Kenn Kaufman — the field guide, from a South Bend childhood

BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 1954 · BIRDING HERE FROM AGE SIX

The tie. Kenn Kaufman was born in South Bend in 1954 and began bird-watching here at the age of six; the family moved to Wichita, Kansas, when he was nine, and the record of Famous People carries the tie at that strength — a birth and a childhood start, with the life lived since from Arizona and Ohio. This entry is the books': the field guides through which more Americans learned birds than through any other living hand, and the memoir that explains where the eye was trained.

The shelf. His first book was A Field Guide to Advanced Birding in the Peterson series (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), a young expert's manual of identification problems; the revised edition followed in 2011. Lives of North American Birds (1996) adapted Roger Tory Peterson's text into the field-guide era. Kingbird Highway (1997) is the memoir of his 1973 big year — 671 species, recorded while hitchhiking some 25,000 miles across North America, the record that stood against the cross-country campaigns of the era and still reads as the literature of the chase. The Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America followed in 2000, the first major field guide built on digitally enhanced photographs; its Spanish-language edition of 2005 he partly paid for himself, an act of principle the New York Times recorded at the time. The Kaufman Focus Guides and later Field Guides run across the subjects — Butterflies of North America, Mammals of North America, Insects of North America, Nature of New England, and Nature of the Midwest, the last co-authored by this section's Jeff Sayre. The later prose books are Flights Against the Sunset: Stories That Reunited a Mother and Son (2008), A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), and The Birds That Audubon Missed (Avid Reader Press, 2024), his study of the species Audubon overlooked or misdrew.

Sources:

1. The New York Times (2005), "Bird-World Star, Rocking the Field-Guide Establishment" — the South Bend birth, the birding start at six, the Wichita move at nine, the 1973 big year of 671 species, the 2000 field guide, and the partly self-financed Spanish edition of 2005.
2. The author's publisher catalog — Lives of North American Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), Kingbird Highway (1997), the Focus Guide series titles, Flights Against the Sunset (2008), A Season on the Wind (2019), and The Birds That Audubon Missed (Avid Reader Press, 2024); the Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding (2011).
3. Houghton Mifflin catalog — A Field Guide to Advanced Birding in the Peterson Field Guide series, 1990.