Kingbird Highway

The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder

Kenn Kaufman

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547349442
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

An ornithologist's account of his youthful, year-long, cross-country birdwatching adventure: "A fascinating memoir of an obsession." — Booklist
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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editor’s Note: Capitalizing of Birds’ Names
• Preface
• Not Quite the West
• Finding the Road
• A Record for the Breaking
• The Tucson Five
• California Influence
• Just Like Christmas
• There’s a Birder on the Road
• Time of a Rival
• Strategy and Hard Weather
• To the Promised Landfill
• Truckers’ March
• Shadow of Alaska, Shades of England
• Dry Tortugas
• The Fall of a Sparrow
• Legions in the Sky
• A Day as Big as Texas
• Springtime Fades Away
• The Kenmare Convention
• A Thousand Miles of Gravel
• The Edge of the World
• Full Summer
• Birdman’s Holiday
• Spots Before the Eyes
• Exhausting the Possibilities
• Border Patrol
• Close to the End
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH