This article was sent to me by a friend who got it off CarolinaBirdChat:

Phoebe Snetsinger, 68, Dies; Held Record for Bird Sightings
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Phoebe Snetsinger, who saw and recorded more birds than
anybody else, died on Nov. 23 in a van accident on a
birding expedition to Madagascar, shortly after viewing an
exceptionally rare Helmet vanga. She was 68 and lived in Webster Groves,
Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.

Birding went from a hobby to a passion for Mrs. Snetsinger
on the day in 1981 that a doctor told her she had an incurable cancer,
with less than a year to live. Rejecting therapy, she took off to Alaska
on a scheduled trip, her first long-distance journey simply to see
birds."She came back and felt good," her husband, David, said.
"Things just started snowballing from there."

Mrs. Snetsinger liked to say her avian ardor "began with a
death sentence," and her relentless energy reflected that level of
urgency as her cancer went into the first of several remissions. Family
members and friends could not imagine her without binoculars, floppy
hat,sneakers, telescope and other field gear as she scurried around the
globe on scores of bird tours, most costing more than $5,000. An
inheritance paid the bills; she supplied the boundless energy. She said
she spent more time in the world's jungles, mountains and other wild
areas than at home.

There were setbacks, as the cancer, melanoma, recurred every
five years or so, only to go into remission again. But her record, as
verified by the American Birding Association, was sighting about 8,400
birds, ornearly 85 percent of the species now estimated to exist, more
than 2,000 birds ahead of her nearest competitor.

"She was a celebrity in our bunch," said Bret Whitney, a
co-founder of Field Guides, a tour operator based in Austin, Tex.
Mrs. Snetsinger was traveling on one of the group's tours
when the van overturned. Whitney said she apparently died instantly.
"She gave so much to the birding world and had so much more
left to give," said G. Stuart Keith, the birding association's first
president. At the highest tier of birding, it was a common joke to
differentiate between Phoebe Snetsinger and the phoebe, a genus of
flycatchers.

Genera, or large groups of species (as in the genus Homo of
Homo sapiens), were of considerable importance to Mrs.
Snetsinger, who kept a separate list of those that have only a single
species,known as monotypic genera. Her list of more than 2,000 such
genera far surpassed anyone else's, said Whitney, who also works as a
research associate at Louisiana State University.

She also kept extensive notes on subspecies, using index
cards as a catalog until switching in recent months to a computer from
the Remington portable typewriter she had used since college.
Her subspecies notes, in whatever format, are important
because many of the birds have now been reclassified as species. When she
started,there were 8,500 officially named species, compared with about
10,000 now. A spokeswoman for the American Museum of Natural History said
some scientists believed there could eventually be as many
as 18,000 named separate bird species.

This means that her life list will almost certainly grow
posthumously. "She has birds in escrow," Whitney said.

Mrs. Snetsinger was born in Lake Zurich, Ill., where she
attended a one-room elementary school with only two other students. At
11, she met her future husband, then 13, in 4-H clubs.
She graduated from Swarthmore College as a German major, and
then taught science at the Baldwin School, a private girls school
in Bryn Mawr, Pa. When Snetsinger returned from service in Korea,
they both attended graduate school and she earned a master's degree in
German literature.

They had four children, all of whom survive. They are
Thomas, of Corvallis, Ore.; Penny, of Woodbridge, Conn.; Carol, of
Missoula, Mont., and Susan, of Tempe, Ariz. All but Penny pursued
careers relating to birds, Thomas as a researcher in endangered bird
species for the Federal government, Carol as a bird researcher in Alaska
and Montana, and Susan as a student of the spotted owl in the Northwest.

In 1965, a friend took Mrs. Snetsinger birding for the first
time in Minnesota, and when her husband took a corporate job in
Missouri she pursued her interest with a group of birders. (Birders
adamantly spurn the term "birdwatcher" in the belief that it suggests a
lack of gravity.) The group visited local woods and prairies each
Thursday afternoon.
After birding came to represent a new lease on life to her,
Mrs. Snetsinger began to take longer and longer trips. She was
hooked when she visited Kenya and saw 500 different birds in three
weeks. Her odyssey was aided by new technology for recording bird
sounds, greater access to more and more remote habitats and the
increasing numbers of tours being offered.

The depth of her enthusiasm is suggested by her response to
a fall she took about six months ago while climbing a mountain in the
Philippines: she stayed in the field for two additional weeks to see more
birds.
The whole idea of listing birds, or at least the seriousness
of the pursuit, is also sometimes criticized, or at least satirized.
Indeed, it is called "the game" by birders themselves. "It's like
collecting stamps or baseball cards," said Paul J. Baicich, editor of
Birding, the magazine of the American Birding Association.
Snetsinger said his wife's competitive spirit was kept
hidden, though he did not deny it existed. In a 1996 interview, she
insisted that she wanted to play down her quantitative quest. "I'm going
back to being a birder, not a lister," she said.

Ultimately, she felt very lucky, as she explained in an
article to be published in next February's issue of Birding.
Birding is the best and most exciting pursuit in the world,
a glorified never-ending one," Mrs. Snetsinger wrote. "And the whole
experience of a foreign trip, whether you see 10 new birds or 500, is
simply too good to miss.

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