Absolutely unparalleled -- I completely agree that this book is the best I have seen of its kind. I only wish there were such exquisitely detailed birding information available for other cities I frequent, such as Philly, D.C., and Boston.

Kudos for Joel Greenberg and Lynne Carpenter's recently published book. I have sampled many, many bird finding guides, as most dedicated birders have, but I rank their new 'Birders Guide to the Chicago Region', as the best of its type. Its comprehensiveness, indexing, maps, species accounts and locations, accuracy and ease of use are unparalleled. Lynne and Joel: You have my highest compliments for an absolutely first rate job!

The latest Kaufman Focus Guide, designed for beginners, features a pictorial table of contents, a primer on identification and habitat, butterfly lifecycle and where to find the critters, other butterfly activities, such as gardening and photography, and further sources of information, such as books, websites and organizations. It concludes with an index of larval food plants, an index of scientific names, an index of English names which doubles as a life list and a final one-page quick-find, color-coded index.

In between are 2,300 digitally edited photographs, which have the easy-comparison advantages of paintings, and concise descriptions, with range map and primary larval foodplant. Each page of illustrations also includes an "actual size" figure, which is amazingly useful in the field. Similar species are grouped together for convenient comparison.

This is another practical, well-designed and beautiful addition to the Focus Guide series.

This is the best butterfly guide on the market. It's convenient, light-weight, and well illustrated. Kaufman has organized his butterfly images very well; the pictures are large enough to be useful while stilling keeping the guide compact. Each image is clear and concise, showing the field marks and vivid colors of various butterfly species.

There are other features besides imaging that make this guide so handy. It's smaller than BUTTERFILES THROUGH BINOCULARS, which makes it easier to carry in the field. Secondly, it covers all of North America. Finally, there are silhouette style images provided on the plates, showing the actual sizes of the butterflies, which can be very useful for distinguishing one species from another. Some caterpillar images are also provided along with adult butterfly images. Despite all this, the authors have left plenty of space for useful texts that accompany each plate. Included in the text are notes on the butterflies' behavior and flight patterns, as well as the food preferences of their larva.

Overall, this is a great butterfly guide. Whether you just like identifying the butterflies in your yard or happen to be a serious butterfly-watching enthusiast, this guide is likely to be right up your alley.

The Birds of Pennsylvania by Gerald M. McWilliams and Daniel W. Brauning is a special interest book, being a state distribution book, but is one that you should consider adding to your library. For those who like to read distribution books in general and those birders living in the mid-Atlantic states in particular, THIS IS A MUST HAVE. I fall in the former group and must say that of all of the distribution books that I have this is the easiest reading because of the writing style. It is also the most informative from a general perspective: For each family there is a basic information opening ala David Sibley's Guide to Birds. Then for each species there is a general status that discusses the species distribution over its entire ranage. Next is a description of the habitat in which the species is found. Then comes the information that concerns Pennsylvania in particular -- Seasonal Status and distribution. Next is a history of the bird in PA. Last is a comment section that gives id problems, endangered status, nest box requirements and placement to attract Bluebirds, etc. Finally are footnotes.

Facts that I have picked up from jumping around in this book are: How cormorants differ from other birds -- they have their four toes connected by webs and THE ADULTS HAVE NO EXTERNAL NOSTRILS and breath through their mouths, p40. Why Waxwings are called Waxwings, p345.

So give this book a look. I do not think you will be disappointed if you are into distribution books. And if not, this book just might get you into them! As to how it measures up to being a desirable distribution and status book for Pennsylvania birders, I will defer to Kenn Kaufman from his forward: "Now there is an outstanding book to fill that need."

Kenn closes with his forward with "I congratulate McWilliams and Brauning on an impressive achievement and heartily recommend this volume to anyone who cares about birds." So do I.

This review has been also posted on Birdchat, a birders listserver.

This is a great book for serious birders. It contains a great amount of important information that is well organized and helpful. This is a technical book that I would not recommend for the beginner, however, I found it practical in its structure and content.

I strongly recommend this book. I held back from awarding a full five stars because I felt that their illustrations lacked a little "life" although experienced birders will probably not find this to be a problem.

I bought this book and the contents are very helpful in identifying birds. The problem is it has the information duplicated from pages 145 to 176, skipping from page 112. I have tried to exchange it with another one, but it had the same problem. I tried to do that for the third time, and now I am waiting for it. I hope it arrives with all the pages and no duplications.

This book rocks the house

Kenn Kaufman answers the question of what happened to all those scruffy kids who were hitching rides across America in the early 1970s. They grew up. In his case, this story of an epic quest to see more birds in a single year than anyone ever had before, lay in a box 25 years after it was written. Fortunately he decided to dust it off, clean it up and share it with us. I met Kenn once when I was on my own quest to see 400 birds in North America in a single year, about 15 years after he found 666 species, or 671, depending on whose rules you are using. He showed me my first Varied Bunting at the Patagonia Refuge. I got started on this road of bird listing after finding Jim Vardaman's book and reading it about a dozen times. Vardaman beat Kaufman's record with dollars, finding 699 in a single year. Probably Kaufman's book will inspire many more to take up the quest, for the simple reason that he's a far better storyteller. This is an adventure that goes far beyond bird watching. It is a lyrical book of the road, like Kerouac with a purpose. The music of trips remembered by a single song played to death by the AM stations comes ringing back over the years. I remember hitching from Missouri to New York State and hearing "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do," each time I got into a car. Kaufman tops that with the thunder of Jim Morrison's voice warning drivers who just picked him up, "There's a killer on the road." He transforms it into, "There's a birder on the road," but you can feel the discomfort of getting into cars in Southern states to that refrain. A high school dropout, lured by the bird quest at age 16, Kaufman's education about relationships came from statements of disillusion -- confessions to a stranger on an all night drive. It left him wary and ill-prepared for what might have been the real thing. His enduring relationship, the quest to see all those birds, is finally crystalized by a long- hair who listens to Kaufman's tale of why he is hitching from Arizona to New Jersey to see a non-descript shorebird, and lays a John Lennon line on him, "He's got to be good lookin' 'cuz he's so hard to see."

THE KINGBIRD HIGHWAY

I first read Kenn Kaufman's KINGBIRD HIGHWAY, a year and a half ago, on a trip to Churchill, Manitoba. It was such a compelling story, I knew immediately that I had to review it. Although I run the risk now of being the last reviewer in America to cover this book, KINGBIRD HIGHWAY is too good to pass up. It's a cut above anything written so far by an American birder and will surely be regarded as a classic in future years.

KINGBIRD HIGHWAY tells the tale of how, at age 16, Kenn Kaufman dropped everything and hit the road in search of birds. It's a remarkable story. There he was: honor student; president of the student council-obviously a gifted kid with a bright future in college. But his overwhelming yearning to learn everything he could about birds could not be suppressed or even postponed. He dropped out of school and began hitchhiking back and forth across the continent, searching for birds and adventure.

"I knew that, back at home, kids my age were going back to school," wrote Kaufman. "They had the clang of locker doors in the halls of South High in Wichita, Kansas. I had a nameless mountainside in Arizona, with sunlight streaming down among the pines, and Mexican songbirds moving through the high branches. My former classmates were moving toward their education, no doubt, just as I was moving toward mine, but now I was traveling a road that no one had charted for me . . . and my adventure was beginning."

Kaufman learned to survive on pennies a day (he budgeted himself only one dollar a day for food). He sold blood plasma twice a week, for five dollars a pint. He went to temporary employment agencies and would work by the day, until he had $50, then hit the road again. Sleeping outside in all kinds of weather, finding shelter under bridges and overpasses, he followed his unstoppable desire to find birds and learn more about them. He even started eating cat food: "a box of Little Friskies, stuffed in my backpack, could keep me going for days," he wrote. Besides being a great coming of age book and a road adventure yarn, KINGBIRD HIGHWAY provides a remarkable insight into a transitional era in American birding-the early 1970s. At the beginning of that decade, no one had yet reached the 700-species mark in their North American life lists-in fact, only the best birders had passed the 600-species mark. And the record for the most birds seen by a birder in a single year had stood at 598 since 1958, when ace British birder Stuart Keith completed his record-smashing North American big year.

In terms of the up-to-date information available for birders, many things had changed by 1971. Informal hotlines had begun springing up across the country. New bird-finding books, such as Jim Lane's guides, were providing intricate instructions on how to find birds in various regions. And, at some birding hotspots, taped telephone messages were providing weekly updated information on rare birds seen locally to anyone who called. With this budding network of bird-information sources, a new big-year record was there for the taking. And Kaufman wanted desperately to be the one to achieve it. He made his first try in 1972, but barely a month into his big year, he found that the record had already been topped by another boy wonder, Ted Parker, who had seen an incredible 626 species in 1971.

Kaufman's great adventure began in earnest on New Year's Day, 1973, when he tried once more to begin a big year, setting his sights firmly on Ted Parker's record. But it turned out that he was not the only one with that thought in mind. For the entire year, he had to compete toe-to-toe with Floyd Murdoch, a graduate student who got to travel to wildlife refuges all over the country to get information for his doctoral dissertation (and amass bird sightings). I won't tell you who won-in some ways, it doesn't matter. As Kaufman discovered in his lengthy travels, the journey is more important than the destination.

KINGBIRD HIGHWAY was a great surprise to me. Though I've always considered Kenn to be a good writer, and everything I've read of his has been excellent, journeyman work, KINGBIRD HIGHWAY is something more. In this book he not only captures the soul of birding but also the spirit of youth. The writing is lyrical, bordering on poetry at times. I hope that Kenn authors many more books of this kind in the years ahead.

I usually give books away after I read them, but this is a keeper. I know I will want to read it again, probably more than once. Not only is it inspirational reading for those who love birds, but it's great travel writing and a moving coming-of-age story as well. Not only that, but the illustrations(also by Kaufman) are charmers as well. Kaufman's trip to St. Laurence Island , between Alaska and Siberia, with its spiritual overtones, remains the high point for me. I think this book is going to develop a substantial public. I recommend it to anyone, not just bird folks.

Let me tell you my bias up-front - I generally prefer bird guides which contain illustrations rather than photographs; I have found that poor lighting, bad angles and subjects not representative of their species tend to make their way into photo guides, thereby defeating the purpose. That said, I am very impressed with the quality of images in the Kaufman guide, likely because they're not unretouched. Kaufman uses digital editing to touch up the photographs so that each one is more representative of each species, and so that the quality of lighting is excellent.

It is of a size small enough to be easily carried into the field, unlike my favorite book, the Sibley guide, and the different page background colors are convenient for flipping quickly to the right section. There are short sections in the front of the book on "how to bird," "where to bird," and "what to look for," along with a few other blurbs, but all of this covers only nine pages total. Further, the text accompanying each bird is very short, one small paragraph.

Still, it's readily apparent that a *lot* of work went into this guide, and I'm really impressed with it. While I personally believe that it's not something a novice birder would likely find really useful, like the National Geographic Society's book, intermediate and advanced birders will likely find it easy to use for quick reference about a field marking or species differentiation. Conveniently, he covers all of the birds of North America, thereby obviating the need to purchase one book for the East, one for the West, and so forth.

My best advice is to get your hands on a copy of this book before purchasing it if you're not certain you'll like it - birding guides can be a highly-personal thing, and you may find that this review is just totally buggered! I'm still glad I own this book, and occasionally take it out into the field instead of my preferred NGS, just for the sake of variety.

Attention, all North American birders. The ultimate field guide has arrived--Ken Kaufman's new Focus Guide to the Birds of North America! Not since Roger Tory Peterson's landmark guides has one book combined all the essential elements a birder needs to quickly and accurately make field identifications.

Previous guides have used either artists' color plates or photographs; each has its pros and cons. But the Kaufman Guide's use of computer-enhanced and edited photographs gives us the best of both worlds and works marvelously, now that the technology makes it possible.

The ranges maps, in addition to providing the usual winter and breeding distribution, distinguish between areas where species are common and rare. They also include migration ranges, which are rarely pictured in other field guides.

Best of all, Mr. Kaufman has put all the essential facts and photos into a compact 384-page paperback that will easily fit in a coat or pants pocket. While no one book can possibly provide everything a birder might want, this one, for its size, gives one the most important info. For birds that are usually seen in flight, like pelagics, raptors and waterfowl, there are additional poses. And for those especially nasty challenges, such as juvenile gulls, fall warblers, and immature sparrows, there are also extra photos.

If you can only afford one bird book or don't care to carry a liibrary everytime you go out in the field, this is the book for you! I've been birding for nearly half a century, and this is now the one I'll take everytime!

I started birdwatching in the mid-seventies and used as my first field guide the Golden book. It is the perfect size to go anywhere and it includes the range maps of the species on the same page as the painting of the bird. (My major complaint of the Peterson guide is the maps are at the back of the book.) The Golden was my favorite until I purchased the National Geographic 3rd edition. The NG contains more variations of each species with great detail. However, this turned out to be a double-edged sword. Too much detail to look through on an unfamiliar bird, and the book is cumbersome in the field. Checking out Ken Kaufman's new field guide from my local library and using it during the waterfowl migration this spring, convinced me it is my must have book in the field. I was never a fan of the photographic guides, but with today's technology, Kaufman and his crew hit a home run. Clear digitally- enhanced photos. It IS field guide size with range maps next to the bird's picture. The one-page, short index inside the back cover is very helpful in looking up a bird quickly. I own eight field guides including the Sibley guide, but this is the one I take in the field. If you're looking for a single book to get started in birdwatching, this is my pick. Happy birding!

The real advantage of Kenn Kaufman's book is its accessibility. Next to the Birder's Handbook, which tried several funky organizational and icongraphic systems at once, Kaufman is pure readability. The attractive, intelligent presentation here is immediately appealing. This serves double duty as a coffee table book and reference.

I read both this and the Birder's Handbook when I see something new. Kaufman gives you a solid account of each bird, but he's limited to individual species. (There are brief family introductions, written about at the level of the family intros in a field guide.) The essays in Birder's Handbook are very pleasing to browse into; in Kaufman, once you've read a species, you're on to another species. Kaufman has nothing to say, for example, about mobbing behavior. Birder's Handbook has a long essay, naming several species and discussing the state of research on the subject.

Kaufman is also less clear about what's missing about a bird. Birder's Handbook is held to its schematic approach, so you immediately know when there's a question mark in a location that's usually got a little symbol. Kaufman occasionally mentions that something isn't well known, but you have to read into the essay to find that.

As complements to a field guide, both this and The Birder's Handbook are useful and enjoyable. I personally wouldn't be happy without either one.

Kenn Kaufmann has provided a nice, highly readable, first place to look for general information on any North American bird. The information provided is somewhat more extensive, in most cases, than can be found in similar Birder's Handbook by Ehrlich, Dobkin, and Wheye. Unfortunately, however, Kaufmann omitted notes and bibilographical information (which were included in the Birder's Handbook). Had the bibliographical information been included, this book would easily have rated 5 stars. As it is, the reader is frustrated in the search for more detailed information. I should also mention that the visual presentation of this book is nothing short of first class. Although not a book of fine-art photography, it is nonetheless an aesthetically pleasing volume printed on high-quality paper.