(Photo/Courtesy of Kim and Kenn Kaufman)He turned around to see Kimberly, who had just pelted him with a snowball, grinning at him. Then something cold and wet hit him in the back.Ī snowball fight is what initially brought Kim and Kenn Kaufman together. At the end of the trip, I’m feeling like I’m missing a chance to connect with this beautiful, mysterious girl.” “It’s considered bad form if the guy leading the trip is just paying attention to this pretty girl. “When you’re a field trip leader, you try to pay equal attention to everyone there,” Kenn says.

While there, he led a birding hike in an area park. The pair reconnected nearly two years later in February 2003 when Kenn, who was living in Arizona, flew to Columbus to speak at Black Swamp Bird Observatory’s anniversary banquet. “He just left everyone so excited about birding and what we had seen.”

“Looking back, I think I fell in love with him that day, watching him be so enthusiastic about birds I knew he’d seen before,” she says. Kimberly looked down at her field guide, written by Kenn Kaufman, and beyond thrilled that the renowned birder and author would be leading the trip. “He gets on the mic, and he explains that our guide got called away. “This really gorgeous guy gets on the bus,” says Kimberly, recalling that day in April 2001. 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.Kimberly Kaufman sat aboard the tour bus in Texas, bird guide in hand, excitedly waiting for the guide to board the bus and lead an excursion to find colorful and unusual birds.Ī researcher and board member for Black Swamp Bird Observatory in Oak Harbor at the time, Kimberly had flown to Texas for her first big trip, the Texas Tropics Birding and Nature Festival. What had been a game became a quest for a deeper understanding of the natural world. 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. 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. A report of a rare bird would send him hitching nonstop from Pacific to Atlantic and back again. 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.

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.

Kingbird highway by kenn kaufman