Birder's memoir skips forest for the trees.

Byline: REVIEW By Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Birding on Borrowed Time

By Phoebe Snetsinger 

(American Birding Association, 307 pages, $19.95)

Four years after she died in a bus crash in Madagascar, Phoebe Snetsinger remains - numerically speaking, anyway - the top birder in the world.

This obsessed woman's lifetime record of seeing and identifying more than 8,400 bird species was even more remarkable when you consider that she was suffering from malignant melanoma during the last 17 years of her life.

Facing a medical death sentence - she was told on diagnosis she had one year to live - she traveled from continent to continent in search of diademed sandpiper-plovers, horned guans and feline owlet-nightjars.

Now her memoirs have been published by the American Birding Association.

"Birding on Borrowed Time" takes the reader through Snetsinger's world travels from her discovery of the joys of birding at age 34, to her 8,000th world bird, a rufous-necked wood-rail seen in San Blas, Mexico, 30 years later in 1995.

That was a watershed event, both for Snetsinger and for the birding community. As recently as 1980 the top world list seen by a single birder stood at 5,420. Snetsinger's ability to expand that number by 50 percent is a testament not only to her determination but to advances in technology, communications and travel.

In fact, at that point she officially hung up her binoculars, so to speak. Although she continued to travel and add species to her list she declined to submit it to the ABA any longer - in part to give others an opportunity to best her record.

"Birding on Borrowed Time" will be of interest primarily to other birders, especially those who can afford, as she could, to travel the world and book guided tours to help them locate and identify bird species. That is what Snetsinger writes about, practically to the exclusion of all else.

What's missing in her book is much personal context, either about Snetsinger herself or about her driving fascination with finding birds.

There are dark sides to this story, both obvious and more subtle, and they are left unexplored. Snetsinger, who occasionally comes across as a fairly clueless tourist, is brutally gang-raped and nearly murdered in Papua New Guinea.

"The five thugs managed to disappear forever, taking with them two good pairs of binoculars and my bird book," she writes.

This disconnect runs throughout the book.

Her husband appears but rarely in the story and then primarily to threaten divorce. It's hard not to sympathize with him, given her single-mindedness. We find out next to nothing about the exotic places she travels in, except for the birds she saw there.

And she bobbles the larger issues entirely. Why did terminal cancer drive her to search the world for bird species? What does counting birds mean in the greater scheme?

In her defense, Snetsinger was not a professional writer, and this was not even a finished book when she died. It was pulled together by a son, Thomas, who lives in Oregon.

It works best if read for what it is: a not terribly reflective travelogue by someone who did a rare and curious thing.

The book is illustrated by bird artist H. Douglas Platt, including 16 full-page color plates, and contains a handful of photographs of the author on her travels and at home.

Bob Keefer can be reached at 338-2325 or [e-mail].