She is a novelist turned naturalist. New York Times best-selling author Amy Tan has

turned her intense gaze to the world of birds and shared her private drawings and

musings in a new book.

Jeffrey Brown recently joined her at her Northern California home

for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

He's asking a question.

Rick, yes. He's asking a question.

Rack! Yes! Yes, you can come.

It's a backyard bird call.

Part of the daily routine of observing and interacting with the many species of birds, more than 60 and counting,

that regularly visit the Sausalito California home of a flightless creature named Amy Tan.

I'm the flightless creature with the food.

I'm here.

It's now captured in her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, gathered from six years of looking and learning.

It's a chronicle of me learning to be a curious child again, a chronicle of hope, a chronicle

of learning to observe more closely and match it with emotions and questions about morality and mortality.

It's so many things to me.

It was a diary of my life during this period.

Tan is best known for her fiction,

beginning with the Joy Luck Club in 1989.

Books often grounded in her own Chinese-American experience.

Her turn to birds was partly stirred by the ugliness she saw in the human world,

...