Phoebe Snetsinger, Birding on Borrowed Time (Colorado Springs: American Birding Association, 2003)
Phoebe Snetsinger’s name has long been synonymous for me with fine birding and big listing. Diagnosed with terminal melanoma at 49 and told she had only a short time to live, she rejected treatment and decided instead to see all the birds she could in what time was left. She lived for another 19 years and became the first person to see all the 8,500 bird species known in the world at that date. When the second-hand bookseller Andrew Isles announced he had secured a copy of her autobiography, I immediately snaffled it up, and was further delighted to find the forward had been written by another great lister, Peter Kaestner, who was the guide on our India tour in February, back in the pre-Covid 19 era. Phoebe Snetsinger came to birding late, when she was 34, mother of 4 children, with a “mind starving for some kind of outlet that didn’t revolve around raising a family”. A friend took her birding, handed her a pair of binoculars, and pointed her in the direction of a male Blackburnian Warbler. She was hooked! As she became more experienced, she also became more ambitious, but also more eager to learn more about her new hobby. She always kept immaculate notes, determined that she would not “count” a bird unless she had seen and identified it properly herself—no merely relying on a guide for her! On a trip to Panama in 1981, when she reached her 2000th species, she became aware of a worrying lump under her arm. Diagnosed and given what she saw as a death sentence, she set off for Alaska, determined to add as many birds as possible, then went to the high Himalayas. On that trip, one of her fellow-travellers died, peacefully, in her sleep. “Jo’s end,” writes Snetsinger, “seemed to me the best that one could possibly ask for” and stiffened her determination to see more and yet more. Her autobiography is beautifully written, well-paced, and illustrated with lovely drawings and paintings by artist H. Douglas Pratt. It recounts shipwrecks, earthquakes, recurrences of the melanoma and the breakdown of her marriage. To give you a taste of the excitement of reading her, take this extract: “it began to rain heavily, and the falling drops made it impossible to pick out any subtle bird movement—because everything was moving with raindrops. I continued to watch the track for want of something better to do, and suddenly a rufous-brown bird with a semi-cocked tail scuttled rodent-like across the track. Quick, but adequate: it was a Rufous Scrub-bird.” On her fourth trip to Madagascar, with a want-list of 23 species, five of them representing new genera, her bus crashed and she was killed instantly. Her last sighting had been the Red-shouldered Vanga, a beautiful bird, in a family unique to Madagascar. As her son Thomas writes in the epilogue, “she went out, as she had always hoped, at the very top of her game, in the middle of doing what she loved to do.” Carpe diem, as she herself often said. Rosemary Lloyd
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