Kingbird Highway
by Kenn Kaufman

I’m going to admit right up front that I have not yet finished this book.  I really enjoyed what I read, but as life got busy, I just found it tough to make the time for reading this.  It’s far more interesting than I would have thought, as it is, on the surface, a book about birding.  And since I have no prior interest in the subject, I wasn’t sure how it would go.  Kenn Kaufman recounts his year of birding from 1973.  But, it’s about so much more than that.  Two review quotes on the back compare the book to On the Road. Kaufman’s shoestring budget and method of traveling and meeting birders and finding his place in the world is the real story here.

I was inspired to check the book out after mis-reading that The Big Year with Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson was based on this.  Perhaps I read the wrong article or checked out the wrong book, as I now reread that the film was based on a different non-fiction book.  Nevertheless, I’m glad I found this one, and one day I will complete it.

(The film, The Big Year, if you haven’t seen it, is a delightful one.  I know it might not be for everyone, but I appreciate its light-heartedness and sincerity.  There are too many movies out there that don’t trust their audiences and go over the top in action or crude comedy.  I love when a film can be funny without being mean and can follow the journey of people’s dreams without being corny.)

“Any day might be a special one—you just had to get outside and see if it was.”  ch 1

“It’s like a trip where the destination doesn’t have any significance except for the fact that it makes you travel.” Rich Stallcup, ch 5

“You had to make the effort to have the luck.”  ch 6

“There is a tendency to assume that the world has been discovered already…so when something significant happens, we may not be prepared even to notice.” ch 9