![]() ![]() He ‘did’ this birding year on a shoe-string, hitching and bumming lifts, eating little and rough-sleeping. ![]() The older Kenn is able to navigate us through how the events were to mould him, build him and break him. The skill in the writing is that none of the naivety, impetuousness, fearlessness or difficulty of youth has been lost - we still travel from bird to bird and from place to place with the 18-year old Kaufman, can share with him his hopes, plans and passions. The fact that the book has been written from the perspective of an older man looking back on his younger self give the words so much more gravitas and meaning. ![]() ![]() This Christmas I finally got hold of a copy and, over the past two days, have done so. Over recent months, birder Mervyn Jones has implored me to do so, as it is a book that he holds in the highest regard. I was aware of this book, a modern birding classic, but had not read it. It was not until 1997 that it was dusted down and, with the help of professional editors and his own growth as a writer, it was published. He wrote an account of those 12 months directly afterwards, but was so disappointed with the result that he hid the finished manuscript in a box. Back in 1973, an American teenage birder by the name of Kenn Kaufman spent the year birding across North America, in an attempt to see more species of bird in a calendar year than anybody had recorded before. ![]()
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