Our 2013 20th Anniversary Festival is now over – please mark your calendar for the 2014 festival, January 15-19, and check back later for details.

Presentation:"Birding in Outer Space"

Kenn Kaufman is an American author, artist, naturalist, and conservationist, known for his work on several popular field guides of birds and butterflies in North America.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Kaufman started birding from the age of six. When he was 9, his family moved to Wichita, Kansas, where his fascination with birds only intensified. At age sixteen, inspired by birding pioneers such as Roger Tory Peterson, he dropped out of high school and began hitchhiking around North America in pursuit of birds. Three years later, in 1973, he set the record for the most North American bird species seen in one year (671), though this record included regions like Baja California that are no longer ornithologically considered part of North America, and it has since been surpassed. His cross-country birding journey, covering some eighty thousand miles, was eventually recorded in a memoir, "Kingbird Highway."

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The crane oil triptych painted by Kristi Koser was used to promote, "Crane Song," an NET documentary produced several years ago.  Every year some 80 percent of the world's Sandhill cranes make their way through a 75-mile stretch of Nebraska's central Platte River Valley, a critical stopover in their 5,000-mile spring migration.

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