Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

From on the way out the door in Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes:   We're heading to Boston to start our trip to introduce the brand-new Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of New England!   The official publication date is Tuesday, Oct. 16, and we will kick things off at the New England Wild Flower Society and Massachusetts Audubon Society before going on to events in all six New England states.  We are looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting lots of new friends as we travel through one of our favorite regions in the world! Here's a preliminary schedule; we will try to update this with more information as we get more details.  We are immensely grateful to Taryn Roeder and her staff at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for making arrangements for this whole tour. Here's our new "baby" - its official "birthday" is October 16th! October 16 at Framingham, Massachusetts : 12:30 p.m. program and book signing at New England Wild Flower Society. More inform...

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: Way back last year -- on December 25th -- I wrote a post about a wild animal that we observed at our bird feeder. In case you don’t remember or didn’t see the post, here’s another picture of this wily creature: Actually, if you didn’t read it, I’d like you to scroll back to Dec. 25 and read that post and tell me: could you tell that I was trying to be humorous, or was it just too subtle? The reason I ask is that, in that post, I didn’t mention what kind of squirrel it was. I was trying to strike a familiar chord with all those people who have had their bird feeders emptied by voracious squirrels. This has happened to a lot of people, but it isn’t always the same kind of squirrel. In the U.S. and Canada there are at least eight species of tree squirrels, plus various ground squirrels and chipmunks, that will come to bird feeders at least occasionally. If I had started to get technical about the particular type of squirrel that was chowing down at ou...

From Cloud Nine over Ohio, Kenn writes: Lisa White, my editor for the last several years at my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, e-mailed me a short while ago with some very good news. First, some background. From the time my field guide to North American birds was published, in October 2000, I had this ambition to bring out a version of the book in Spanish. I'd been living in Arizona, traveling a lot in California and Texas and Florida, and I knew that I heard a lot of Spanish being spoken on the street. The latest census figures at the time showed that something like 28 million U.S. citizens spoke Spanish at home. Of course, I knew that most of those individuals were bilingual, and could use an English-language bird guide if they really wanted to. But my whole aim was to get more people interested in birds. So I figured, why not give them a bird guide written in the language in which they were most comfortable? The opportunity came a few years later. The publisher decided to...