“Look at this one,” said seven-year-old Malkolm. “A purple… I can’t pronounce it. A purple something.”Malkolm sat strapped in the back seat, thumbing through the bird book that we’d just bought him. We were in the middle of a six-month slide show tour about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We tried to ignore the contradictions as we drove from the Yukon to Florida, up to New Jersey and west to California… burning gas while trying to prevent oil development in the Arctic Refuge. Back in 1999, global warming was a tiny, barely noticeable cloud on our horizons.We taught Malkolm his schoolwork while we drove from show to show. He liked the bird book more than Math or English. By the time we found the “purple something” (a Gallinule) in the Everglades, he was hooked. We’ve always read books out loud in the evenings. During a trip to the Arctic we read Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway. Kaufman, like Roger Tory Peterson and other notable birders, was writing about his “Big Year,” a year-long quest to see as many North American bird species as possible. I figured that Malkolm would eventually do his own “Big Year”, but I didn’t realize that he’d drag Wendy and me along with him.
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