper parts, wings, and tail are bright blue with a rusty wash in autumn. Throat, breast, and sides cinnamon-red. Underneath white. The female bluebird has duller blue feathers, washed with gray, and a paler breast than males.”
Writing with joy, the author exclaims, “Is there any sign of spring quite so welcome as the glint of the first bluebird unless it is his softly whistled song? No wonder the bird has become the symbol for happiness.” Perhaps, I thought, the male bluebird Kit and I had encountered fleetingly at the Lodge was searching for a birdhouse or a cavity in a tree while awaiting the arrival of a mate.
That evening, I also consulted my copy of The Backyard Bird Chronicles—a bird journal written and beautifully illustrated by author Amy Tan, published in 2024. The author, I’ve learned, has long enjoyed nature journaling but until recently had not included birds. “I was sixty-four,” Tan writes, “when I took drawing classes for the first time, followed by nature journaling field trips…led by John Muir Laws…a well-known and beloved naturalist, artist, author, scientist, conservationist, and educator.” His books and classes, she notes, were not strictly about drawing. “They were about being curious and returning to childhood wonderment, when everything was seen as new.”
Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles is an illustrated commentary on the birds she observed in her backyard in Sausalito, CA during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her chapter on bluebirds is dated September 1, 2020—a time when the view out her window was smoky from periodic wildfires in Northern California. Using John Muir Laws’s ID technique, Tan quickly “said aloud” words that described a bird she’d glimpsed that day. “Gray head, rufous breast, bigger than a towhee” …before it flew away. Soon another bird took its place, one “mostly soft gray but fatter and with white spots on its breast.” She notes, “this little dumpling had blue feathers.” She knew it was a thrush of some kind and when she saw blue peeking through its creamy taupe feathers, was certain she’d seen a Western Bluebird mom and baby.
Amy Tan is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement, as well as two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins. At the end of The Backyard Bird Chronicles, the author writes that she is grateful “to the organizations who inspired my concern over the survival of birds and my involvement in bird conservation organizations: American Bird Conservancy, WildAid, WildCare, Point Blue Science and Conservation.”
Written a century apart, Neltje Blanchan De Graff Doubleday’s and Amy Tan’s passionate and utterly delightful and prescient bird journals invite us all to look out our backyard windows with fresh eyes and wonder, and perhaps be rewarded by a glint of blue on the cusp of spring.