Kenn Kaufman: Flights Against the Sunset

There are people who are famous, and people who deserve to be famous; Kenn Kaufman fits into both categories, and like most birders in North America, I look forward to reading everything from his pen, from serious identification articles to light-hearted anecdote. Admirably and enviably, he succeeds as a writer at both extremes; who but Kenn Kaufman, after all, could have written both Kingbird Highway and Advanced Birding–and made them both work so unbelievably well? Kingbird Highway is (with, what else, Wild America) one of the two finest pieces of birding adventure produced in the twentieth century, and Advanced Birding will long remain an essential and much-consulted stalwart on every birder’s bookshelf.

Kaufman’s new Flights Against the Sunset is in the Kingbird Highway mode, a collection of anecdotes and fantasies, most of them originally published over the years in the pages of Bird Watcher’s Digest. Every one of them is as readable as it is enjoyable, for the most part as fresh as the day it first appeared in print.

The challenge of the anthologist, of course, is to generate a context within which the collected pieces make sense. Kaufman’s solution here is to present his stories as if told over the course of a single wrenching day in his mother’s hospital room. His goal is to make her–to make the non-birding reader–understand what happens when “the world of birds intersects with the world of the humans who pursue them.”

Unfortunately, Kaufman’s prose is somewhat flat in the framing scenes set in the hospital. But the embedded stories themselves are vibrantly and entertainingly told, honest-to-goodness page turners capturing perfectly the excitement of vagrant-chasing and the delight of watching common birds in mundane surroundings. The non-birding reader may still find this book, in Kaufman’s words, “psychologically foreign territory, more distant and unfamiliar than the wilds of Venezuela.” But that’s just what we birders are looking for, and that’s just what Kenn Kaufman delivers in Flights Against the Sunset.