Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds

244 Pages·2009·1.65 MB·English

by  Olivia Gentile

CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
A Note on the Author
About the Illustrations
Imprint
For my grandmother, Dorothy Fischer
INTRODUCTION
WHEN I WAS twenty-three, I fell in love with a birdwatcher. I’d just finished
college and was living in rural Vermont, not because I loved mountains and open
space but because I’d gotten a job as a reporter at a small-town newspaper. I was
skeptical, in fact, about mountains and open space. Most of my friends had
moved to New York City when we graduated, and I would have, too, if a
newspaper there had only hired me. Instead of writing about the election
between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and the emergence of capitalist China, the
sort of work I’d fantasized about when I decided to be a journalist, I was writing
about the new ice cream cart that had set up shop in the town of Springfield and
the county prosecutor who’d been arrested for drunk driving.
I met Tait through a friend at the paper. He had big blue eyes, lots of curly
blond hair, and a gentle, almost angelic way about him. He was a few years older
than I was, and when I asked him what he’d been doing since college, he said
he’d mostly been studying birds, as a field assistant for various research projects.
One summer, he’d lived in a tent on top of a mountain in Vermont, in a spruce
forest, and observed the behavior of the rare and reclusive Bicknell’s Thrush; not
long after that, he was sent to Panama, where he tried to figure out whether the
Slate-throated Redstart could nest in the sparse trees on shaded coffee
plantations.
When he wasn’t working, he watched birds for fun, in the ponds, swamps, and
woods near his house. By “watched birds,” I don’t mean that he sat around, like
you do when you watch TV. Birdwatching, the way most people do it, is a lot
like hunting, which is why some practitioners prefer the more active-sounding
term “birding”: you have to know where and when to look for birds, you have to
chase them down, and, when you find them, you have to figure out what species
they are—often in just a second or two, before they fly away. Tait, like most
birders, kept a “life list” of all the species he’d seen and identified, and he was
always looking to add new ones, or “life birds.”
He told me he’d gotten interested in birds when he was about ten and his
mother set up a birdfeeder outside their kitchen window. At the time, she was
home-schooling him, and she asked him to take an inventory of all the birds and
other animals in their town. One of the first natural history books ever published
was The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, an account of the flora and
fauna in an English township by the local pastor, Gilbert White; the book later
came to be known simply as “White’s Selborne.” As an homage, little Tait called
his inventory, which was written in pencil on lined paper, “Tait’s Bartonsville.”
A few years later, he got a scholarship to attend a boarding school in upstate
New York, where he was shy with his peers but was encouraged by his teachers
to walk in the woods and fields and look for birds.
I’d never given birds a moment of my attention. But when I looked through
Tait’s binoculars, I saw their subtle loveliness: the lemon yellow of a warbler’s
breast; the slow wing-beat of a hawk in flight; the curl of a heron’s long, slender
neck. Through Tait, I also learned to hear birds—their hoots, chuckles, trills, and
caws—and it dawned on me that they were everywhere, even in winter, when the
world looked barren. I learned, too, that birds had evolved from a small two-
legged dinosaur called a theropod, which grew feathers, probably to keep warm,
and which eventually used those feathers to take to the air. There’s no need for
fantasies like Jurassic Park: every time you see a bird, even a crummy little
sparrow, you’re looking at what’s left of the dinosaurs.
I was so taken with Tait and his passion for the natural world that it took me a
while to recognize his depression. It slowed him down almost every day, and
when it was bad, it paralyzed him. He’d forget things, pace, sleep too much, and
cry. He’d been on and off medication for a while, he told me, but it never seemed
to do much good.
All the same, every morning just before dawn, even when he was at his worst,
he woke up to listen to the birdsong. He’d lie on his back in the purple-gray
dark, eyes open and alert, and sift through the chorus to identify each species. If
I was awake, he whispered the names of the birds so I, too, could appreciate the
music. His connection to nature was so powerful, I realized, that it penetrated his
depression better than medicine could, better than I could. I wondered if he
would be alive without it.
We eventually broke up, which was crushing to both of us. He was still on my
mind several years later, when I was studying writing in New York City. Most
people barely notice birds, even in bucolic Vermont. Why had they come into
focus for Tait? Had he already been depressed when they did? Why, exactly, did
they soothe him so? The other birdwatchers I’d met through Tait seemed to
approach the pursuit with similar ardor. Did they need salvation too?
I decided to write some sort of essay on birdwatching, and I called a few bird
clubs near my home in Manhattan to see what they had going on. One man
misunderstood and thought I was interested in joining his club. He tried to
encourage me. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe you’ll be the next Phoebe
Snetsinger.” The man had never met Phoebe, but he knew all about her—as most
birdwatchers do, it turned out—and he told me a little. That was back in 2001,
two years after her death, and I’ve been piecing together her life ever since.
Phoebe wasn’t meant to be a housewife. Her father was Leo Burnett, founder of
one of the biggest advertising agencies in the country (the Leo Burnett Company,
in Chicago), and she inherited his intensity and drive. As a little girl in the
1930s, she was a tomboy who zealously memorized baseball statistics; when she
was a teenager, in the 1940s, she wanted to be a psychologist, then changed her
mind and decided to be a chemist. By the time she graduated from college,
though, it was the era of Ozzie and Harriet. Earlier in the century, women had
broken down all kinds of barriers, but in the postwar years there was a backlash:
women were once again supposed to marry young, have as many kids as
possible, and devote themselves entirely to their families. A few women tried to
flout the norm and take up careers instead, but most of them didn’t make it very
far.
Shy and unaccustomed to making waves, Phoebe married a few days after she
graduated, became a housewife in the Minneapolis suburbs, and had four
children in quick succession with her husband, David, a scientist who taught at
the University of Minnesota. She was a thoughtful, loving mother, but she
couldn’t muster much gusto for cooking and cleaning, and by her early thirties,
she was “starving for some kind of outlet that didn’t revolve around raising a
family,” as she wrote later. (She had company. She was thirty-two in 1963, when
Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.) She tried being a Sunday
school teacher and a Girl Scout leader, but didn’t take to either. Then, one sunny
spring morning when she was thirty-four, when only one of her kids had started
school and the youngest two were still in diapers, a neighbor took her out
birdwatching. As she beheld the blazing orange throat of a Blackburnian Warbler
that was perched in the top of a tree, she had an epiphany akin to a religious
awakening. “I had never seen anything like it,” she wrote, “and at the same time,
I realized that the bird had probably been in the trees in my own back yard every
spring I’d been alive. It was as if a window opened up.” She began birding with
her neighbor once or twice a week, mostly in the woods around their houses, and
keeping a life list, which grew slowly at first, since it takes a while to learn how
to “spot” birds in trees and shrubs, not to mention how to tell one kind of bird
from another. A couple of years later, when the family moved to a suburb of St.
Louis, she found a bird club to join, made more friends than she’d ever had
before, and started to sharpen her skills.
Once she’d mastered most of the birds near home, though, she wanted to
travel around the country and the world to see more; most of all, she wanted to
spend time in the tropics, where the vast majority of the ten thousand bird
species live. It was, people were saying, the Golden Age of birding: it was easier
than it had ever been to get around in the tropics, and while a great deal of rain
forest and other habitat had recently been destroyed, there hadn’t yet been many
extinctions. Throughout her forties, when her kids were in their teens, Phoebe
wrote poems about feeling trapped, out of place, and depressed in the suburbs,
and about wanting to flee to the jungle, where she belonged.
In 1981, when she was just a few months shy of her fiftieth birthday, she was,
to her shock and devastation, diagnosed with advanced melanoma and told she
had less than a year to live. Since there were no good treatments, she decided to
spend her final months chasing birds wherever she could, a plan her family
supported. She went with “bird tours”—a new phenomenon at the time—to
Alaska, Australia, Suriname, and India, always thinking each trip would be her
last. As it happened, however, her doctors had been wrong, and a year after her
diagnosis, her body was robust, her spirit was exuberant, and she was starting to
wonder how many species she could find before she was forced to stop. “I know
the balloon will burst some day in the next few years,” she wrote to a friend,
“but meanwhile life is so good.”
In the years that followed, Phoebe crisscrossed the globe with ever-deepening
abandon, staking out rare and spectacular birds in the wildest places on earth.
She still took tours, but she chose increasingly fringe ones, and as time went on
she took more trips on her own, hiring local guides to show her around. She slept
in yurts, at truck stops, and by the side of the road; she traveled in tiny planes, in
canoes, and on horseback. Once, she was chased by tribesmen with ten-foot-long
spears; another time, she was boatwrecked in the middle of the ocean. On the
island of New Guinea, she was carjacked, kidnapped, and brutally assaulted by
five thugs. Ten years after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Phoebe had
become obsessed with the notion of seeing eight thousand species, more than
any other birder in history. She had also lost the capacity to take into account her
family, her health, and her safety.
Phoebe liked to write things down, and I’ve been able to reconstruct her life
through her papers: the poetry she wrote in her forties, letters she sent to friends
and family, notebooks she kept on trips, and articles she contributed to the
newsletter of her bird club and various magazines. When she was sixty-five, she
started working on a memoir, and it was almost complete when she died.
I interviewed Phoebe’s two brothers, Dave, her widower, who still lives
outside St. Louis, and her four children, now in their forties and fifties, all of
whom have careers in the natural sciences. The Snetsingers are private, dignified
people, but they shared with me what they were comfortable with, and they
allowed me to read and excerpt Phoebe’s papers. I interviewed dozens of her
friends, most of them birders, and found that a lot of them had stories worth
telling, too. I tried out birdwatching myself, and I eventually took bird tours of
Kenya and Peru, two countries in the tropics with particularly large numbers of
species.
This book is about Phoebe, and about birding, a way of life I wanted to better
understand. But it’s also about the larger questions Phoebe’s life raises. What
happens when society pushes you into a role that you aren’t meant to play? If
you’re told that you only have a short time to live, how should you spend it?
Where is the line between dedication and obsession, and when does obsession
cross the line into pathology?
What does it mean, ultimately, to live, and die, well?
Chapter 1
IT HAD BEEN a long, nasty winter, even by Minnesota standards. At first, it
was numbingly cold. “Keep Your Overcoat Buttoned Up,” the Minneapolis
Morning Tribune warned, with midwestern understatement, in mid-January,
when the temperature was five below zero. Over the next few weeks, it often got
down to twenty-five below. “Another battery-destroying, toe-freezing, window-
frosting day of cold, cold weather is predicted for the Twin Cities today,” the
paper said in early February. In March, there were three blizzards, each ten days
after the last, each with winds so fierce that you couldn’t see. At one point, the
wind was so strong that it kicked up the soil, which mixed with the snow and
turned it black. Roads, schools, and stores were closed; telephone and power
lines went dead; kids jumped from their roofs into thirty-foot-high snowdrifts.
“Winter May Be City’s Worst in 43 Years,” the Tribune declared.
It was 1965. Phoebe was thirty-four, and she lived with Dave and their four
little kids outside Minneapolis, in New Brighton, an industrial town that was
turning into a suburb. Penny was six; Tom was four; Carol was three; Sue was
one. Dave, who had grown up on a farm, was a professor of agriculture on the
St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. His specialty was the relatively
new field of poultry nutrition: he tried to figure out what to feed laying hens and
chicks so the chicks would grow quickly and make for healthful, tasty meat. He
taught, performed experiments, wrote papers, and sat on committees. Phoebe
stayed home with the kids, which meant, of course, that she got to see their first
steps and hear their first words, but also that she spent much of her time running
after them, changing their diapers, and cleaning the house. When she could get
out, she did some volunteering for the League of Women Voters (she was a
Democrat with misgivings about the Vietnam War) and the Girl Scouts (for a
while, she was a troop leader). She and Dave taught Sunday school at the local
Unitarian church, not because they were particularly religious but to give their
kids a sense of community.
Although Phoebe’s parents gave them a little money each year, they lived
primarily off Dave’s salary as an associate professor, and so they’d bought a
small, one-story house with a single bathroom, the sort of house where you don’t
get much privacy no matter which room you’re in. There were only three
bedrooms, Sue’s nursery was a refurbished bathroom, and the living room was
barely big enough to fit all six of them. The house was in a big field, though,
near a lake and some woods, and they spent a lot of their time outdoors.