Phoebe Snetsinger
Published 2003 by the American Birding Association
Reviewed by Joel Stephens
Here tells the story of a woman whose obsession for birding reached a fever pitch after listening to her doctor give her the death sentence. Malignant melanoma recurred in a lymph node 9 yrs after initial diagnosis and subsequent removal of a mole. Her remaining time was better described by months, not years. This book is her memoir of her birding adventures before, but mostly after her diagnosis.
At the time of her recurrence, she was already an accomplished birder. She was one of the top “listers” not only in her home state of Missouri, but also the United States. Her friends group included many of the top birders during the time that is considered the golden age of birding, the 1970’s.
She was a wife and a mother in her late forties in 1981 when her sentence was handed down. An unimaginable blow for anyone. What would she do with her remaining time? Spoiler alert! She far exceeded her doctor’s expectation and became the first person to ever see more than 8000 birds.
Here are my thoughts on the book.
Unlike my previous review (Kingbird Highway), I feel this would be a difficult read for anyone that does not truly love birding and to some extent listing on an international level. Yes, there is some human interest and relationship story lines to provide additional depth, but it is mostly about birds, international travel and listing.
The pre-technology age of birding fascinates me. The more I read about birding in this era, the more I realize that birding was not for everyone back then. Today, birding is for everyone. Download an app or two and you can ID 90% of the birds in your region without doing hardly any homework or needing any additional help. Think about eBird and Merlin: Sound ID, Step-by-step ID, photo ID, automatically generated lists of the birds you should see for the time of year, alerts, notifications, target lists, electronic life lists, state lists, county lists, year lists, hot spots, recent sightings, calls for every bird at your fingertip, etc, etc, etc. My goodness it is so easy to be a “good” birder today without putting in the hard work or making any human connections. Imagine shooting par the first time you ever set foot on a golf course. That is what birding is like today.
I loved reading about Phoebe’s unique system of documenting her sightings. Essentially, recipe cards sorted by species. She had the vision and understanding of the future of taxonomy to keep notes of sighting of the same species from different regions, particularly if it was an identified sub-species. In the early ‘90’s when there was a massive amount of “splitting” of species, her detailed notes of sighting locations gave here literally hundreds of “armchair” lifers. I hope her children did not just toss the cards in the bin.
I was intrigued learning about the concept of playback and how it was performed during the pre-digital age. You take your cassette recorder, when a bird starts calling (maybe you don’t even know what bird makes that call) you record it and then play it back. Here comes the bird.
No one gets 8000 birds on a middle-class budget. Pheobe had come into a significant inheritance that allowed her to travel the world many times over, always birding with the best known most respected guides of the time. She took multiple trips each year. Her obsession to reach 8000 before moving on adversely affected her relationships with the people she cared about the most. It reminded me a bit of Owen Wilson in “The Big Year”. While the book is very interesting to birders, it is not completely relatable to most.
The final thought is that to reach 8000 birds, you have got to go to places without nice accommodations, populations, roads, food, etc. She went on some incredible journeys, put herself in serious danger more than once and achieved incredible physical feats to reach some of the birding sites. There is not a luxury eco-lodge at every great birding location in the world…or at least there wasn’t in the 70’s and 80’s.
Joel Stephens