Author-illustrator encourages people to keep their childlike sense of wonder about birds and nature

Kenn Kaufman began a 90-minute talk about his latest book this week with an anecdote about how he thought he had “discovered” a bird himself when he was a 7-year-old boy.

It was a Gray Catbird, a bird that got its name in part from its distinctive mewing sound.

“I had been birding for a year. I thought I knew a lot about birds, but had never heard of this Catbird thing,’” the internationally renowned author, illustrator, and naturalist from Ottawa County, told nearly 500 people who attended a talk he gave via Zoom on Tuesday night.

The event was organized by the Oak Harbor-based Black Swamp Bird Observatory, the group behind the annual birding extravaganza known as the Biggest Week in American Birding that’s held along northwest Ohio’s Lake Erie shoreline each May.

As it turned out, Mr. Kaufman’s euphoric “discovery” was just evidence of his boyhood wonder about the natural world. His deep fascination with birds has inspired him to learn more about them throughout his life.

Eventually, Mr. Kaufman learned — through a deep dive into history books — that ornithologist Alexander Wilson thought he had discovered the same species of bird in the early 1800s before his fiercest rival, the famed John James Audubon, thought he had been the first to make that discovery.

Several other men fascinated by nature during the 1700s, including former President Thomas Jefferson and naturalists such as Mark Catesby, William Bartram, and Carl Linnaeus, thought they were the first to find that unusual bird, too.

But evidence points to an unknown person in the Cherokee Nation hundreds of years or more before all of them, Mr. Kaufman said.

“The Cherokee people really are and were good birders,” he said. “None of these European guys discovered the catbird. It was already known.”

Mr. Kaufman is the author of several field guides and bestselling books, some of which have been translated into other languages and sold abroad.

But his latest release, The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness, has made an especially big impression among reviewers and birding aficionados because it challenges some of the early ornithology work that Audubon and others did.

At times funny and irreverent, Mr. Kaufman gives numerous examples throughout the book in which Mr. Audubon and his contemporaries got facts wrong and, in Audubon’s case, stretched the truth because of their egos and their ambition to be the first at identifying birds in eastern North America.

Others in the mix included George Ord, a protégé of Mr. Wilson who held a grudge against Mr. Audubon, and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, a 19th-century French naturalist who was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Mr. Kaufman said his book title wasn’t meant to poke fun at Mr. Audubon, or attack his legacy.

He said he’s not attempting to celebrate or vilify any of the characters from that era.

Rather, he wants readers to know that Mr. Audubon and others — like all of us — aren’t perfect, and that mankind’s understanding of nature evolves through history.

“This early history is fascinating for a number of reasons,” Mr. Kaufman said during his talk. “It's not my place to pass judgment on these historical characters. I'm just trying to present them as they actually were.”

In truth, he said, many people “who do great work also do some terrible damage,” Mr. Kaufman said.

“Audubon is not a hero to me, but I don't advocate for throwing his artwork away,” he said. “Audubon’s artwork is amazing."

Mr. Kaufman, a noted painter and illustrator himself, said that while he’s not in awe of Mr. Audubon’s claims, he’s in awe of him as an artist.

He said Mr. Audubon did “magnificent and timeless works of art.”

“If you try to paint in Audubon's style, it's just so hard to match,” Mr. Kaufman said.

Those from Audubon’s era were at a considerable disadvantage when it came to creating artwork of birds, too.

Back then, those who were trying to document bird history through their own illustrations and paintings shot the birds and pinned them up in their studios for close-ups as they worked. Today, of course, high-powered digital cameras have replaced guns as the shooting device, with super-sharp images used as a painter’s model.

“We criticize them for shooting birds, but they didn't have [modern] optics,” the event moderator, Kimberly Kaufman, said. She is Mr. Kaufman’s wife and BSBO executive director.

Every bird’s name came from a human, which to Mr. Kaufman means a disproportionate emphasis on humans and the ego-driven competitions to name birds that he wrote about.

“To me, there's something about celebrating about each bird that doesn't relate to a person,” he said. “I would not shed any tears if all of these birds were renamed and given more descriptive names, more appropriate names that honor the birds instead of honoring people.”

He said Mr. Audubon had an obsessive personality, and especially disliked Mr. Wilson.

“So where do I come down on Audubon as a person?” Mr. Kaufman asked. “I can’t match his artwork. I can’t praise everything about him because he had some really horrible opinions about some of his fellow human beings and he committed scientific fraud in some cases by making up birds or making up details about some birds. That's pretty disheartening when you learn that.”

At the same time, though, Mr. Kaufman said he “loved the fact that [Mr. Audubon] maintained what seemed like just a childlike sense of wonder about birds all of his life.”

“That sense of excitement just comes bubbling up to the surface,” he said. “That childlike sense of wonder seems to crop up in all of these people I wrote about in the book. There’s this driving fascination. I think it’s a common characteristic of naturalists.”

He ended his presentation by saying he's “one of those lucky people.”

“For us, the wonders of nature never disappoint and they never end. Every time we find something new, we want to know what it is,” Mr. Kaufman said. “We remain as children, eyes wide, expecting miracles around every corner. As we should. Because, you know, there are miracles around every corner. Whenever I go outside, I’m a kid again, with the same sense of excitement I had when I discovered the Gray Catbird when I was seven years old. The best I can hope for anyone is that they develop this sense of wonder with the outdoors and that they go out with that sense of discovery, because there are so many discoveries to be made by all of us.”