- Someone helped put murderers behind bars, solved the mystery of why jets kept crashing and contributed mightily to the rebound of the nearly-extinct whooping crane. But you probably haven’t heard of this person. One guess why.
- Yup, she’s a woman.
- Roxie Laybourne is the fascinating subject of magazine journalist Chris Sweeney’s “The Feather Detective,” about her half-century of work at the Smithsonian Institution and the FBI.
- If “Feather Detective” is made into a movie, Frances McDormand should play Laybourne, who’s characterized as kind, grouchy, funny and brilliant. She’s also a survivor of spousal abuse who describes herself as an inattentive mother.
- As a child in North Carolina, her favorite dish was boiled chicken head.
- She began at the Smithsonian in 1944 (at 34), cataloging the museum’s vast stores of bird specimens. She also was a mostly self-taught taxidermist and, because she figured out a way to determine species from tiny “barbs” in bird feathers when viewed under a microscope, she had a side hustle as an expert consultant and witness. This work continued into the late ‘90s.
- She could testify for, instance, that a particular pillow might have been used to smother a murder victim because the same combination of goose, duck and chicken feathers was present in the pillow and on the suspect’s clothes.
- Laybourne and those she trained could figure out that the bird that busted through a passenger jet’s cockpit window, decapitating the copilot, was a loon.
- This kind of information is important because, although bird strikes are fairly rare for airplanes, they can be disastrous. In 2022, there were more than 15,000 bird strikes in the U.S., contributing to $385 million in financial losses.
- Figuring out that, for instance, crash-prone storks enjoyed the snails near one airport’s runway could lead to removing the snails and saving human lives.
- There is an annual conference, where Laybourne was a superstar, called the Bird Strike Committee USA.
- Because her feather forensics work was so specific, Laybourne taught Smithsonian classes to provide “an equal opportunity for anyone interested in clipping wing bones and disemboweling sparrows.”
- She invented a method of determining the sex of cranes.
- When members of the Ku Klux Klan tarred and feathered a civil rights activist, she connected them to the debris, including a mix of partial feathers, and even pointed out that one of the suspects apparently slept on a chicken-only pillow.
- The New York Times once referred to Laybourne as “the Miss Marple of eiderdown.”
- Sweeney’s simple, elegant writing makes the technicalities of Laybourne’s work easy to understand and the sexism she dealt with infuriating.
- It also captures what a vivid, contradictory character she was, barking at prosecutors who questioned her testimony when she was on the stand but also learning to be patient in the later years of her career.
- Sweeney gives us just enough information about the Smithsonian and the long, troubled history of the study of birds (John James Audubon? Big time racist) to put Laybourne in context, but he never overwhelms her compelling story.
- The Smithsonian Institution’s bird division has a hall of fame, with portraits of 34 significant staff members in its history. Guess how many women there are.
- Yup. Just Roxie Laybourne.
The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne
By: Chris Sweeney.
Publisher: Avid Reader Press, 291 pages.
