Kingbird Highway, a review

In 1973, Kenn Kaufman dropped out of the senior year of highschool in order to travel the country and try to break the record of most bird species seen in one year. While his parents apparently did support this adventure, KK had very little money and he hitchhiked most of his many routes, mainly in trucks. He slept out in the open, even in some atrociously poor winter conditions. While he wrote up his notes soon after, the book was not published until 1997, well after KK had become one of the leading experts in this country. In spite of the lapse of time, I could find little evidence that he interspersed his earlier notes with more recent reflections and insights. He ended up with 671 species (including 5 in Baja California -no longer part of the AOU region), indeed a record for one year. He lived on about one dollar a day and the most expensive trips were those by plane in Alaska. He spent about $1,000 in the entire year, not counting the hospitality he received from many around the country. He also ended up with not a few very good friends, including Ted Parker (to whose memory this book is dedicated). Parker was then a student at the Un. of Arizona where he (and 3 others) seem to have birded more than studied. They co-opted KK as a matter of course. Birders generally belong to the educated and well to do and they treated KK as one of their own. Most went out of their way to make his quest successful by organizing excursions and by introducing him to birders in other hotspots. One of these excursions included a "big day" event in Texas where he received his nickname of "Kingbird." Before 9/11 and the climate of fear, people were still friendly and cooperative, even a long-haired and dishevelled teenager's travels along the Mexican border appears to have caused no problems. Thus a woman who picked him up in the Rio Grande Valley was nonplussed that anyone would travel to see a bird but she was enough of a sport to go out of her way to the Brownsville dump, not a lady like spot, for a Mexican Crow.

This is the third time I have read Kaufman's story. I had found a copy in a bookstore in Maine when rain kept us indoors. I bought it because I had read several other accounts of the travels of "listers" none of which kept me interested from beginning to end. They all had money and travelled in relative comfort; some also tried to achieve a record one-year list and, but few were entertaining writers. What attracted me to KK's book were the aspects of youth and hitchhiking. I identified with the Kansas kid who had to do his birding in a relatively small area for lack of funds and whose reading of birding books, incl. Peterson and Fisher's 100 day dash described in Wild America) strengthened the itch of his curiosity. And also because I had traveled through Western and Mediterranean Europe in the same way during my vacations or between jobs (one or two of which I gave up in order to travel) from 1947 to 1952, i.e. in my late teens and early twenties. There were no super highways then and after World War II, there were fewer cars than hitch hikers. I remember one stretch out of Aix en Provence when I had to walk several kilometers to get to the end of the line of my competitors who were each stationed some 50 meters apart. There may have been an advantage in being farther out of town, as the road was open with less local traffic so that a car had no problem stopping. KK had no such problems and the distances he travelled amaze me still, even after fifty years in this country, in particular as he sometimes had to rush in order to find a rare vagrant species.

All of this is told in a rather casual manner and only rarely did I become aware of the anxieties he must have felt. Although it turned out that a university Professor was on a similar quest without KK's financial handicap, nowhere is there a temptation to engage in one upmanship or a dwelling on his uneven chances given the professor's resources (who ended up with three more birds in the recently redefined North American area, that excludes Baja California). There is a certain friendly competition among the Tucson friends that gets lost in the camaraderie they established among themselves. Actually, while I was really interested in which birds came to fill his list, the thing I remember and talk about are the people KK meets on his travels. A few of those I met myself by chance as we were at such birding hot spots as Hawk Mountain or Cape May on the same day. Being far less sociable than KK, I recognized their names because others addressed them within earshot. Though he says that modern birding with its millions of aficionadoes began in the 1970s, his encounters show that there was already a wide spread network of active and very knowledgeable birders when he took to the road. Before Peterson's 1934 guide other guides had sold more than 1,000,000 copies. In fact, already in the 1960s I avoided Saturdays and Sundays at Hawk Mountain because of the crowds. And when there was a snowy owl of a gyrfalcon at the Brigantine (Forsythe) NWR in New Jersey you'd find yourself in the company of some fifty or so, even on workdays. In some instances KK leaves me curious, for example about Elaine; apparently they liked each other and he reflects on what sort of relationship they might develop if his vagrancy, etc. did not make him unsuitable (as he sees it).

And I wonder whether one can set a yearly record today by traveling on a similarly low budget. Hitchhiking is out and even when I stop along a road and try to locate a bird, I have found myself questioned by a passing cop (although white haired at 78 I do not have a "homeland security profile"). And there are more birds on other people's lists. 750 would have to be the goal and 100 or more of these are strays and thus chance birds, like the red-footed falcon that appeared only once (recently on Marth'sVinyard). I traveled to S.E. Arizona (and KK's Tucson) one time in early March and last year, with my son in law, in the last week of April. On these two trips I saw about 70 "lifers," which comes to some 75 dollars a bird. The trip with my son in law was a bit more austere; he saw some 110 "lifers" on this his first birding trip to the West, probably at little more than ten dollars a species. Since my retirement in 1998 I have made specific birding trips to southern Florida, S.E. Texas, the mid-California coast, S.E. Arizona (2x), Alaska (centered on Anchorge) and added about 30 species each time to my N.A. list and it is getting more expensive per bird, e.g. our last trip to Montana and Yellowstone yielded only 11 new birds (but oh. . . wilderness!!) On the other hand, there are today excellent birdfinding guides with detailed directions and if you have a fancy cellphone you can read the local bird alerts for the very latest. My own N.A. list, compiled over 50 years, has more than 700 birds but only 625 of these I saw in North America. Interestingly enough it was mostly after reading KK that I became interested in my own list and since I retired I have poured over birding books for the regions where I traveled as a merchant mariner in the 1950s. By modern standards the list is modest. It is also tentative as I must rely on my memory stimulated by color pictures and descriptions and the birds I have listed are nearly all the commonly occurring species in an area. And now, while I occasionally seek a bird mentioned on a Bird Alert website, I don't rush (and often miss it) preferring to go slow and observe. Which is, I am glad to say, what KK, fide his later books, has ended up doing.