Kingbird Highway

Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufmann, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 20066 320 pp. 978-0-618-70940-3

Kaufman is a renowned name in the world of bird watching. He is widely published both in magazines as well as field guides of all sorts. My respect for him first wavered when I read that he had panned some writing of Roger Tory Peterson when he did not know who the author of the text was. He capitulated like a republican criticizing Limbaugh when he came to understand that Peterson was the author. This book did little to help me regain my respect for the author.

When I was young I collected baseball cards avidly. It was my goal to get them all as fast as I could. That worked well when I was eleven. In my early adulthood I went to a baseball extravaganza dinner and my disillusionment with this sort of adventure began. Sitting amongst the greats of the game felt incredibly banal as it occurred. I had the same sense of disappointment as I read Kingbird Highway.

Kaufman acquitted himself in the last few pages by admitting that his quest to set a record for the most bird species sighting in one year really was not worth the effort. His goal to chart every species that he saw as opposed to learning what he could about that species was in his own mind futile and it was too bad he did not reveal this until the last few pages.

The book did not inspire us with tales of naturalism nor did it invigorate us with notions of conservation. It was a tale of his zeal, one that was misguided. The reader was simply regaled with the saga of a year on the hitchhiking path around America with the effort to see as many birds as possible. There was a level of description of the sighting that was weak as the story was more about how he got there and why. The reader learns very little about the bird itself.

Kaufman also uses the hindsight of 25 years to tell this tale of those youthful wanderings. Mistakes and embarrassments get the band aids requisite with the additional knowledge and cozying of the various exploits that a quarter century of experience provides. It was not good as a memoir because he could coax memories into what they should have been so many years hence. It was not good as a travelogue either because his continual relocation via thumbing across the country was like his bird quest-it was a list of places he got to without any story. Places were simply places that he got to and could check them off of his list.

Everyone who writes a memoir wants it to exclaim the author’s unwillingness to play purely by societal rules. All of these authors are rebels of some sort and when this book first came out in 1996 the public had less of an imagination of the joys of hitchhiking. That endeavor certainly had a rebellious lure to a reader, sealing Kaufman’s credentials as a renegade. Yet in the days of his actual exploits, traveling by that method was not very strange. I am only a few years older than the author but I remember my own hitchhiking trips well (they were never as extensive as Kaufman’s but often spanned many hundreds of miles). Traveling in that fashion and being bearded and long haired just was not that unique. It was very popular at the time.

Kaufman’s prose in this case was pretty good. The book was highly readable and those who enjoy reading the books of icons will find this to be an entertaining addition to their lists of readings. Kaufman has proven himself to be a leader in the world of bird watching and there is nothing wrong with that. Kingbird Highway won’t teach us much about that activity however.