SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Imagine a police procedural. Cops called to a gruesome scene. Evidence techs secure the area. They dust for prints and blot up stains. Then a hard-boiled homicide cop sees something and says, better call in the feather detective. Well, thank Roxie Laybourne, the Smithsonian taxidermist and forensic ornithologist. I think, in fact, the term was invented for her. She practically wrote the textbook on examining bird feathers having to do with catastrophes and crime scenes, from murders to plane crashes. Chris Sweeney has written her story in his book, "The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, And The Magnificent Life Of Roxie Laybourne." He joins us now from the studios of WBUR in Boston. Thanks so much for being with us.
CHRIS SWEENEY: Thanks so much for having me.
SIMON: Let's begin by telling Roxie Laybourne's story through, well, a famous and tragic event - 1960, Eastern Airlines Flight 375 crashed into Boston Harbor. Sixty-two people died. Turns out, struck by a flock of birds. How did Roxie Laybourne get involved?
SWEENEY: At that time, it was known that airplanes and birds were not a good recipe, and no one really understood, though, that a commercial airliner would be at risk. So when that airplane went down, there was speculation that it was birds. Some witnesses said they saw birds, but the CAB, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and the FAA, which was in its infancy at that stage, they didn't know what species was struck and how many. And so when they extracted the airplane out of the harbor, they found some bird remains gunked up in the engines, and they needed to figure out what kind.
And so they sent them to the Smithsonian down in Washington, D.C., which has an enormous bird division with a lot of specimens. And Roxie and her boss kind of dug in, and lo and behold, it was a large flock of European starlings that caused that crash. And Roxie had found a feather that helped her piece that together and, you know, identify starlings that were for sure the bird that caused that crash. And that kind of led her boss to say, you know, Roxie, I think this is going to be your work from here out.
SIMON: How did Roxie Laybourne develop what I'll just call this area of interest?
SWEENEY: She had worked as a taxidermist very early in her career. In the 1930s, she worked at a museum in North Carolina, working in taxidermy, and she was good at handling birds and preparing bird specimens.
SIMON: She'd been dissecting birds from a young age, hadn't she?
SWEENEY: She had been, and she always had - she was a real outdoorsy type young woman. Had an interest in birds, biology, ornithology, and she was quite good with a fleshing knife and understood the basics of taxidermy. And as she got better at it, she got a position at a museum. She was the first woman taxidermist in North Carolina to hold a, you know, actual job in that field in a museum. And then come World War II, the Smithsonian's bird collection was falling into a state of disrepair. A lot of the men who worked there had gone off to fight, and so they needed to bring in taxidermists. And Roxie came up from North Carolina and really impressed some of the staff with her abilities to, you know, repair these old specimens and to breathe new life into them. And these specimens are very important for research purposes.
SIMON: One year alone, Roxie Laybourne was called into 45 criminal cases?
SWEENEY: That is correct, and a lot of them were poaching cases.
SIMON: Help us understand some of the poaching cases. The one against a very prominent family.
SWEENEY: The one against the prominent family with the Kluge estate, and they had an British-style hunting preserve on their estate in Virginia, where you line up with a rifle and the birds are chased into the air, and mostly affluent people kind of shoot them, and they call that hunting.
SIMON: I think John Kluge might have been the richest person in the United States at that point, too.
SWEENEY: The richest or the second richest. I - you know, he was well - very well off. And it was a bizarre case in which one of the people who worked at the shoot kind of started getting queasy about the work, and they were awful. They were murdering dozens of hawks, owls. They had an incentive program to whoever killed the most hawks and collected the bands off of them. To prove that these were kills, they would clip the hawk feet off. And they were killing, I believe, you know, into the hundreds of these - all of these were protected species. And so they raided the estate, and Roxie was part of that raid because they needed to identify the evidence at the site. They didn't want to risk bringing this into court. And so Roxie, the feather detective, was at the crime scene, analyzing dozens and dozens of bird remains there.
SIMON: Yeah. Did she, as her professional success grew - and it's, you know, irresistible to put it this way - did she ruffle a lot of feathers?
SWEENEY: I think she did, and she also got a lot of admirers. She ruffled feathers because she was a bit of a mess at work. She took up a lot of space. There were actually complaints I found in her files about how she would stack reams of her case reports just on shared workspaces. Her office was a mess, and she didn't suffer fools lightly. She was very demanding, and she expected her mentees and her proteges to work as hard as she did, which was often six or seven days a week, 10-hour days. And she stood up for herself. She didn't take criticism lying down, and she didn't get bullied by middle management, despite how much bullying they tried to enforce on her.
SIMON: Did she ruffle a lot of feathers among men, in particular?
SWEENEY: She did. And if you look back at the history of the Smithsonian, this was a male-dominated institute for its entire existence, and Roxie was a woman in this. And if you look at ornithology, that was a male-dominated field of science, as so many were. So Roxie got under the skin of men because of how she operated, who she was and I think her skill level. I think people were jealous of how good she was and how hard she worked. So she did confront a lot of sexism throughout her career, and she was approached by a lot of women seeking advice on how do you make it as a woman in science. And she always just said work harder than everyone.
SIMON: Roxie Laybourne died in 2003 at the age of 92. What do you think we have to thank her for today?
SWEENEY: I think we have a lot to thank her for, including safer practices at airports in terms of managing birds. This is not a problem that has gone away. It's not like you can snap your finger and make all the birds go away from an airport. Every year, there are thousands, tens of thousands, of bird strikes. Roxie's pioneering work in this field helped airports realize we need to set up practices to keep away birds, to manage them, to keep them out of flight paths. And knowing the species may tailor. You know, you don't want long grass. If you want certain bird species, you got to get rid of standing water. So Roxie's identifications really helped inform modern-day practices of how airports are managed and maintained in terms of wildlife.
SIMON: Chris Sweeney's new book, "The Feather Detective." Thank you so much for being with us.
SWEENEY: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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