The Feather Detective
On 4 October 1960, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 took off from Logan International Airport on a clear fall evening and plunged almost immediately into the icy waters of Boston Harbor, killing all but ten of the seventy-two people on board. It remains the deadliest air crash in New England history.
When the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the cause of the crash, the public was incredulous: A flock of European Starlings, which weighed less than three ounces each, had brought down the 98,000-pound plane. In total, the plane’s engines had ingested fewer than a dozen of the small songbirds, but the freak accident highlighted the threat the creatures posed to airplanes in flight.
Bird strikes happen all the time, though they do not always lead to plane crashes. Knowing which species and weight of birds hit planes frequently could help manufacturers build bird-resistant aircraft and enable ecologists to guide programs to reduce bird populations near runways. In the tragedy’s aftermath, the FAA instructed all airlines to mail a “feather or more” of birds sucked into aircraft engines to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. There, it fell to 50-year-old taxidermist Roxie Laybourne to take the mangled bits of the bird – often only wisps of degraded feathers – and make an accurate species identification. Insiders now call the process—which involves examining feathers’ microstructures— the “Roxie Method.”
In The Feather Detective, Chris Sweeney traces Laybourne’s career as the world’s first forensic ornithologist, who made aviation safer, and whose work also helped build criminal cases against murderers and poachers. Laybourne died in 2003, so Sweeney’s account draws on interviews with her colleagues, court transcripts, press clippings, correspondence, and archival recordings, including an eight-part oral history interview conducted by the Smithsonian.
Laybourne started her career as an unpaid apprentice at the North Carolina State Museum where she discovered a talent for taxidermy. To become a full-fledged scientist, which she aspired to do despite having a full-time job, a troubled marriage, and a toddler, she enrolled in a graduate program in zoology at North Carolina State.
In 1944, on a professor’s recommendation, she applied for a temporary taxidermist position at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. and moved to Washington, D.C. As she skinned birds and prepared specimens, her superiors noticed her work, and her work ethic. At the end of the year, she joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) and also stayed on at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, working with thousands of bird specimens. “You learn a lot washing feathers, if you pay attention,” she argued. Six years after arriving in Washington, she completed her master’s degree at George Washington University.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) eventually sought her expertise as well. Typically, her work for them involved matching a feather found at the scene of a crime with an object that belonged to the perpetrator or the victim— a pillow or a down jacket, for example. But even though her efforts helped prosecute criminals, her FWS boss felt that this “service work” distracted from the laboratory’s research mandate and abolished it in 1974. However, she continued her feather identification work as a private consultant.
At 64-years-old that year, Laybourne realized it was time to start handing down her hard-won knowledge to promising young researchers. Mentoring did not come easy to her Laybourne. Her criticisms could sting. FBI special agent Doug Deedrick, who Laybourne trained to become the bureau’s in-house feather expert, recalls that she “wouldn’t hesitate to give [him] ‘a slap across the face,’ so to speak,” when he failed to meet her expectations, Sweeney writes.
At the Smithsonian, Beth Ann Sabo—an apprentice who persisted despite Laybourne’s tough love— left to lead feather-related work at a high-tech forensic lab in Oregon dedicated to crimes against nature, and Laybourne’s quest for potential successors continued. She saw promise in a technician called Carla Dove. Laybourne, who had endured a secondary status without a PhD, arranged for the U.S. Air Force – which outsourced bird strike identification to the Smithsonian – to fund her protégé’s doctoral studies. For her doctoral degree, Dove studied the microstructures of shorebirds, because many important airports are located on marshy shorelines. In the scientific community of the Smithsonian, Laybourne who did not have a PhD, had endured eyerolls and snide comments in her time.
When the museum celebrated its sesquicentennial anniversary in 1996, Laybourne – now in the sixth decade of her career – set up a table at the National Mall to share her work with the public. Marcy Heacker, a veterinary technician looking for a career change, approached her. Through an accelerated apprenticeship, Heacker trained in forensic ornithology. Dove and Heacker reported to Laybourne, as though she was their boss, but each worried about her as if she were their mother, Sweeney writes. When Laybourne died at age ninety-three, the two women who carried her scientific legacy forward were among the pallbearers at her funeral.
Among the 34 portraits that constitute the Division of Bird’s “Hall of Fame,” Laybourne remains the sole woman. While “the Roxie Method” creator may never become a household name, this engagingly written biography brings her remarkable story to a wider audience.