Birding on Borrowed Time

#15
Title: Birding on Borrowed Time
Author: Phoebe Snetsinger
Publisher: American Birding Association
Year: 2003
Genre: Autobiography/Birdwatching307 pages+ A fascinating account by the world record-holder for most bird species seen- Unengaging at times, perhaps due to only cursory coverage of the author's emotions and relationships
I learned about this memoir from Koeppel's To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession. Like Koeppel's father Richard, Snetsinger dedicated herself to seeing as many new birds ("lifers" in birding nomenclature) as possible. It appears that she still holds the world record with over 8,500 species; at the time of her death in 1999, she had seen about 84% of the world's extant birds. Snetsinger began birding as an adult; aided by a "small fortune" inherited from her father, she was able to travel frequently in pursuit of new birds. A melanoma and prognosis of imminent death caused her to step up her birding, and periodic recurrences kept the heat on. Birding on Borrowed Time includes a fold-out map showing her extensive world travels.

I'm always pleased when I discover that an author I'm enjoying went to Swarthmore. Looking back on her college years, Snetsinger wonders, "Were there no birders at Swarthmore?" This question resonates for me as well. In fact, I remember no birds at Swarthmore, suggesting that I saw only familiar mid-Atlantic species like chickadees, nuthatches, and sparrows. Like Snetsinger, I don't remember anything even as unexotic as a warbler, though I spent a lot of time sitting quietly in the holly collection (Swarthmore is an arboretum) overlooking a section of Crum Creek. This inspires me to get up early at my next class reunion to search for morning birds.

Unlike Richard Koeppel's father, Snetsinger seems to have liked birds themselves, often exclaiming over their beauty, habits, habitats, and other features. At the same time, she clearly derives great pleasure from taxonomy, tracking, and later in the process, the competition to amass the largest number of sightings. In this regard, the birds are secondary to their acquisition and how it is tracked and expressed; they might as well be rocks or baseball cards. Indeed, Snetsinger devotes the bulk of more than one chapter to her development of an indexing system. If you have a profound love of office supplies and spreadsheets, you'll enjoy these chapters, as I did; otherwise, you'll probably want to skim them. Black and white illustrations and a section of color paintings by the well-regarded H. Douglas Pratt bring us back to the birds themselves when the narrative is dense with lists and descriptions of stages of developing the notations for the lists.

I'm interested in birds but not particularly acquisitive about them. I don't keep a life list, I use a pair of very cheap Bushnell 8 x 23 binoculars, and my most obsessive birding adventure was driving from Napili Bay on west Maui to Hosmer Grove on Haleakala at 5:00 AM to see 'I'iwi (Vestiaria coccinea), 'Apapane (Himatione sanguinea), and, as a bonus, a pair of Red-Billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) as the sun crested the mountain peak. None of these are rare in the Hawaiian Islands, but I hadn't seen 'I'iwi or 'Apapane on a previous trip and wanted to. Still, I understand both the attraction to birds and the delight of ticking off species in a field guide or list. Two days ago, I was excited to see three bald eagles closer to home than I've ever seen them; two were feasting on a sheep carcass, which was especially spectacular. From where I'm sitting right now, I can see 15 bird encyclopedias and field guides, some domestic and others for Asia, Europe, and Mexico. Still, I am less than a dilettante and hesitate to call myself even an amateur birder. The sort of obsessive birding Snetsinger describes leaves little room for anything else. Indeed, it threatens her marriage and causes her to miss the wedding of one of her children. Not cancer, swamped boats, earthquakes, gang rape, or broken bones stop Snetsinger from her pursuit.

Birding on Borrowed Time gives a good account of an obsession. In this way, it's a good companion to books like Fatsis's Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players and Jacobs's The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. A good companion travel narrative is Gelman's Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World. To explore the emotional side and the effect of such obsession on one's family, read Snetsinger, then read Koeppel's rather wistful account of trying to connect with his father in To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession. 



Photo: http://www.hawaii.edu/elp/photos/iiwi.jpg