How to start birding, according to Amy Tan
The celebrated author wrote a bestseller on birding. This is how she got started.
Amy Tan has always loved nature. From the age of eight, the novelist was plucking snakes and lizards from a creek near her suburban home in Northern California. But birds entered the picture much later.
In 2016, at 64, Tan began taking classes on how to draw and journal about birds. In the backyard of her Bay Area home, her subjects included hummingbirds, jays, sparrows, finches, warblers, and owls. Her lovely drawings and witty journal entries were published last year in her best-selling book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles.
I began birding in New York City the same year Tan picked up the hobby—and I wasn’t alone. Almost 50 million others considered themselves birders then, a number that has since doubled, according to a 2022 U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey. Most are backyard birders like Tan.
Birding is a gateway to the outdoors, and there is a growing recognition among scientists of its health benefits. A 2024 experimental study published in Journal of Environmental Psychology found that even 30 minutes of bird-watching was linked to improved psychological health.
(What happens to your brain when you see a bird in nature?)
There are many ways to approach this hobby, from watching birds around your home to actively searching for them farther afield in urban parks or the rugged wilderness. You can also go it alone or bird-watch on trips led by professional guides. Whether you’re a novice or an expert, everyone starts in the same place.
Below, Tan shares with me her tips for anyone eager to start birding.
Get outside and ask questions
The first step for novices, Tan says, is simply to get outside and look around. You can start by taking note of the birds you encounter in your daily life, whether you reside in a city, suburb, or rural area. All you need is curiosity. Ask yourself questions: What do they look and sound like? Where are you finding them? What are they doing?
“So many different questions come out of watching one little moment of drama,” Tan says.
Acquire some binoculars
Once you’re ready to start identifying birds, you’ll want to get binoculars. A magnified look at a colorful or imposing bird—a scarlet tanager, an Anna’s hummingbird, a great horned owl—is often the spark that ignites a passion for birding.
Tan began with an old pair, then bought a new one. Despite this new pair still costing on the lower end of the spectrum—around $300—“they were good enough for this backyard birder,” she says.
With her binoculars, she noticed that the little brown birds in her yard weren’t all the same, as she previously thought. “That got me hooked,” she says. “Once you notice something that’s a mystery in your yard, you have to keep looking.”
Grab a field guide
But how can you tell these birds apart? Most birders use a field guide, which is usually broken down by geography. For her Bay Area home, Tan particularly likes The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America.
(7 birdwatching trips around the world for budding enthusiasts.)
There are several print field guides on the market—including the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada—many of which are compact enough to carry around. They typically include paintings, drawings, or photographs to feature a bird’s field marks—physical characteristics like color and patterns that separate one species from another.
Download bird ID apps
In addition to print versions, many field guides today, like the Sibley Guide to Birds, are available as smartphone apps. Tan uses the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID app, a wildly popular tool among birders of all levels that identifies a birdsong on the spot—essentially a Shazam for birds spotting. When Tan began using Merlin, she realized she had a lot more birds in her yard than she initially thought.
Join a birding or nature group
Field guides can be supplemented by the knowledge you pick up from experienced birders. Wherever you live, there is almost certainly a birding or nature club that organizes free or low-cost outings.
When she first began birding, Tan joined a Facebook group known as the Nature Journal Club, which was partly made up of people taking courses with John “Jack” Muir Laws (no relation to the famous conservationist John Muir), an artist, naturalist, and author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds. Tan joined his Bay Area field trips and also started posting her drawings in that Facebook group. There, she received encouragement from others.
“Birders, by and large, are just fine human beings,” Tan says. “They’re the best mentors because they’re opening a beginner’s eyes to something remarkable out there.”
Though drawing birds might seem impossible to beginners at first, Tan’s advice is to buy a pad of cheap paper and “make a mess.”
“Don’t worry about being a perfectionist,” she says. “Just spend five minutes a day drawing a bird. You have to put in what Jack Laws calls ‘pencil miles.’ I have logged thousands and thousands of pencil miles.”
Set up bird feeders
What was remarkable for Tan when she first started birding was all the birds she could lure to the woodland habitat around her house. She says she was “pathological” in her search for the right feeders and the right food—nectar for hummingbirds and seed and suet for birds like woodpeckers and finches. Along with saucers of fresh water, her setup allowed her to observe birds from 10 feet away on her patio, and even closer from her bathroom window as she brushed her teeth in the morning.
It helps if you grow things that birds like to eat too, which Tan accomplished with plenty of flowering, fruiting, and seed-bearing plants. People living in apartment buildings, she notes, can hang feeders on their windows.
Enjoy the health benefits of observing birds
Tan’s yard list is now up to 73 species. Watching birds has become a practice of living in the moment, she says. It’s produced a kind of addiction to pleasure. “I would immediately feel that all the anxieties, all the worries, all the tasks I needed to do, were just completely wiped out,” she says.
(Listening to birds sing really does soothe your brain. Here’s why.)
Studies show that spending just 15 minutes outside lowers your cortisol levels and increases your serotonin and dopamine levels. Tan agrees that the increase in pleasure and decrease in stress is real.
“Every time I see a new bird, I get what I call ‘new bird tachycardia,’” she laughs. “My heart is pounding, I’m shaking, and I can barely pick up my phone or my camera to take a picture. It’s a great rush of excitement, and that’s so wonderful to see in other people.”
