To be dishonored by the American Ornithological Society:
Emilie Snethlage (1868-1929), of Snethlage’s Tody-Tyrant and Snethlage’s Antpitta. This remarkable woman should be an inspiration to us all. Everything here is from online sources and has not been fact-checked, so caveat lector.
Snethlage is generally not well-known to North American ornithologists, although recent publicity has changed that somewhat (see comments). “This remarkable woman opened science as a profession for Brazilian women'' (Wikipedia). Born in Prussia, she worked as a teacher and tutor until she was 30, when she then was admitted to the University of Berlin to study biology. Her story reflects the difficulties of that era that women had in getting a degree. “The conditions for her to attend university included the need to be in class five minutes before time and sit behind a folding screen. She was not to ask any questions during class and had to leave the premises only fifteen minutes after the end of the class. Snethlage was one of the pioneer women to attend university and she continued her studies in Jena and Freiburg, obtaining a doctorate in 1904, summa cum laude.” After a stint as an assistant at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, in 1905 she was hired by Emilio Goeldi for the Museu Paraense in Belêm, where she became Director in 1914. I wonder if she might have been one of the first women to be a director of a major natural history museum, if not the first. After political problems in Belêm due to WWI hostilities with her native Germany, Snethlage was removed from her position in 1922; subsequently, the Goeldi suffered a long period of stagnation (Junghans 2016). Snethlage, however, resumed her career with the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, with which she was associated until her death.
She carried out extensive fieldwork, primarily in the Brazilian Amazon, until her death in the field (heart failure) in Rondônia in 1929. Amazonian fieldwork has its obstacles even today, so I can only imagine what it must have been like in 1929, especially since she evidently often worked alone with a few field assistants. “With her intense activities in bird observation and collection, Emilie Snethlage indelibly associated her name to fieldwork research in Brazil in such a way that the lower Amazon region – the lower third of the river and its tributaries – which she explored during the time she lived in Pará, is currently known among ornithologists as the ‘Snethlage’s area’” (Junghans 2016). Snethlage had a reputation for toughness in the field, with the most famous story being this (from Junghans 2016): “During a trip across the Iriri River in 1914, Snethlage had her finger bitten by a piranha. Although she attempted to save the phalanx, the wound gangrened, forcing her to remove part of her finger with a machete, since no one among her companions was willing to do so. When reporting the episode, Snethlage writes at length about the habits of the different piranha species and their distribution in different river stretches, but says nothing about the outcome of the case.”
Her travels took her all the way to Acre in southwestern Brazil, and also outside Amazonia to Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Santa Catarina, São Paulo, and elsewhere, and she was a prolific collector, not just of birds but also of natural history specimens in general. “A recent listing, which accounts only bird skins surely prepared by Snethlage and with confirmed locations, features more than 7,500 specimens. From this total amount, 3,027 are registered in Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 1,207 are in Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum, 13 in the USP Zoology Museum in São Paulo, and 3,317 in various museums abroad” (Fatima Lima data in Junghans 2016). Snethlage discovered and described as new for Western science about 40 species and subspecies of birds. Her major work was “Catálogo das Aves Amazônicas” (1914; 530 pp), which was the first synthesis of the Amazonian avifauna.
Helmut Sick dedicated his major work to her, “Ornitologia Brasileira'' (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1997), originally published in 1985. Snethlage was made an honorary member of the British Ornithologists Union in 1915.