Why you should be a bird-watcher
Kenn Kaufman gives reasons that go beyond birds.
At age 16, Kenn Kaufman hitchhiked 80,000 miles – back and forth across North America – in order to see as many birds as he could. Today, he is a field editor for Audubon magazine and a regular contributor to birding magazines. While he’s visited all seven continents, he has made a special study of North American birds and has written field guides for casual birders in both English and Spanish. Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar spoke to Kaufman in 2005.
Salazar: I must admit I’m not much of a birder, and I appreciate your taking time to talk with me and our listeners. Can you tell me what you find so fascinating about bird–watching?
Kaufman: Part of the reason that I want to invite more people into bird–watching is that I think that bird–watching really heightens one’s awareness of everything, and it really makes our world more three dimensional.
Certainly birding increases our powers of observation, just seeing what’s around us and noticing birds, because birds don’t necessarily want to be seen. And so just the fact that we’re finding them and spotting them, we’re developing our powers of observation in by doing that.
And also, you start to see the connections among things. So many of our birds are migratory, and they may spend the summer perhaps in the United States and Canada, but then go to Mexico or Central or South America in the winter. And being aware of the coming and going of these birds really gives us an increased awareness, not only of the change of seasons, but also our connections to other countries.
The birds are really international, and they don’t recognize national boundaries. It’s really a shared resource. We have some birds that may spend the summer with us, and may spend the winter in Brazil or in Argentina.
So, we really have to protect habitat for them all along their migratory route if they’re going to survive. That gives us another
reason for different countries to be cooperating.
Salazar: Tell me a little about your field guides for birders.
Kaufman: At one time I just tried to write stuff for serious birders, but I realized that we really wouldn’t have broad support for conservation of habitat and so on if there wasn’t wide appeal. So these days I’m much more interested in communicating with people who have a casual interest in birds.
I had decided a number of years ago that it was important to get more people involved in bird watching, and I thought that one thing that I could do was to make a field guide to birds that would be easy to use.
The first edition of my field guide was published in 2000, and it did well. But I wanted to reach out to more people.
And it turned out that there were no field guides for North American birds published in Spanish, even though something like 28 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish at home. There were no field guides available in the language they are most comfortable with, and it seemed that it would be an easy thing just to get my bird guide translated into Spanish.
It turned out to be a little it more of a challenge than that. The publishers were apprehensive at first because there were no other bird guides in Spanish, so we didn’t know how it would do. We didn’t know whether there would be a market or not. So I did the legwork myself of finding a translator and hiring a translator to put it together, and we went through a number of steps getting it all translated. Getting the text to fit was a problem because Spanish text tends to run longer than in English. It uses more syllables, more words. So, I had to do some editing of the Spanish to get it all to fit on the pages, and then some things, like the voice descriptions of the birds were hard to translate.
You think of some bird like the barred owl, for example, it’s got this hooting call. In English, we say that it says, “who cooks for you.” But if you translate that into Spanish, it becomes something like, “quien concine para usted.” And you lose the meter. So, the voice descriptions had to be completely redone. But ultimately the whole thing worked out, and Houghton Mifflin agreed to go ahead and publish the book in Spanish.
Salazar: So you speak Spanish yourself?
Kaufman: I’ve traveled a lot in Latin America, and I speak Spanish fairly well, but not well enough to actually translate a whole book. So, to get the book translated, I hired a Mexican conservationist named Patricia Monsano Fisher. She had studied ornithology at Oxford for a while, so she knew about birds, she knew English well, and certainly she knew Spanish, so she was a perfect choice to actually translate the book.
She ran into a problem trying to translate my descriptions of the
voices of birds, so for that we asked a Mexican ornithologist named Hector Gomez DeSilva to provide new descriptions written in Spanish. Hector has done a lot of bird watching all over Mexico and all over North America. He knew these birds from his own experience. So, he was able to write brand new voice descriptions for them in Spanish.
Salazar: Were you always interested in birds?
Kaufman: When I was teenager, my family was living in Kansas, and I had pretty much learned the birds that were common there. I wanted to travel and see more birds, so I actually left school for a while and went hitch–hiking around North America, just thumbing rides.
I wound up going tens of thousands of miles over the space of a few years, trying to find as many birds as I could. I developed a fair amount of familiarity with all of the North American birds, and I traveled quite a bit, not only in the U.S., but also in Canada and Mexico.
And birding was such a fantastic experience for me that I really
wanted to share it with more people. And that was part of the reason why I was so eager to go ahead and do a bird guide that would be available for everyone.
Salazar: The Spanish field guide was just published in 2005. Have you had any reaction to it from the Spanish–speaking community?
Kaufman: When the Spanish guide first came out, the immediate reaction was actually from people in the conservation community, saying what a great thing it was that I would be bringing more people into an appreciation of birds.
But then I’ve also had some great contact with people, I’ve talked with groups at different places and talked about the fact that bird–watching is such a great family activity. For example, I’ve had a quite a few young couples with children who were eager to get the book and share it with their kids and take their whole family out bird–watching. That’s been very gratifying.
One of the challenges that I had in working on a field guide in the first place is the fact that I’ve been studying birds since I was six years old. I had to be careful not to just take things for granted and just remember that for everyone, there’s a first time for seeing any bird.
But my big incentive is that we need more support for conservation of natural habitats. And there are lots of scientific reasons for protecting biodiversity. But I think that people are more likely to protect birdlife, and protect the habitat for it is if they actually care, if they can connect on an emotional level. So, in trying to get more people interested in birds, I was really thinking about the future and about the value of conservation, and that was the main reason for wanting to do the book in Spanish as well. The more people that we can get involved in appreciating natural history, the more chance we’ll have in protecting wildlife for future generations.
The rediscovery of the Ivory–billed woodpecker represents the fact that there is a lot to be learned out there. There’s a lot to be discovered. We may tend to just assume that everything is known about the world, but that’s certainly not the case.
And anyone who starts looking at birds, or other aspects of nature, they can make discoveries that are really amazing and unexpected. I mean, I’ve never rediscovered a bird that was thought to be extinct, but a couple of times I’ve found birds that were way outside their known ranges, like finding a bird from Asia somewhere in Alaska, or finding a bird from Mexico somewhere in California.
And, that sort of discovery is possible for anyone who goes out and really pays attention. It just requires a little bit of knowledge, and then going out with awareness and with an open mind, and just being open to the possibilities.
Salazar: Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
