Kingbird Highway
The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating story
It was amazing what a teenager could accomplish traveling all over North America searching endlessly for common and rare birds while hitchhiking almost the whole time. Fascinating read. I just returned from a cruise in Alaska that went through the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands searching for birds and wildlife. I did see a lot of birds and my favorite was the McKay’s bunting on St Matthew. I wish I would have read this book before the trip as we were in Vancouver before the trip and didn’t know about the Sky Larks near Victoria. We were actually within a few miles of there! Great read if you can appreciate the love of birds and the sheer stamina of Kenn and his fellow Birders.