A sixteen year old boy from Kansas takes his fascination for birds to the highest level in his quest to locate and identify birds in the US and Mexico in the early 1970s. As Kaufman clarifies in the early pages of his memoir, he can’t accept what he does as ‘birdwatching’ because that has a passive connotation. Rather, his story describes the passionate, and in his case, relentless act of ‘birding’. Kaufman decides to attempt what is known as “A Big Year”, a competition to tally a staggering 600+ bird species in a single calendar year.
Think for a moment about the pre-cellphone, pre-Google maps era as people traveled great distances to follow the enigmatic patterns of migratory birds over the course of a year. Now, imagine being broke, no income, no car and no permanent place to call home and you begin to envision the determination this quest required. Aside from coordinated meetings with fellow birders at seasonal events and specific locations, Kaufman hitchhiked across the nation, and astoundingly even up into the farthest reaches of Alaska, to find and tally “his” birds. The weather alone proved challenging, not to mention finding reliable, safe rides. He spent countless hours standing on the roads of America watching cars and trucks pass him by.
With wonderfully descriptive chapter titles like; Finding the Road, California Influence, Strategy and Hard Weather, To the Promised Landfill, Dry Tortugas, A Thousand Miles of Gravel, The Edge of the World, Exhausting the Possibilities, and Border Patrol, the reader comes to appreciate the many decisive points along the journey. The inclusion of a map showing the route described in each chapter is invaluable as the saga unfolds. Of course, there are good illustrations of a handful of birds which are credited to Kenn Kaufman himself. Kaufman is also the author of the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, a bible in the hands of those who know a little or a lot about birding.
Does the young guy achieve the highest tally of the year? No spoiler here, but as the quest wears him out, and still exhilarates him, the author learns a lifetime’s worth of sacrifice and reward.
