Most birders have origin stories, the tales they tell of how birds, for whatever reason, moved from background to foreground in their lives. Novelist Amy Tan’s journey, cataloged in her delightful new ...

“These pages are a record of my obsession with birds,” writes Amy Tan in the preface to “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” and “obsession” is no overstatement. Her new book, culled from “nine personal ...

Author Amy Tan spends hours in her backyard, watching and drawing birds go about their business. Her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, is full of essays and illustrations about her connection to ...

If you didn’t know the line “Hope is the thing with feathers” had been written by poet Emily Dickinson, you might think it was the marketing tagline for ”The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” a collection of ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. Birdwatching has become a cherished pastime ...

This combination of cover images shows "The Backyard Bird Chronicles" by Amy Tan, left, and "The Birds that Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness" by Kenn Kaufman. (Knopf via ...