Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural Obsession That Got a Little Out of Hand

Kenn Kaufman

ISBN 10: 0395773989 / ISBN 13: 9780395773987

Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1997

First printing. Author inscribed on a "Bird Watcher's Digest" bookplate on the first free end paper. Gilt lettering on brown covers in a brown pictorial dust jacket. 8vo, 318pp. Seller Inventory # 007198

Synopsis:

At sixteen, Kenn Kaufman dropped out of the high school where he was student council president and hit the road, hitching back and forth across America, from Alaska to Florida, Maine to Mexico. Maybe not all that unusual a thing to do in the seventies, but what Kenn was searching for was a little different: not sex, drugs, God, or even self, but birds. A report of a rare bird would send him hitching nonstop from Pacific to Atlantic and back again. When he was broke he would pick fruit or do odd jobs to earn the fifty dollars or so that would last him for weeks. His goal was to set a record - most North American species seen in a year - but along the way he began to realize that at this breakneck pace he was only looking, not seeing. What had been a game became a quest for a deeper understanding of the natural world. Kingbird Highway is a unique coming-of-age story, combining a lyrical celebration of nature with wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventures, starring a colorful cast of characters.

Reviews: You may not have found your loins quivering at the thought of a rose-throated becard, but Kaufman (Lives of North American Birds, not reviewed) has, and here he sings sweetly about the birder's ineffable fascination with all things feathered. By the age of 16, Kaufman knew what he wanted from life: to look at birds. So he dropped out of school--with the blessings of his admirably tolerant parents--and hit the road in search of birds. With very little money, he needed ingenuity to survive. He discovered, for instance, that a box of Little Friskies cat food could sustain him for a week. He gradually encounterd a subculture of birding aficionados and joined their ranks. In 1973, when he turned 19, he decided to embark on a so-called Big Year: to count as many species as he could manage in a year's time. The book is largely taken up with that quest. There are, of course, plenty of birds here, from the everyday to the extremely rare, but Kaufman also provides--in a winning, plain-spoken prose style--a Baedeker that covers the fine art of hitchhiking, crackling landscapes, and sharp profiles of other birders (as with any subculture, the personalities ranged from the repulsive to the sublime). The listing begins to pale by the end of the year: ``Views of birds are measured in milliseconds, in which bird songs are classified instantly, and then ignored, in which no precious moment of daylight could be wasted on aesthetics.'' Yet one can only marvel at how determined he was (he eventually counted 666 species) and at the purity of his enterprise, and join him in regretting that the compilation of lists has shifted ``away from knowledge and planning and experience, toward contacts and hotlines and money.'' For Kaufman, the pleasure now lies not in lists but in simply watching attentively. He makes us understand the joys of both in this frank, passionate book. (maps and drawings, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kaufman set out on his first solo birding trip when he was 16 years old, on a Greyhound bus, starting in Wichita, Kansas, and ending up in a California jail, for it was illegal for minors to be in that state without adult supervision. So began his quest to set a record: spotting the most North American bird species in a one-year period. Kaufman did just that in 1973, sighting what was then a record 229 species on a grueling hitchhiking trip that took him from Puget Sound to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico. Other birding trips followed, from North Dakota to Alaska, from Alaska to Maine, from Maine to Mazatlan in Mexico, and from Arizona to New Jersey. On those arduous trips, too, the author hitchhiked, stopping to work at odd jobs to earn a few dollars. His book is a fascinating memoir of an obsession with birds. George Cohen

Bibliographic Details

Title: Kingbird Highway: The Story of a Natural ...
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA
Publication Date: 1997
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: As New
Dust Jacket Condition: As New
Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition