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Birding on Borrowed time.... BOGTIPS!!!!!!
Bog tips... Birding on Borrowed Time by Phoebe Snetsinger, illustrations by H. Douglas Pratt, American Birding Association, 2003, 307 pages. Phoebe Snetsinger came somewhat late to birding. It wasn't until she was 34 that a life-changing view of a Blackburnian Warbler set her on the birding path. As soon as she became a competent birder (which was almost immediately), she began to travel to exotic places and to build her amazing life list. I usually bird in the same place and see the same birds. I don't keep my life list up-to-date, and my idea of a birding trip is a weekend at Cape May. But Phoebe birded the world -- she saw more birds than anyone ever had, and when she reached 8,000, she stopped reporting her numbers. Early in her birding career, when she had seen only a paltry 2,000-plus birds, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctors told her she had a year to live (at most). Phoebe decided that a year was a year and she might as well bird. So she did -- for 17 more years. Her memoir, Birding on Borrowed Time, left my head spinning. The places she went -- Indonesia, South Africa, the Philippines, Hong Kong... -- and the birds she saw -- Wallace's Standardwing, Malaysian Rail-babbler, Victoria's Riflebird... -- blur into a litany of exotic names, birds I will see only in Douglas Pratt's beautiful pictures. She evidently had unlimited funds and unlimited energy. And she worked to learn everything she could about the birds she saw. Before any birding trip, she would "gather the necessary materials," which included a field guide and checklists for the area. She compiled a notebook, sometimes spending months annotating the checklists with descriptions and whatever information she could find on each species she hoped to see. Then she studied the notebook. By the time of the trip, she knew exactly what to look for -- and almost always she found it. After each trip, she made careful notes on the birds she had seen, even those that were not first-time sightings. For Phoebe's family, however, she must have become somewhat of a rare bird herself. Her husband and children are justifiably proud of her accomplishments and her courage, but at one point her husband considered a divorce. (He wasn't really interested in birds!) One daughter got married while Phoebe was on a birding trip, and it was only by chance that she didn't miss a ceremony to dedicate a building named after her father. (There were no birding trips that week.) "Those magical moments of total absorption" (seeing a new bird) -- that was her life. She was obsessed, but she was also incredibly courageous, scrupulously honest, and totally generous to other birders. Her ethic was simple: "Work like hell and be helpful to people." She did, and she was. She died in a traffic accident in Madagascar in 1999. She had long ago expressed the wish that she might "go down binoculars in hand." And so she did. |
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