The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Scrub jays appear frequently in Tan’s work. She enjoys watching their playful antics. Like crows, scrub jays are highly intelligent and good problem solvers. She watches juvenile jays fight over food at feeders while scarfing down dead mealworms, a treat other birds knowingly avoid. When another species of bird pushes them away from a feeder, the jays attempt to fight or stay nearby, waiting to try again. Tan sees them as a symbol of persistence, which may be due to the way they are raised. The writer watches as a mother jay responds to the cry of a fledgling that struggles to maintain balance on a swinging feeder. Instead of helping her baby, the mother flies away, leaving the fledgling to figure out its next move.

Tan addresses her affection for scrub jays later in the work as she watches one jay repeatedly break through her attempts to keep him out of a feeder. Each time she sets up a new obstacle, the jay finds a way to thwart it. Tan admires the bird’s tenacity and relates it to her own. The birds exhibit determination in the face of adversity. They claim their space at the table and demand to be heard. For Tan, who took up nature journaling in the middle of a global pandemic, this is an important reminder to keep going.

The first time Tan sees a hermit thrush, she is delighted. The species is a rare sight in her yard. When the same hermit thrush continues to frequent her feeders, Tan even trains the ground feeder to eat from a perch. Over time, she notes that the hermit thrush is not a hermit at all. It is sometimes social with other birds, but at other moments, it wants to stay in the solitude of its own company. In the diary, the bird symbolizes nonconformity and how animals’ behaviors may be more individualized than instinct allows: “I have a new opinion of Hermit Thrushes. They are not shy and secretive. They are solitary nonconformists” (90).