By Diana Steele
A Season on the Wind
Kenn Kaufman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26
A tiny blackpoll warbler, a bird no heavier than a ballpoint pen, makes an epic journey each year. In fall, the bird flies some 10,000 kilometers from its breeding grounds in Alaska or Canada to its winter retreat in South America. In the spring, the bird undertakes the return trip. In his memoir A Season on the Wind, naturalist Kenn Kaufman shares his awe for the miraculous round-trip flight this warbler makes every year.
A backdrop to the book is northwestern Ohio’s “Biggest Week in American Birding,” headquartered at Magee Marsh in Oak Harbor. As northbound birds like the blackpoll drop into the marshes that line Lake Erie’s southern shore in early May, so do the birders — who come to see the hundreds of migratory bird species that stop here to rest and feed every spring.