In May 2005, Houghton Mifflin Company published a Spanish translation of my field guide: Guía de campo Kaufman a las aves de Norteamérica. This was the first guide to North American birds to be published in Spanish. In an interview in February 2005, I described the motivation for producing this guide: "I'm a believer in the idea that we'll have more support for wildlife conservation if we have more people interested in nature. The Hispanic population is such a large and dynamic part of the U.S. citizenry ... Naturally a high percentage of Hispanic Americans are totally bilingual, and could easily use an English-language bird guide if they wanted to. However ... the 2000 U.S. Census showed that over 28 million people in this country speak Spanish at home. It seemed logical to produce a bird guide in the language with which they would be most comfortable."

The text for the guide was translated into Spanish by Patricia Manzano Fischer of Toluca, Mexico. She is Project Director for the conservation organization known as Agrupación Dodo A.C., coordinating their environmental education and bird conservation work.

Because the voices of birds are hard to describe, and the subtleties of bird sounds are very difficult to translate, new voice descriptions in Spanish were written for most species by the Mexican ornithologist Héctor Gómez de Silva.

The illustrations in the Spanish version and the new English version are the same: the Kaufman guides are the first in the world to be illustrated with photographs that have been digitally edited for accuracy and direct comparability.