REVIEW: The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney
The fascinating and remarkable true story of the world’s first forensic ornithologist—Roxie Laybourne, who broke down barriers for women, solved murders, and investigated deadly airplane crashes with nothing more than a microscope and a few fragments of feathers.
In 1960, an Eastern Airlines flight had no sooner lifted from the runway at Boston Logan Airport when it struck a flock of birds and took a nosedive into the shallow waters of the Boston Harbor, killing sixty-two people. This was the golden age of commercial airflight—luxury in the skies—and safety was essential to the precarious future of air travel. So the FAA instructed the bird remains be sent to the Smithsonian Institution for examination, where they would land on the desk of the only person in the world equipped to make sense of it all.
Her name was Roxie Laybourne, a diminutive but singular woman with thick glasses, a heavy Carolina drawl, and a passion for birds. Roxie didn’t know it at the time, but that box full of dead birds marked the start of a remarkable scientific journey. She became the world’s first forensic ornithologist, investigating a range of crimes and calamites on behalf of the FBI, the US Air Force, and even NASA.
The Feather Detective takes readers deep within the vaunted backrooms of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to tell the story of a burgeoning science and the enigmatic woman who pioneered it. While her male colleagues in taxidermy embarked on expeditions around the world and got plum promotions, Roxie stayed with her birds. Using nothing more than her microscope and bits of feathers, she helped prosecute murderers, kidnappers, and poachers. When she wasn’t testifying in court or studying evidence from capital crimes, she was helping aerospace engineers and Air Force crews as they raced to bird-proof their airplanes before disaster struck again.
In The Feather Detective, award-winning journalist Chris Sweeney charts the astonishing life and work of this overlooked pioneer. Once divorced, once widowed, and sometimes surly, Roxie shattered stereotypes and pushed boundaries. Her story is one of persistence and grit, obsession and ingenuity. Drawing on reams of archival material, court documents, and exclusive interviews, Sweeney delivers a moving and amusing portrait of a woman who overcame cultural and scientific obstacles at every turn, forever changing our understanding of birds—and the feathers they leave behind.
CW/TW – animal lovers might be distressed. In order to do her job, Roxie Laybourne needed to also be a taxidermist. Details of this are discussed. There are also details of crimes and poaching. Roxie’s first husband was an abusive alcoholic.
Do the work, keep your mouth shut, and they will respect you.
Dear Mr. Sweeney,
Sometimes a book just calls to me. When I saw this title and read the blurb I hastily asked to be allowed to get an arc. In my request, I mentioned that I enjoy reading books by Mary Roach. I was bouncing with excitement when I was approved. Readers who also like Roach or Sam Keen would probably enjoy this one, too.
She was, as far as anyone knew, the only person in the world who possessed this unusual self-taught skill set.
It takes skill to tell a person’s entire life and keep a reader interested. If other elements, such as a crash course in the development of the Smithsonian, need to be included, that ups the stakes. Roxie Laybourne’s life is fascinating and took many twists along the way necessitating discussion of a lot of stuff. Kudos for covering all this while keeping the narrative moving.
How had it come this far? How did a southern girl with a talent for taxidermy end up at one of the most renowned museums in the world, investigating assorted tragedies? How had she turned an obsession with feathers into a suddenly sought-after field of science?
Born to a rural North Carolina family and in a time when most women didn’t go to college or work in museums, Roxie was determined to do something different and follow her passions. She was gutsy, took advantage of opportunities, tried to let snide comments from her male colleagues roll off, kept her mouth shut and did her job. A skillful taxidermist, she rescued hundreds of nearly ruined bird specimens after she started working at the Smithsonian. She stuck to her job and ended up starting a new specialty in feather identification. Why was that needed? Well, let’s find out.
Freak accident or not, the FAA needed to ensure the public that it was taking the bird threat seriously. Toward the end of the accident report, the Civil Aeronautics Board announced that, per the board’s recommendation, the FAA was launching a “comprehensive program of research into turbine engine bird ingestion.” As part of that program, the agency gave Roxie a government-issued microscope and vague marching orders to figure out the different types of birds turning up in airplane engines.
Most people today have heard of the “Miracle on the Hudson” when Sully Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles saved the lives of their passengers and crew by landing on the Hudson River. A bird strike brought the plane down. One from almost fifty years earlier got Roxie started. At that time air travel was increasing and planes were falling from the skies. Little attention was paid to birds as a cause until a crash at Logan Airport. Tasked with identifying the remains of birds found on the runway and seeing if they matched the remains in the engines, Roxie had begun a new career.
Roxie was quiet and intense during the first few weeks on the job, knowing that she was being judged on every level. The specimens she prepared. The hairstyle she wore. The heft of her drawl. Everything was under the microscope of an institution whose entire leadership structure had consisted of white men and white men only since its founding. Roxie wasn’t necessarily looking to break into the boys’ club, but she wanted the respect of her fellow taxidermists. The easiest way to get it, she figured, was to work harder than them.
Not only airlines needed help with this. The USAF and NASA had their issues with birds as well. Engineers for airplane manufacturers needed to study what improvements were needed for planes based on impact studies of birds (something Mary Roach mentioned in her book “Fuzz.” Then law enforcement agencies began sending her envelopes of feathers from crime scenes leading to her testifying at trials.
Feathers are the Swiss Army knife of animal outerwear. In addition to enabling flight, they provide insulation against arctic blasts and waterproofing against tropical downpours. They camouflage predators and prey alike, and they are essential to wooing mates and propagating certain species.
Whooping cranes were in dire straights by mid century. One of the issues for (the miniscule) captive populations was that no one could sex the birds they had. Could Roxie help? After examining taxidermied crane specimens at the museum, Roxie put her new knowledge to work on other (not endangered) cranes, refined her technique and developed a way to gender cranes which kick started breeding programs.
Roxie had succeeded. She’d developed the method for sexing cranes, field-tested it, and applied it to the target species. Mission accomplished. Today there are more than five hundred Whooping Cranes in the wild.
Knowing that she needed to pass on her feather identification skills, Roxie lured in likely candidates and put them through the ringer before finding one who stuck out the rigorous training and Roxie’s sometimes brusque temperament. By the time she began training the next one, and urging her to continue her advanced education and also getting the USAF to pay for that, Roxie had smoothed out her temperament a bit. But her driving remained pedal to the metal through DC traffic.
Roxie reminded Arrington that for a long time she’d been asking the military to find someone whom she could train to identify feathers, and they never put forward a single worthwhile candidate. Now she had the wonderful Carla Dove at her side, who wanted to earn a PhD and represented a long-term solution to the air force’s feather needs, but Dove was saddled with a full-time job and student loans.
Roxie proudly recalled that by the time she and Dove boarded their flight home from Vienna, they “were assured of funding.” Under the arrangement, the air force would cover Dove’s doctoral research and pay her to apprentice under Roxie at the museum when she wasn’t in class or working on her thesis.
I like that Roxie wasn’t sugarcoated. Her faults as well as her strengths are here. She was tough, dedicated, worked like a demon even into her eighties, mentored a new generation in the techniques she had pioneered, helped save pilots’ lives, helped students, testified in trials – ugh, the kill pit, worked to help make planes safer, and taught everyone that a tiny, downhome North Carolina woman with a southern drawl was nobody’s fool. The pacing is great, scientific stuff is explained for the layperson, and things never bogged down. Thank you for making her life entertaining as well as interesting. B+
~Jayne
Roxie contained multitudes, and that could be a challenge for those around her. Family members and close friends knew her to be welcoming, thoughtful, and fun. They also knew her to be a demanding, task-oriented workaholic whose temperament was as fickle as a feather in an updraft.
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This does sound appealing, Jayne, so thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Was the book well edited? I notice ensure in the quote above where I would have used assure.
@Kareni: I noticed that, too, when I read it. There might have been one more thing I questioned but other than that it was okay.