Book Review: Novelist Amy Tan shares love of the natural world in ‘The Backyard Bird Chronicles’

By ANITA SNOW
Associated Press

Best-selling novelist Amy Tan of “The Joy Luck Club” fame combines entries from her nature journal with astonishing illustrations thanks to lessons in bird illustration in “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” to share a birdwatching obsession that dates back to before the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s among recent books grabbing onto the hobby of watching and cataloguing birds that soared in popularity when people were home for months and looked outside their windows for entertainment. Coming out in May is another book sure to delight amateur naturalists: Kenn Kaufman’s “The Birds that Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness.”