Book: Birding on Borrowed Time by Phoebe Snetsinger

There is a listserv named 10,000 Birds but the current list is now nearly 10,400 species globally. Phoebe came to serious birding at the age of 34. She was married with four children and lived in St. Louis, Missouri. One day she went walking in the woods with a friend who came "with binoculars and a Peterson field guide…and she handed me her binoculars to try…The first bird I really saw through those binoculars was a fiery-orange male Blackburnian warbler that nearly knocked me over with astonishment--and quite simply hooked me forever." For you non-birders, this is a bird that could do that!

And what an absolutely amazing birding life she had. She definitely saw birds (over 8000 and the first person to have seen that many) in countries all over the world, traveling several times a year, usually with knowledgeable guides. While she doesn't talk much about the expenses of these trips, I kept thinking about it. She apparently had money of her own from her wealthy parents. She does allude to that but very briefly.

While not a book that is utterly captivating and hard to put down, it is written well, very matter-of-factly about some very extraordinary happenings…like getting raped or shipwrecked, trekking through jungles, visiting politically unstable countries. For instance I opened the book at random to this page:

"En route back to Burundi, we took a one-day swing through the Nyungwe Forest of southern Rwanda, mainly to pick up the Ruwenzori Turaco, which we'd missed in the mountains of Zaire, and stumbled across one of my all-time most-wanteds--a flock of Red-collared Mountain-Babblers, as well as the turaco. We did this trip in the nick of time, while the gods were smiling. It was repeated once more the next year, and the participants got out of Burundi with some difficulty, just as war and all the ensuing human horror tales were beginning."

Or, "I was somewhat appalled to realize that I had signed up to go across the Tibetan Plateau in search of endemics with Ben King in the summer--a trip which would doubtless surpass everything in my experience for miserable and grueling conditions (with, I hope, the exception of Irian Jaya!). There are those who think I'm a masochist--and they may be right!"

Much of her birding was done after a diagnosis of malignant melanoma with a prognosis of three months of reasonably good health but death within a year (thus, the title). And even though she had recurrences, she did not die of melanoma and lived many more years.

The book is also, of course, a travelogue but her focus was always on the next lifer: a Carmine Bee-eater or Stripe-headed Antpitta or Ash-breasted Tit-Tyrant, the Northern Pygmy Owl, the Harpy Eagle, Five-colored Barbet….the exotic lovely names are on every page.

And how fortuitous her name...