Posted on June 9, 2019
She set a world record...
...for spotting birds?
Serious birdwatchers, or birders, need patience, good walking shoes, binoculars, and knowledge. Phoebe Snetsinger, born on this date in 1931, had all of those - and she also had a strong motivation:
She had, she was told, terminal cancer.
"Terminal" means that she was expected to die from the cancer. However, when amateur-birder Snetsinger was given this diagnosis, at age 50, she decided to take a trip to Alaska to add birds to her list of species she'd seen and identified. And when she came back from that trip, she discovered that her cancer was in remission!
Birdwatchers have this thing called a Life List - a long, probably computerized list on which they list the various species and sub-species that they have spotted, along with dates and places. You can guess from the phrase "Life List" that the list includes all the species of birds spotted over the entire course of your life. If you hit 600 birds, you're doing great!
Well, Phoebe Snetsinger saw more than 8,000 different bird species!!!
That's about 85% of all bird species! Impressive!
Snetsinger's cancer came back several times, but it also went into remission again, over and over. Snetsinger fought back with at least one surgery, probably some other treatments, and by gallivanting all over the world in defiance of her death sentence. She even wrote a book called Birding on Borrowed Time.
Snetsinger had an adventurous spirit and enough money to travel all over the world. Thanks to her inheritance from her father, Snetsinger traveled to all seven continents in order to see all those different kinds of birds!
Snetsinger became the first person ever to break 8,000 on her Life List, and when she died at age 68 - in a car accident, while birdwatching, by the way - NOT from cancer! - she had 8,398 different species on her list.
Since then, her world record has been broken a few times, and right now there is one bird watcher, British birder Tom Gullick, who has reached 9,000 different species of birds on his Life List!
It took him until he was 81 years old to see that many - very nearly all of the bird species that exist! - and so I can revise my original list of what bird watchers need to succeed:
patience,
good walking shoes,
binoculars,
knowledge,
an adventurous spirit,
enough money to travel,
and luck - to live a long life!
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