Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder

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.

• A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration
• Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World
• The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession
• Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips From North America's Top Birders
• Wild America: The Record of a 30,000 Mile Journey Around the Continent by a Distinguished Naturalist and His British Colleague
• Gulls Simplified: A Comparative Approach to Identification
• The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
• Peterson Reference Guide to Sparrows of North America (Peterson Reference Guides)
• Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding (Kaufman Field Guides)
• Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America