Today’s animated Google Doodle celebrates the 85th birthday of Phoebe Snetsinger (1931-1999), a woman who, at age 49, was diagnosed with terminal melanoma, and decided to make the most of her remaining years by seeing as many species of birds as she could. And she got 17 more years—traveling the world four months every year looking for birds. As the Independent notes, she racked up a total of 8300 species on her life list—more than anyone had ever seen before. (It’s estimated that there are roughly 10,400 bird species on the planet.)

Snetsinger’s life, even aside from the melanoma, wasn’t all beer and skittles:

“People would get excited when they found out they’d be on a tour with her, and were honored when she took time out to help them in the field,” wrote Olivia Gentile, author of “Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds”. “Even catching a glimpse of her was thrilling, as if she were a rock star.”

Yet the trips abroad took their toll. She reportedly missed her mother’s funeral and her daughter’s wedding to attend birding tours. She injured her knee on a mountain trail and sustained a permanently crippled arm after she broke her wrist.

Worse was to come. When she was staying at an isolated lagoon in Papua New Guinea, her guide was beaten up and she was gang-raped by five men. One year later, Ms Snetsinger revisited the scene of the attack.

The incredible feat of one woman’s epic journey of discovery and documentation came at the ultimate cost.

On her final trip abroad in Madagascar in November 1999, the van Ms Snetsinger was riding in rolled over and crashed.

The world’s most famous bird-watcher died instantly, at the age of 68 – but not before she had spotted an exceptionally rare Helmet vanga.

Here’s a helmet vanga (Euryceros prevostii) from northeast Madagascar:

In her memoir, she wrote: “If it’s my last trip, so be it – but I’m going to make it a good one and go down binoculars in hand.”

Snetsinger’s now been surpassed by several avid birders; the new record is apparently held by Jon Hornbuckle, who saw 9414 species. (See his website here.) Here he is with a bird; can you identify it?

Often the Google Doodles honor someone I don’t know, but that’s all good because those form Teaching Moments. Today’s Doodle, honoring the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs (she died in 2006), is one of these (click on the screenshot to go where the Doodle goes):

I’ll let reader Barn Owl, who sent me the link, sum up the honoree:

Today’s Google doodle features Jane Jacobs, a journalist and community activist who wrote an excellent book entitled The Death and Life of Great American Cities (among many other articles and books).  It’s so full of insight and wisdom about urban planning and city life, that it’s difficult to believe (with the arrogance of 21st century hindsight) that the book was published in 1961.

Although I no longer teach at my own University, as a secular Jew (i.e., one who needs love and approbation, which explains why so many comedians are Jewish), I will claim that I’m included in the group being celebrated today by Google. And I still teach here and there. . . .

I left out this holiday in the Hili post, but include it here, along with the cute animated Doodle. Click on it to see where it goes:

I have a feeling that the last pencil in line, stunted, alone, and upside down, is making some kind of political or ideological statement, but maybe I’ve been in the game too long. Your guess?

Matthew Cobb, however, still teaches, so we can celebrate him. And also Leicester City, which clinched the championship of the Premier League yesterday after my beloved Spurs didn’t beat Chelsea, tying them at 2-2.

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of Claude Shannon in 1916 (died 2001), called the “father of information theory,” but also the father of digital circuitry, which uses binary zeroes and ones (he’s juggling them above) to design electrical switching circuits. (As the New Yorker notes in a profile, “Claude Shannon, the father of the Information Age, turns 1100100.”) If you click on the Doodle, you’ll go to a list of links about Shannon. As the New Yorker article notes:

First and foremost, he introduced the notion that information could be quantified at all. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” his legendary paper from 1948, Shannon proposed that data should be measured in bits—discrete values of zero or one. (He gave credit for the word’s invention to his colleague John Tukey, at what was then Bell Telephone Laboratories, who coined it as a contraction of the phrase “binary digit.”)

I hadn’t noticed, but a reader let me know, that yesterday Google also had a Doodle marking the birthday of engineer, mathematician, and physicist Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923):

Time Magazine describes her achievements, which includes breaking (or at least butting up against) a scientific ceiling:

Hertha Marks Ayrton became the first woman to present her own work to the U.K.’s Royal Society when she stood in front of the scientific academy in 1904 and read “The Origin and Growth of Ripple Marks.” Until then, scientists were baffled by the creation of ridges in sand when a wave washes over a beach.

To celebrate Ayrton’s scientific discoveries and victories over discrimination, Google has honored the British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor with a Doodle, on the 162nd anniversary of her birth. In addition to unlocking the mystery of ripples, Ayrton also became and expert on electric arcs, widely used in lighting at the time.

In 1906, the Royal Society awarded Ayrton with its prestigious Hughes Medal for her contributions to physical sciences. But the academy denied her the honor of becoming a fellow, because she was married. Addressing this kind of gender discrimination in science, Ayrton wrote: “An error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”

Speaking of cats, it’s time for our weekly Felid Lineup.