Kenn Kaufman
Kenn Kaufman (born 1954) is an American author, artist, naturalist, and conservationist, with a particular focus on birds.
Born in South Bend, Indiana, Kaufman started birding at the age of six. When he was nine, his family moved to Wichita, Kansas, where his fascination with birds intensified. At age sixteen, inspired by birding pioneers such as Roger Tory Peterson, he dropped out of high school and spent several years hitchhiking around North America in pursuit of birds. This adventure eventually was recorded in a memoir, Kingbird Highway.
Thereafter he spent several years as a professional leader of nature tours, taking groups of birders to all seven continents. In 1984 he began working as an editor and consultant on birds for the National Audubon Society, a connection that continues to this day. Gradually he transitioned from tour leading to a full-time focus on writing, editing, and illustrating, always on nature subjects. His first major book, the Peterson Field Guide to Advanced Birding, was published in 1990. This was followed by another dozen books, including seven titles in his own series of Kaufman Field Guides. His next book, The Birds That Audubon Missed, is scheduled for publication in May 2024.
Currently, Kaufman devotes most of his time to writing books and painting bird portraits. His paintings have been juried into several prestigious exhibitions. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithological Society, a recipient of the Eisenmann Medal from the Linnaean Society of New York, and the only person to have received the American Birding Association's lifetime achievement award twice.
Kaufman resides in Oak Harbor, Ohio with his wife, Kimberly Kaufman, also a dedicated naturalist. Kenn and Kimberly mostly work on separate projects, but they collaborate as the "birding experts" for the popular Birds & Blooms Magazine.
“ Dreams and coffee and sunrises make up the rhythms of the road. Music is a part of it, too: the popular music on the jukeboxes and radio stations. You hear it constantly, in diners and on car radios. The music has a rhythm that fits the steady drumming of tires over pavement. It seeps into your bloodstream. After a while it ceases to make any difference whether or not you like the stuff. When you’re traveling alone, a nameless rider with a succession of strangers, it can give you a comforting sense of the familiar to hear the same music over and over. At any given time, a few current hits will be overplayed to exhaustion by the rock & roll stations. In hitching across the continent, you might hear the same song fifty or sixty times. Certain songs become connected in your mind with certain trips.”
“Where would the would-be “purists” draw the line between native and alien elements? This whole planet was altered by the hand of man.A birder who scorned the alien Sky Larks might stand on San Juan and salute the native eagles . . . but some of those eagles had been released here; and they were living on an unnaturally high population of rabbits, from another continent, introduced here. The rabbits, in turn, were probably feeding on alien plants from other lands that were naturalized here — if the San Juan roadsides were anything like all the other roadsides in North America. And we birders of European descent were introduced here also, a few generations back. Even my Native American friends of the night before could claim to be “native” in only a relative sense; their ancestors had come across the Bering land bridge from Asia. None of us is native here.”
“This is the West. We expect things to be tough out here.”
“Haunting the library as a kid, reading poetry books when I was not reading bird books, I had been astonished at how often birds were mentioned in British poetry. Songsters like nightingales and Sky Larks appeared in literally dozens of works, going back beyond Shakespeare, back beyond Chaucer. Entire poems dedicated to such birds were written by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many lesser-known poets. I had run across half a dozen British poems just about Sky Larks; Thomas Hardy had even written a poem about Shelley’s poem about the Sky Lark. The love of birds and of the English language were intermingled in British literary history.Somehow we Americans had failed to import this English love of birds along with the language, except in diluted form. But we had imported a few of the English birds themselves — along with birds from practically everywhere else.”