Lake Erie Lives

The songbirds come at night, with warm rays soaked up in tropical climes fading from their wings as they push farther and farther north. They come by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, on the southwestern shores of Lake Erie. Here, they’ll wait — relaxing and carbo-loading, or whatever the bird equivalent of pre-marathon pasta might be — and they’ll watch.

The birds, explains Kenn Kaufman, bird-watcher and ornithologist extraordinaire, are waiting for a favorable wind to drive them on the long flight across the lake. He’s witnessed this event for seven years, and when he talks about it, there’s no keeping the excitement out of his voice.

“The spring migration here is just so phenomenal,” he says. “There’s all this stuff going on at once, millions of birds going in all different directions. And yet most people are not really that aware of the fact that it’s going on.”

That’s Kaufman’s job: to celebrate these creatures in the parallel universe unfolding just above our heads. Over the years, he’s become one of the country’s most prominent birders. He lectures, teaches, writes and — one gets the sense — dreams about birds.

The 57-year-old, who has twice been awarded the American Birding Association’s highest honors, started young. As a child, says Kaufman, “I’d go out and wander the suburbs in Indiana, and we didn’t have any dinosaurs or bears or elephants in the neighborhood, so about the time I was 6, I decided to take a day or two and just figure out what these birds were. And I’ve been working on it ever since.”

When Kaufman was 16, he dropped out of school, left Wichita, Kan., and thumbed his way across the United States chasing birds. When he was 19, he began a successful year-long quest to record the largest number of birds seen in a 12-month period. He’s part Kerouac (he wrote a memoir about the adventure, called “Kingbird Highway”), part Darwin. And he’s still partly the small boy who got his first book on birds from the library branch four blocks down the street from his house. “I would go there,” he says, “and sit on the floor and try to figure out what I was seeing.”

Birds, he says, are very similar to humans. Unlike cats or dogs, whose sense of smell informs their worldview, birds react like humans, using sight and hearing.

“They experience the world in the way we do,” Kaufman says. “With birds, they’re just so intensely alive. I think that was what captured my imagination when I was 6 years old.”

Kaufman traveled the world following his passion, eventually landing in Arizona. But he found himself drawn to Lake Erie, where bird migratory patterns were especially visible. He met a girl (yes, she’s a birder too) and realized the things he cared most about were here, in northwestern Ohio. So he moved, for her, for the birds, for his soul, and, of course, for May.

May is the month when winter’s really over, the month when the breezes turn warm and everything starts to feel alive again. For Kaufman, it’s the month he awaits all year long: It’s migration season.

Now, technically, birds migrate throughout the spring and fall. But May, well, that’s the sweet spot. Kaufman’s led birding expeditions on every continent, and estimates he’s seen more than 5,000 species, but, he says, “in early May, I don’t want to be anyplace else in the world except here.”

Kaufman’s “here” is a swath of protected land that runs through northwestern Ohio formerly known as the Great Black Swamp region. There’s not much left of the swamp, just a few preserves scattered across the lakefront. But it’s enough to provide a crucial stopover for more than 250 types of birds, including 37 types of warblers alone, enough to keep Kaufman hard at work for almost a decade. This spring he’ll start researching in earnest, preparing to write a book on the migratory patterns he’s observed here over the years. It’s what he’s always done, and he couldn’t imagine anything else.

“I lived below the poverty line until I was in my mid-30s,” he notes. “I just refused to go off and devote full time to anything that wasn’t birds or nature. I just love birds. They’ve got the hard job. All I’ve got to do is just describe it in a way that’s compelling.”