
When Phoebe Snetsinger was diagnosed with melanoma in 1981 and given less than a year to live, she knew how she wanted to spend it: seeking out birds. Snetsinger, honored in today’s Google Doodle,…
Today’s Google Doodle (in the US, at least) honors Phoebe Snetsinger on what would have been her 85th birthday. Snetsinger had been interested in birding for years, but when she was diagnosed with terminal skin cancer, her interest became an obsession. She became the first person to observe 8,000 bird species in 1995, and her tally was at 8,400 species when she died in 1999. She died, incidentally, not of her melanoma but due to a bus crash while she was birding in Madagascar.
(image taken from this article)