With Kenn Kaufman

By Robin Dougherty, 5/18/2003

Kenn Kaufman is a world-renowned naturalist. Once, though, he was merely a small boy with a penchant for dinosaurs and volcanoes. ''I looked at picture books a lot. When I started wandering around the neighborhood - this was in northern Indiana - and concluded I wasn't going to find any alligators or dinosaurs, I started looking at birds.''

Kaufman, who worked on the Peterson Field Guide ''Advanced Birding'' at the request of his mentor, renowned birder Roger Tory Peterson, has begun to spread his wings in another direction. The latest entry in the Kaufman Focus Guides, ''Butterflies of North America,'' was recently released. Coauthored by Kaufman and lepidopterist Jim P. Brock, the book features photos and text on domestic Lepidopterae from the Antillean Daggerwing to the Zestos Skipper.

Q. New England's most famous lepidopterist was Vladimir Nabokov, whose collection of blues is still in cabinets at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he was once a curator.

A. I haven't seen his collection, but there have been a couple of books that have come out in the last couple of years with quotes from his writing and the story of his research on the blues. It's fascinating stuff - they are really complicated taxonomically. I think it speaks to his intellect that he wanted to work on this group rather than on something easier.

Robin Dougherty, a writer and critic, lives in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at inkrd@aol.com.

This story ran on page H8 of the Boston Globe on 5/18/2003.