Life List

Among the world-listing fraternity, and I use the word advisedly, the name of Phoebe Snetsinger has passed into legend. Birding from the age of 34 but diagnosed with cancer at 49 and given less than a year to live, she attempted to see as many of the planet’s birds as possible in the little time she had left. She defied diagnosis and eventually lived to see more than 8,400 species, before being killed in a bus crash in 1999 at the age of 68. Her record total continues to increase as ‘armchair ticks’ accumulate.

To achieve this aim, Snetsinger spent a large amount of her inheritance from her father, director of one of America’s biggest advertising companies, and endured a boat-wreck, earthquakes, malaria, broken bones, rape and assault in some of the world’s harshest and most inaccessible environments.

Born in 1931, Snetsinger was a bright and promising science student, but in 1950s America women were expected to become home-makers, and she married within five days of graduation and began raising five children. This role did not sit well with her, and she took up birdwatching after an epiphany with a Blackburnian Warbler in a neighbour’s yard; this enabled her to develop a life of her own, both socially and psychologically.

In Life List Olivia Gentile’s well-researched and balanced view conveys Snetsinger’s passion for birds more effectively than the subject did in her memoir Birding on Borrowed Time and, having been given access to her unpublished journals and poems, is able to interpret her birding life in an emotional context. There are virtually no non-birder’s slip-ups, but the book is still engrossing and accessible to the lay reader.

Snetsinger seems very much to have been a natural born birder who kept meticulous records, and by many accounts was an extremely helpful companion, brimming with enthusiasm throughout long, arduous bird-finding trips. She could also be a tour leader’s worst nightmare – her full-on pre-planning enabled her to often identify obscure endemics before those more familiar with the species, and her forthrightness made her quick to complain if she was disappointed with a tour.

The author has a good intuitive understanding of birding culture, and the book is all the better for her outsider’s stance. Gentile pays Snetsinger greater tribute by setting her exploits and life decisions within a wider societal, cultural and familial context, using interviews with family, friends and birding companions. Despite coming close to being divorced by her husband and often treating her children with disregard, her family speaks of her with much affection.

While we can never totally understand the motivations of another human being, Gentile has got as close as possible, enabling us to appreciate one of birding’s great and notorious eccentrics, and to sense the wider effects of a focused and unreasonable, but remarkable, obsession.

To the extent that any listing record is a noteworthy accomplishment, Snetsinger’s will forever be a benchmark, and it is hard to see this book being bettered as a saga of the costs of such an achievement.

Tech spec

•     Life List by Olivia Gentile (Bloomsbury, London, 2009).

•     345 pages, eight plates, 10 line drawings.

•     ISBN 9781596911697. Hbk, £25.

First published in Birdwatch 205:54 (July 2009)