The Wildlife Art & Adventures of Jim Kern

Photographer

 

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Jim Kern writes: “In the fall of 1958 I was adrift in the Sunda Sea in a 30’ handmade boat. The sails were so thin I could have poked a finger through them. We had no motor. The goat we had killed and had on board as dragon meat spread a stench by the second day. Late on the third day we gained the island and got the first color photographs of the Komodo dragon, eventually visiting the island two more times, a record for a wildlife photographer.”

Some of the dragon pictures appeared in a National Geographic article, but a selection of the most dramatic ones appear in The Wildlife Art & Adventures of Jim Kern Photographer. This gift book is a 50-year celebration of a career that began when recognized wildlife photographers could be counted on two hands. The best 400 photographs from a file of 35,000 are reproduced in archival quality.

The search for the rare and the endangered brought Kern a lifetime of adventures. The reader will find separate chapters on many of them. In the Philippines he put rare, poisonous, fresh-water sea snakes in his attaché case and brought them through customs for a herpetologist in Miami. On Baffin Island an Eskimo took him out on the pack ice in Frobisher Bay and left him alone on a tundra-covered peninsula for days to explore and photograph the wildlife there. In Costa Rica after spending a month searching for the nest of the most beautiful bird in the Western Hemisphere, he built a blind and got the first color photographs of the quetzal, only to lose the birds when poachers stole them for the illegal animal trade.