"The Feather Detective"
Mar. 2nd, 2026 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeChris Sweeney
Roxie, petite with thick glasses and an ear-length bob of graying hair, gazed out her window toward the shadows of the forest, where warblers, flycatchers, and other seasonal travelers of the Atlantic flyway were passing through on spring migration.
offering up scientific analysis showing that the feathers recovered from the scene of the crime matched bits of feather that were found on Andrews’s clothing at the time he was apprehended. <> To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this marked the first time that feather forensics would be used in a homicide trial.
* Roxie’s investigatory superpower was an unmatched ability to take a tiny fragment of feather, look at it under her microscope, and identify the type of bird from which it came. She reached her conclusions primarily by analyzing the shape and patterns of structures called barbules that are invisible to the naked eye. It didn’t matter if the piece of feather looked like pocket lint that had been whipped around a blender—Roxie almost always determined its avian owner. She was, as far as anyone knew, the only person in the world who possessed this unusual self-taught skill set.
shouldered his way through the crowd of panicked onlookers toward a small dock where boats were shuttling anyone with dive gear out to the wreckage. <> The window-rattling impact he felt a half hour earlier was Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 careening into Boston Harbor.
Quesada went public with the news almost immediately, telling the world that a flock of European Starlings took down Flight 375. <> The speckled passerines first gained a foothold in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to activist groups intent on introducing non-native species to the U.S. by releasing them into the wild. In one of the more famous instances, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin allegedly set free one hundred European Starlings in Central Park, in what some have described as part of his bizarre quest to release all the species of birds mentioned by Shakespeare.
Warning signs were everywhere, and some experts began suspecting that birds played a role in a number of unexplained crashes. Throughout the late 1950s, the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Navy launched a program to document and study bird strikes at the navy station on Midway Islands, where huge albatrosses menaced pilots and their planes. One of the program’s key determinations was that the birds tended to loiter around dunes that created rising air currents; by leveling certain dunes, the air force successfully encouraged a good portion of the birds to relocate to areas well outside its flight paths.
* Making a proper research skin is a delicate procedure that involves snipping and stripping out everything inside the bird other than the skull, wing bones, and leg bones, while keeping the feathers intact and as natural looking as possible. It’s more plastic surgery than taxidermy, and Roxie’s talents bordered on high art. <> Her male counterparts over the years had been promoted to lofty positions and dispatched on expeditions around the world to collect every type of animal you could imagine, from polar bear fetuses to zebra longwing butterflies. All the while, Roxie didn’t wander far from the bird collection,
Some birds’ feathers could look a dozen different ways depending on how the airplane hit it, what part of the bird the feathers were recovered from, what time of year it was, and the age of the bird at the time of the strike. A tiny Horned Lark, for example, could leave behind a yellow, black, brown, or white feather. There was no instruction manual Roxie could turn to for help.
Somewhere in these microstructures, she thought to herself, there had to be the equivalent of a human fingerprint, a unique identifier
He was the illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson, a well-to-do baronet who owned a sizable amount of land and eventually earned the plum rank of Duke of Northumberland. .. The sweetness of his successes could never fully mask the bitterness of being born a highbrow bastard. Within weeks of his mother’s death in 1800, James Louis Macie changed his name to James Louis Smithson, reclaiming part of his estranged father’s identity and bestowing upon himself the dignity he believed he deserved... From his secretive birth in Paris to his death in Italy, the man’s life twirled like one long melodrama. Death, however, proved merely an intermission, for Smithson had staged a postmortem plot twist
* in 1836, President Andrew Jackson dispatched attorney Richard Rush to London with orders to pry the fortune free from British hands. It took two years of maneuvering through the notorious rat’s nest that was the English Court of Chancery.. From New York, the gold coins were routed to Philadelphia, where the Treasury Department reminted the precious metal into Goddess of Liberty ten-dollar gold coins. All in, Smithson’s gift totaled $508,318, a monstrous sum at the time equivalent to roughly 1.4 percent of that year’s federal budget.
A sharp naturalist with a talent for identifying mammal skulls, Roosevelt knew the strengths of the Smithsonian’s collection and he understood its weaknesses—namely that it was shallow on plant and animals from Africa. As he mulled over the details of his upcoming trip, the president’s ambitions ballooned. What if instead of simply going hunting, Roosevelt led a full-fledged scientific expedition to East Africa on behalf of the Smithsonian?
* The first weeks of a yearlong presidential expedition deep into the tropics were a juggernaut of logistics and personnel issues. More than 250 porters, gun bearers, horse tenders, and other staff accompanied Roosevelt, hauling hundreds of wooden crates filled with rifles, munitions, traps, taxidermy tools, and canvas tents—on top of “four tons of fine salt” needed to preserve the various hides and skins they’d be mailing across the Atlantic.
The high school curriculum required that she take either home economics or civics. While Roxie had little interest in the so-called science of homemaking, she understood that civics was a literal boys’ club; not a single girl had enrolled in it. As she chewed over her choices, pangs of adolescent angst undulated through Roxie’s gut. In the end, she caved to the social pressures of the era and did what she was expected to do.
* most other times the young women were expected to be on school grounds. This never posed much of a problem until Roxie learned that Amelia Earhart was flying into town on a Thursday to put on a show in an autogiro—a silly-looking single-seat aircraft with a rotor stuck to the top of it.
For entertainment, she trapped rabbits on campus, at least one of which she skinned and turned into supper in her dormitory’s kitchen. She embarked on barefoot hikes in the dead of winter to test her grit
in the summer of 1934. Roxie, sporting a blouse and a pair of black-and-white-striped slacks, was stranded off the coast of one of North Carolina’s barrier islands, stuck chest-deep in mud that might as well have been wet cement. Each time she tried to take a step forward, the viscous goop constricted tighter around her frame and yanked at her tennis shoes. If the tide came in, she’d be doomed to a watery grave.
Pivers Island: President Theodore Roosevelt signed off on the construction of an expansive marine research laboratory, only the second scientific facility of its type in the U.S., the other being Woods Hole laboratory on Cape Cod.
The next morning, she woke to a hot red rash running up her arm. The diagnosis was blood poisoning and the remedy in the pre-penicillin era was a course of sulfa drugs, a class of synthetic chemicals that can cause harsh side effects.
Taxidermy and curio were enjoying a moment; displaying local fauna in a family’s parlor or living room was a way of displaying one’s affluence and knowledge. The Brimley brothers cleaned up on this trend and went on to establish a formal company, Brimley Brothers, Collectors and Preparers.
* She grasped a scalpel and made a clean slice down the bird’s breast to its vent. Slowly and methodically, she emptied the animal’s innards, separated the femur from the fibula and tibiotarsus, snipped through the soft tissue and vertebrae, and flipped the animal’s skin inside out over its skull. From there, she scraped out all the hunks of fat and tissue she could find and followed the remaining instructions in a book on taxidermy that she’d purchased in anticipation of this moment. Having apparently overcome the sewing deficiencies that plagued her in high school home economics, she took a needle and thread and closed up the bird.
* While the article referred to Roxie as a “pioneer” and applauded her commitment to the trade, it failed to note that Roxie was still not being paid for her services nearly four years after joining the museum staff. In order to generate income, Roxie did custom taxidermy work on the side.
In October of that year, Roxie gave birth to her first son, Clarence Grimmer Simpson. Motherhood weighed on her like a thousand-pound anchor.
The whole world was shifting, and Roxie was unsure of what direction she was sliding. Her son was growing; her husband was drinking. Her adventurous twenties were done and over and her thirties were off to the type of tiresome start that dragged most people into middle age and mediocrity. She didn’t want to settle.
Roxie arrived for her first day at the museum on June 5, 1944, hours before Allied soldiers stormed the shores of Normandy. The men in the taxidermy studio weren’t likely to admit it, but the museum—or more precisely, the museum’s birds—needed Roxie.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Smithsonian transmogrified into an unlikely instrument of war and established a committee focused on “exploiting every facility of the Institution” to support the troops... Museum officials escorted military personnel on secret tours so they could analyze the design of medieval helmets, discuss Inuit shipbuilding techniques, and study scores of other arcane artifacts in hopes of gleaning battlefield advantages.
* Taxidermists typically require sizable worktables given the nature of their tasks. But the men, eyeing Roxie’s diminutive stature, provided her with what looked like a card table because they thought it would suit her size. The idea that it was the specimens that took up table space and not the practitioner apparently never entered their minds.
A properly prepared research skin should be sewn up tightly, with the wings pinned back, legs crossed, and beak edging slightly upward. All the fat, guts, organs, and glands should be removed from inside the animal to ensure pests don’t swarm and replaced with enough cotton to fill it out, but not so much that it’s lumpy.
Some of the men liked to stage elaborate practical jokes, including one in which the hiss of an air compressor and a twenty-foot-long dead python were combined to scare a custodian half to death. To pass the hours, the crew teased each other in a way that only people who spend their days preserving dead animals could find funny. One memorable zinger was that Watson Perrygo used so much arsenic on his specimens that he was like a “sparrow taking a dust bath in it.”
bathing in the luminous pigments and stark shadows of Johannes Vermeer’s work—her favorite artist at that time. On Sundays, she’d spend hours riding streetcars from one end of the line to the other, jumping off to explore new pockets of her adopted city and do a bit of birding.
E.G. brought these skills to the Smithsonian, where he once labored for months on a three-hundred-pound python, shaping the sinuous mold and then painstakingly replicating the pattern of the snakeskin by painting each scale by hand... But it is a safe bet that Roxie’s second pregnancy came as a shock to both of them. She was forty-four years old. He was sixty-six.
The Chesapeake Bay is among the most popular watering holes for these birds. Since long before the dawn of man, huge flocks have been flying back and forth between the temperate wetlands and estuaries of the mid-Atlantic and their breeding grounds in the Arctic, a journey that covers some four thousand miles. At the time of the Vickers crash, the largest concentration of Tundra Swans in the world would have been found in the Chesapeake watershed.
On a more fundamental level, regulators never properly accounted for the higher speeds of modern aircraft, which made it more difficult for pilots to evade birds and increased the likelihood that collisions could wreck airplanes and claim human lives. A two-pound bird hitting an airplane going five hundred miles per hour could generate twenty tons of force.
Feathers engender obsession. This holds true across centuries, countries, and cultures. Navajo shamans and Ivy League scientists, ancient Roman fortune tellers and moneyed fly fishermen have all fallen under the enchanting spell of plumage. Infatuation with feathers went mainstream in the late eighteenth century... When the Titanic sank, the highest-insured pieces of luggage on board were reportedly a dozen crates of feathers worth an estimated $2.3 million (after adjusting for inflation).
Made of beta-keratin, the same rigid protein that forms reptiles’ scales, feathers are light and soft, yet strong enough to withstand the punishing forces of high-speed aerial acrobatics and long-distance journeys over harrowing landscapes and through treacherous conditions. <> 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.
* Swallow-tailed Kites have forked tail feathers that allow them to maneuver like fighter jets so they can hunt down dragonflies, wasps, and other agile insects. Owls have serrated wing feathers to mute the noises of flight so they can silently swoop through the dead of night to ambush their quarry. Anhinga have feathers that are less water resistant than most other birds, an adaptation that helps them move easier underwater.
most feathers follow a similar structural blueprint. There is a central shaft, the lower tip of which is called the calamus or quill and the upper portion of which is called the rachis. Branching off the central shaft are the barbs—there are pennaceous barbs that are bladelike and plumulaceous barbs that are soft and fluffy and tend to be clustered near the base of the feather. Branching off the barbs are tiny microstructures invisible to the naked eye called barbules.
She knew how to make slides and differentiate minute details of plants under the microscope. She also knew that when trying to identify plants, it was always best to first determine the family and then narrow it down, if possible, to a handful of likely species. A similar approach seemed sensible for birds.
* “But [cleaning] single feathers that had gone through aircraft? Now that was a whole new ball game,” she admitted... She’d drop the feather pieces into the sudsy bath and use forceps to whip up a small whirlpool. The feathers would bend and swirl, the barbs clumping together and forking apart. Stir too hard and the feather fragments twisted with one another—potentially bad news if the airlines only sent a little bit of material. Stir too gently, and the grime remained in the barbules.
When the lab was outfitted with lines for compressed air, Roxie insisted that some feathers fluffed up better if she administered it in a musical rhythm rather than a steady, hissing stream. When dealing with doves, she preferred a cha-cha cha-cha-cha, cha-cha cha-cha-cha... Twiddling the rachis between her fingertips or watching downy barbs dance like blades of windblown grass as she hit them with the compressor—it was all part of the obsession that was starting to take hold.
the Pacific program ran parallel to a classified set of studies led by the army’s biological weapons program at Fort Detrick, which included testing experimental bioweapons such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis and Q fever... It was, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the first and last time the Smithsonian engaged in classified research, a “mésalliance between science and secrecy during the height of the Cold War,”
It was the slow accretion of knowledge that came from analyzing hundreds of samples and sketching the microstructures on index cards over and over that allowed her to start accurately identifying the birds to which these feathers belonged... Roxie trained herself in pattern recognition, forging a mental algorithm for quickly sorting through and recalling microstructures. <> Sometimes she could identify a feather in an afternoon—ducks, for instance, were fairly easy for her, as were pigeons, the nodes of which looked like blooming crocuses. Other times a single sample would take six months or a year to identify.
Sexing cranes: There’s a very good reason why proctologists sedate their patients before a colonoscopy, but gassing cranes was out of the question. In order for Roxie to examine a Sandhill Crane, zoo staff had to first tape its bill closed, being careful not to accidentally cover the nostrils, and then fold the long, thin legs in half, taping each at the joint. The bundled-up bird was then laid on its back with a cloth draped over its head. A staff member hovered above, gently squeezing the wings of the supine bird to minimize movement
she performed the procedure on three Manchurian Cranes, three White-naped Cranes, two Sarus Cranes (the tallest flying bird in the world), one Demoiselle Crane, one Wattled Crane, four Blue Cranes, and four Black-crowned Cranes. It was the avicultural equivalent of a blind wine tasting:
The roughly thirty-eight square miles that make up Bitter Lake Refuge sit at a confluence of geographies, with the Chihuahuan Desert running up against the southern edges of the Great Plains. The nearly thousand-mile-long Pecos River cuts along the eastern side of the refuge and carries south to the Rio Grande, while the western edges are pocked with sinkholes, lakes, and wetlands.
Rosie arrived at the zoo seven years earlier in 1956, after a rancher found the bird hobbling around his farm in Central Texas with a broken wing. He loaded the animal into his truck and drove it 120 miles south to San Antonio, where he handed it off to Fred Stark, director of the zoo.
an impassioned memo to Fish and Wildlife. “I would be a dissembling coward if I did not admit that I was shocked and distressed by what I saw. The two birds are merely existing, shut up in a ridiculously small pen scarcely large enough for a pair of tame ducks,” Allen wrote.
Douglass successfully ran out the clock on Roxie. After nearly six weeks on the road, she boarded an Eastern Air Lines flight back to Washington without ever setting eyes on Douglass and without ever examining any of his zoo’s six Whooping Cranes.
Government officials rushed to clean up the mis-sexed mess, changing the crane’s name to Canus, a portmanteau of Canada and U.S. <> Over the next four decades, Canus became the most prolific progenitor the Whooping Crane community had ever seen.
Freeman was self-deprecating with an “adaptable but excitable disposition,” as one air force performance review put it.
few people would have expected the first astronaut fatality to be attributed to a bird—it was the banality of tragedy cloaked in feathers.
* The field of ornithology largely excluded women, while idolizing all types of problematic personalities, from sexists to racists to fabulists. John James Audubon, America’s most influential ornithologist, was an anti-abolitionist who bought and sold slaves while collecting ecological intel from African Americans and Native Americans that he met during his field expeditions.
A Black teenager skinning birds in the back rooms of the Smithsonian was a surprising sight to many people, including Paul Banko, a teenager from Virginia who also spent the summer of 1964 skinning birds under the supervision of Roxie. Working alongside Baskerville was the “first personal contact with Black kids” Banko ever recalled having, and Roxie’s equal-opportunity approach to bird-skinning struck him “as very progressive for those racially turbulent times.”
* Widowhood: Grief is formless. It can be a bog of melancholy for some people, a fount of self-destruction for others. Roxie found liberation through it. Marriages and children had long stifled her ambitions... However glib it may sound, E.G.’s death afforded her a level of independence that she’d not been privy to since her days in North Carolina, and she decided that it was time to go all in on her career.
* One such instance, and one of the first truly high-profile criminal cases to come Roxie’s way, occurred in April 1971 outside of Detroit... Prostate on the roadside and dazed from the blow, Brownlee laid motionless as the men slathered him in tar and then dumped a bunch of feathers on top of him... The case made national news and Miles’s conviction was a big win for the feds, for feather forensics, and for Roxie.
When her eldest son, Clarence, got married, Roxie hosted and catered the ceremony and reception on her property. About halfway through the event, while guests were still feasting and partying, she repaired to the kitchen and began a deep clean of the oven. One of her new in-laws asked her why she wasn’t outside enjoying the company, to which Roxie barked about how the stove needed cleaning and it didn’t make any sense to wait until after the party
* To manage the pressure of testifying, Roxie turned back to her days in Meredith College’s theater troupe and started treating her courtroom appearances as if she had been cast in a leading role. Once you raise your hand and are sworn in, you are no longer you, she told herself. You are an actor, and your audience is that jury.
Deedrick was the first person who was in the right place professionally and intellectually to take on the challenge, and Roxie didn’t want him to lose interest or patience. During those first few skinning classes, she was uncharacteristically effusive, telling Deedrick that he was the best skinner she had ever had in her class.
Separately, scores of women across the Smithsonian banded together under the Smithsonian Institution Women’s Council and found an ally in Gloria Steinem, who spent part of 1978 working in the Smithsonian’s Castle as part of a fellowship... Roxie wasn’t involved with the women’s council, and the council wasn’t focused on federal agencies that happened to have employees based in the museum, like Fish and Wildlife. She clung to the belief that it was better to keep her head down, her mouth shut, and her eyes on her work.
* The tricky part for Zug was that Jones’s complaints appeared to have merit and he couldn’t just blow off the head of the Fish and Wildlife lab. He drafted a memo in late 1978 that excoriated Roxie for misusing her status as research associate and instructed her to remove anything pertaining to her feather-identification research from the museum. The memo noted that while Roxie would retain her affiliation with the Smithsonian, she could only access the collection for certain work... They weren’t fanboys of Roxie by any means and could have kept mum. Instead, unbeknownst to Roxie, they rallied behind her and drafted a collective response to Zug, contending that Zug misunderstood Roxie’s work and was misstating the problem. While never mentioning Jones, the trio explained that Roxie’s use of the collection for feather identifications for law enforcement and the FAA were “entirely appropriate.” They added that Roxie’s research associate status wasn’t tied only to her blackbird research, but also to her long-running and very popular bird-skinning class and to work she did to identify feathers and bird parts for a litany of scientific colleagues... The men also apparently saw this as an opportunity to get Roxie to clean up her office
Loons are well adapted for the water, where they spend most of their time, and have a distinct anatomical structure in which their legs are tucked far back on their bodies. This helps make them excellent swimmers, but renders them slow and clumsy on land. If one alights on a hard surface such as pavement, it often becomes stranded, unable to gather the necessary speed to lift off.
* Standing there, looking at an animal she loved crammed awkwardly in a hole she broke her back digging, Roxie knew what needed to be done: out came the hacksaw, and off came Star’s legs.... “What I love about it, is that it’s Roxie in a nutshell,” Katherine Urbano, her granddaughter, said, describing the anecdote as the perfect encapsulation of how Roxie’s sentimental warmth collided with her unrelenting pragmatism.
Few people understood the contours of Roxie’s personality as well as her youngest son, Rob, who grew up second to her workload, absent a father, and with health issues to boot. In addition to his double cleft palate as a child, Rob later developed a bacterial infection that left him with ankylosing spondylitis,
They were private, reserved, and at times volcanic in their temperaments. A thread of codependence bonded mother and son, and they were emotionally and physically anchored in Manassas.
They found Musgrave and his two employees guilty of multiple counts, including conspiring to kill protected birds. Unsatisfyingly, the high-profile trial and the extensive police work amounted to nothing more than a few misdemeanors. Musgrave the baronet incurred about $10,000 in fines and was barred from working on game preserves in the U.S. for one year. None of the men served any jail time—one of them allegedly fled to England before the sentence was even handed down.
devised DNA extraction and sequencing procedures to monitor the caviar trade. That process once helped take down a New York food distributor who was harvesting roe from American paddlefish and selling it as high-priced sevruga caviar. Paddlefish are the ichthyological equivalent of an old-growth tree, capable of living over fifty years.
Airport authorities started hiring wildlife management teams to control bird populations. Extreme measures were sometimes required. <> At JFK, a colony of Laughing Gulls in the nearby Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge grew from 15 nesting pairs in 1979 to more than 7,600 pairs in 1990... the Department of Agriculture pushed forward with a shoot-to-kill program that exterminated 63,000 gulls from the airport over a decade stretch.
The air force innovated itself into a conundrum in the late 1980s: it had made huge strides in developing fighter jets that could fly at downright-frightening speeds while just a few hundred feet off the ground. That’s also the elevation most birds fly at. Adding to the problem was that conservation efforts dating back to the 1960s had started to pay dividends
* One time Roxie helped them determine that a series of collisions at a base in Turkey involved storks—large birds that posed a grave threat to pilots. It seemed like an odd bird to have repeated problems with, and the BASH team didn’t know how to deal with it until they got boots on the ground and discovered the base was overrun with terrestrial snails, a favorite snack of storks. The solution? Assigning 250 soldiers to handpick every snail they could find off the runways and surrounding property.
As one BASH team member later told Roxie, her identifications for the air force were “the cornerstone in developing a [bird strike] database second to none and quite frankly envied throughout the world.”
DNA testing was quickly becoming the gold standard of species identification and appeared poised to supplant morphology. That didn’t render Roxie’s knowledge moot. To identify feathers without understanding the barbules that make them unique was like using a supercomputer to test mathematical models without knowing how to do long division.
Roxie had learned a lot from mentoring Sabo that she could apply to her budding relationship with Dove. She learned the power of kindness, and she learned the power of vending machine snacks and carbonated caffeine. Like a chameleon of calories, Roxie adjusted her tastes to match the mentee.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton named Goglia to the National Transportation Safety Board, the first certified airplane mechanic to ever be appointed to the agency... One day in the late 1990s, Goglia was sitting in his office when he got a call from someone at the Smithsonian asking if he’d like to come over to the National Museum of Natural History and meet Roxie. Goglia’s heart raced. He knew of Roxie’s work and he knew that she’d been involved with the Boston crash.... He and Roxie spent the whole afternoon together. They talked about Flight 375, how bad it was, and how it changed everything... It was a cathartic afternoon for Goglia, two strangers whose lives and careers were shaped by a shared tragedy and the birds that caused it.
Most airworthiness standards pertaining to birds for commercial aircraft have not been updated since the 1970s, when a Tundra Swan downed the Vickers over Maryland. Some experts, including Richard Dolbeer, worry that population increases of large birds have outpaced the FAA’s requirements for bird strikes. There’s no right side of the debate.
The pattern on the geese Sully struck was completely different from that seen in the resident New York birds and most closely resembled the isotopes seen on feathers from a population that probably hailed from Canada. The origin story had potential legal implications: if the geese were from a domestic flock, Dove explained, it could have bolstered the argument that airport authorities weren’t doing enough to keep local birds from loitering.
As for identifying the badly degraded feathers that sat before Dove on this December morning, DNA samples and isotope analysis were of no use. These bird parts didn’t come from an airplane engine. They came from the gut of an invasive Burmese python that someone captured and killed near the Everglades... What concerns Dove is that the birds of the Everglades didn’t evolve with this type of predator. In the last century, the population of Florida’s wading birds has declined by roughly 90 percent thanks to the usual culprits—hunting, development, pollution. A new species of snake to contend with is the last thing these birds need.
Roxie, petite with thick glasses and an ear-length bob of graying hair, gazed out her window toward the shadows of the forest, where warblers, flycatchers, and other seasonal travelers of the Atlantic flyway were passing through on spring migration.
offering up scientific analysis showing that the feathers recovered from the scene of the crime matched bits of feather that were found on Andrews’s clothing at the time he was apprehended. <> To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this marked the first time that feather forensics would be used in a homicide trial.
* Roxie’s investigatory superpower was an unmatched ability to take a tiny fragment of feather, look at it under her microscope, and identify the type of bird from which it came. She reached her conclusions primarily by analyzing the shape and patterns of structures called barbules that are invisible to the naked eye. It didn’t matter if the piece of feather looked like pocket lint that had been whipped around a blender—Roxie almost always determined its avian owner. She was, as far as anyone knew, the only person in the world who possessed this unusual self-taught skill set.
shouldered his way through the crowd of panicked onlookers toward a small dock where boats were shuttling anyone with dive gear out to the wreckage. <> The window-rattling impact he felt a half hour earlier was Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 careening into Boston Harbor.
Quesada went public with the news almost immediately, telling the world that a flock of European Starlings took down Flight 375. <> The speckled passerines first gained a foothold in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to activist groups intent on introducing non-native species to the U.S. by releasing them into the wild. In one of the more famous instances, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin allegedly set free one hundred European Starlings in Central Park, in what some have described as part of his bizarre quest to release all the species of birds mentioned by Shakespeare.
Warning signs were everywhere, and some experts began suspecting that birds played a role in a number of unexplained crashes. Throughout the late 1950s, the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Navy launched a program to document and study bird strikes at the navy station on Midway Islands, where huge albatrosses menaced pilots and their planes. One of the program’s key determinations was that the birds tended to loiter around dunes that created rising air currents; by leveling certain dunes, the air force successfully encouraged a good portion of the birds to relocate to areas well outside its flight paths.
* Making a proper research skin is a delicate procedure that involves snipping and stripping out everything inside the bird other than the skull, wing bones, and leg bones, while keeping the feathers intact and as natural looking as possible. It’s more plastic surgery than taxidermy, and Roxie’s talents bordered on high art. <> Her male counterparts over the years had been promoted to lofty positions and dispatched on expeditions around the world to collect every type of animal you could imagine, from polar bear fetuses to zebra longwing butterflies. All the while, Roxie didn’t wander far from the bird collection,
Some birds’ feathers could look a dozen different ways depending on how the airplane hit it, what part of the bird the feathers were recovered from, what time of year it was, and the age of the bird at the time of the strike. A tiny Horned Lark, for example, could leave behind a yellow, black, brown, or white feather. There was no instruction manual Roxie could turn to for help.
Somewhere in these microstructures, she thought to herself, there had to be the equivalent of a human fingerprint, a unique identifier
He was the illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson, a well-to-do baronet who owned a sizable amount of land and eventually earned the plum rank of Duke of Northumberland. .. The sweetness of his successes could never fully mask the bitterness of being born a highbrow bastard. Within weeks of his mother’s death in 1800, James Louis Macie changed his name to James Louis Smithson, reclaiming part of his estranged father’s identity and bestowing upon himself the dignity he believed he deserved... From his secretive birth in Paris to his death in Italy, the man’s life twirled like one long melodrama. Death, however, proved merely an intermission, for Smithson had staged a postmortem plot twist
* in 1836, President Andrew Jackson dispatched attorney Richard Rush to London with orders to pry the fortune free from British hands. It took two years of maneuvering through the notorious rat’s nest that was the English Court of Chancery.. From New York, the gold coins were routed to Philadelphia, where the Treasury Department reminted the precious metal into Goddess of Liberty ten-dollar gold coins. All in, Smithson’s gift totaled $508,318, a monstrous sum at the time equivalent to roughly 1.4 percent of that year’s federal budget.
A sharp naturalist with a talent for identifying mammal skulls, Roosevelt knew the strengths of the Smithsonian’s collection and he understood its weaknesses—namely that it was shallow on plant and animals from Africa. As he mulled over the details of his upcoming trip, the president’s ambitions ballooned. What if instead of simply going hunting, Roosevelt led a full-fledged scientific expedition to East Africa on behalf of the Smithsonian?
* The first weeks of a yearlong presidential expedition deep into the tropics were a juggernaut of logistics and personnel issues. More than 250 porters, gun bearers, horse tenders, and other staff accompanied Roosevelt, hauling hundreds of wooden crates filled with rifles, munitions, traps, taxidermy tools, and canvas tents—on top of “four tons of fine salt” needed to preserve the various hides and skins they’d be mailing across the Atlantic.
The high school curriculum required that she take either home economics or civics. While Roxie had little interest in the so-called science of homemaking, she understood that civics was a literal boys’ club; not a single girl had enrolled in it. As she chewed over her choices, pangs of adolescent angst undulated through Roxie’s gut. In the end, she caved to the social pressures of the era and did what she was expected to do.
* most other times the young women were expected to be on school grounds. This never posed much of a problem until Roxie learned that Amelia Earhart was flying into town on a Thursday to put on a show in an autogiro—a silly-looking single-seat aircraft with a rotor stuck to the top of it.
For entertainment, she trapped rabbits on campus, at least one of which she skinned and turned into supper in her dormitory’s kitchen. She embarked on barefoot hikes in the dead of winter to test her grit
in the summer of 1934. Roxie, sporting a blouse and a pair of black-and-white-striped slacks, was stranded off the coast of one of North Carolina’s barrier islands, stuck chest-deep in mud that might as well have been wet cement. Each time she tried to take a step forward, the viscous goop constricted tighter around her frame and yanked at her tennis shoes. If the tide came in, she’d be doomed to a watery grave.
Pivers Island: President Theodore Roosevelt signed off on the construction of an expansive marine research laboratory, only the second scientific facility of its type in the U.S., the other being Woods Hole laboratory on Cape Cod.
The next morning, she woke to a hot red rash running up her arm. The diagnosis was blood poisoning and the remedy in the pre-penicillin era was a course of sulfa drugs, a class of synthetic chemicals that can cause harsh side effects.
Taxidermy and curio were enjoying a moment; displaying local fauna in a family’s parlor or living room was a way of displaying one’s affluence and knowledge. The Brimley brothers cleaned up on this trend and went on to establish a formal company, Brimley Brothers, Collectors and Preparers.
* She grasped a scalpel and made a clean slice down the bird’s breast to its vent. Slowly and methodically, she emptied the animal’s innards, separated the femur from the fibula and tibiotarsus, snipped through the soft tissue and vertebrae, and flipped the animal’s skin inside out over its skull. From there, she scraped out all the hunks of fat and tissue she could find and followed the remaining instructions in a book on taxidermy that she’d purchased in anticipation of this moment. Having apparently overcome the sewing deficiencies that plagued her in high school home economics, she took a needle and thread and closed up the bird.
* While the article referred to Roxie as a “pioneer” and applauded her commitment to the trade, it failed to note that Roxie was still not being paid for her services nearly four years after joining the museum staff. In order to generate income, Roxie did custom taxidermy work on the side.
In October of that year, Roxie gave birth to her first son, Clarence Grimmer Simpson. Motherhood weighed on her like a thousand-pound anchor.
The whole world was shifting, and Roxie was unsure of what direction she was sliding. Her son was growing; her husband was drinking. Her adventurous twenties were done and over and her thirties were off to the type of tiresome start that dragged most people into middle age and mediocrity. She didn’t want to settle.
Roxie arrived for her first day at the museum on June 5, 1944, hours before Allied soldiers stormed the shores of Normandy. The men in the taxidermy studio weren’t likely to admit it, but the museum—or more precisely, the museum’s birds—needed Roxie.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Smithsonian transmogrified into an unlikely instrument of war and established a committee focused on “exploiting every facility of the Institution” to support the troops... Museum officials escorted military personnel on secret tours so they could analyze the design of medieval helmets, discuss Inuit shipbuilding techniques, and study scores of other arcane artifacts in hopes of gleaning battlefield advantages.
* Taxidermists typically require sizable worktables given the nature of their tasks. But the men, eyeing Roxie’s diminutive stature, provided her with what looked like a card table because they thought it would suit her size. The idea that it was the specimens that took up table space and not the practitioner apparently never entered their minds.
A properly prepared research skin should be sewn up tightly, with the wings pinned back, legs crossed, and beak edging slightly upward. All the fat, guts, organs, and glands should be removed from inside the animal to ensure pests don’t swarm and replaced with enough cotton to fill it out, but not so much that it’s lumpy.
Some of the men liked to stage elaborate practical jokes, including one in which the hiss of an air compressor and a twenty-foot-long dead python were combined to scare a custodian half to death. To pass the hours, the crew teased each other in a way that only people who spend their days preserving dead animals could find funny. One memorable zinger was that Watson Perrygo used so much arsenic on his specimens that he was like a “sparrow taking a dust bath in it.”
bathing in the luminous pigments and stark shadows of Johannes Vermeer’s work—her favorite artist at that time. On Sundays, she’d spend hours riding streetcars from one end of the line to the other, jumping off to explore new pockets of her adopted city and do a bit of birding.
E.G. brought these skills to the Smithsonian, where he once labored for months on a three-hundred-pound python, shaping the sinuous mold and then painstakingly replicating the pattern of the snakeskin by painting each scale by hand... But it is a safe bet that Roxie’s second pregnancy came as a shock to both of them. She was forty-four years old. He was sixty-six.
The Chesapeake Bay is among the most popular watering holes for these birds. Since long before the dawn of man, huge flocks have been flying back and forth between the temperate wetlands and estuaries of the mid-Atlantic and their breeding grounds in the Arctic, a journey that covers some four thousand miles. At the time of the Vickers crash, the largest concentration of Tundra Swans in the world would have been found in the Chesapeake watershed.
On a more fundamental level, regulators never properly accounted for the higher speeds of modern aircraft, which made it more difficult for pilots to evade birds and increased the likelihood that collisions could wreck airplanes and claim human lives. A two-pound bird hitting an airplane going five hundred miles per hour could generate twenty tons of force.
Feathers engender obsession. This holds true across centuries, countries, and cultures. Navajo shamans and Ivy League scientists, ancient Roman fortune tellers and moneyed fly fishermen have all fallen under the enchanting spell of plumage. Infatuation with feathers went mainstream in the late eighteenth century... When the Titanic sank, the highest-insured pieces of luggage on board were reportedly a dozen crates of feathers worth an estimated $2.3 million (after adjusting for inflation).
Made of beta-keratin, the same rigid protein that forms reptiles’ scales, feathers are light and soft, yet strong enough to withstand the punishing forces of high-speed aerial acrobatics and long-distance journeys over harrowing landscapes and through treacherous conditions. <> 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.
* Swallow-tailed Kites have forked tail feathers that allow them to maneuver like fighter jets so they can hunt down dragonflies, wasps, and other agile insects. Owls have serrated wing feathers to mute the noises of flight so they can silently swoop through the dead of night to ambush their quarry. Anhinga have feathers that are less water resistant than most other birds, an adaptation that helps them move easier underwater.
most feathers follow a similar structural blueprint. There is a central shaft, the lower tip of which is called the calamus or quill and the upper portion of which is called the rachis. Branching off the central shaft are the barbs—there are pennaceous barbs that are bladelike and plumulaceous barbs that are soft and fluffy and tend to be clustered near the base of the feather. Branching off the barbs are tiny microstructures invisible to the naked eye called barbules.
She knew how to make slides and differentiate minute details of plants under the microscope. She also knew that when trying to identify plants, it was always best to first determine the family and then narrow it down, if possible, to a handful of likely species. A similar approach seemed sensible for birds.
* “But [cleaning] single feathers that had gone through aircraft? Now that was a whole new ball game,” she admitted... She’d drop the feather pieces into the sudsy bath and use forceps to whip up a small whirlpool. The feathers would bend and swirl, the barbs clumping together and forking apart. Stir too hard and the feather fragments twisted with one another—potentially bad news if the airlines only sent a little bit of material. Stir too gently, and the grime remained in the barbules.
When the lab was outfitted with lines for compressed air, Roxie insisted that some feathers fluffed up better if she administered it in a musical rhythm rather than a steady, hissing stream. When dealing with doves, she preferred a cha-cha cha-cha-cha, cha-cha cha-cha-cha... Twiddling the rachis between her fingertips or watching downy barbs dance like blades of windblown grass as she hit them with the compressor—it was all part of the obsession that was starting to take hold.
the Pacific program ran parallel to a classified set of studies led by the army’s biological weapons program at Fort Detrick, which included testing experimental bioweapons such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis and Q fever... It was, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the first and last time the Smithsonian engaged in classified research, a “mésalliance between science and secrecy during the height of the Cold War,”
It was the slow accretion of knowledge that came from analyzing hundreds of samples and sketching the microstructures on index cards over and over that allowed her to start accurately identifying the birds to which these feathers belonged... Roxie trained herself in pattern recognition, forging a mental algorithm for quickly sorting through and recalling microstructures. <> Sometimes she could identify a feather in an afternoon—ducks, for instance, were fairly easy for her, as were pigeons, the nodes of which looked like blooming crocuses. Other times a single sample would take six months or a year to identify.
Sexing cranes: There’s a very good reason why proctologists sedate their patients before a colonoscopy, but gassing cranes was out of the question. In order for Roxie to examine a Sandhill Crane, zoo staff had to first tape its bill closed, being careful not to accidentally cover the nostrils, and then fold the long, thin legs in half, taping each at the joint. The bundled-up bird was then laid on its back with a cloth draped over its head. A staff member hovered above, gently squeezing the wings of the supine bird to minimize movement
she performed the procedure on three Manchurian Cranes, three White-naped Cranes, two Sarus Cranes (the tallest flying bird in the world), one Demoiselle Crane, one Wattled Crane, four Blue Cranes, and four Black-crowned Cranes. It was the avicultural equivalent of a blind wine tasting:
The roughly thirty-eight square miles that make up Bitter Lake Refuge sit at a confluence of geographies, with the Chihuahuan Desert running up against the southern edges of the Great Plains. The nearly thousand-mile-long Pecos River cuts along the eastern side of the refuge and carries south to the Rio Grande, while the western edges are pocked with sinkholes, lakes, and wetlands.
Rosie arrived at the zoo seven years earlier in 1956, after a rancher found the bird hobbling around his farm in Central Texas with a broken wing. He loaded the animal into his truck and drove it 120 miles south to San Antonio, where he handed it off to Fred Stark, director of the zoo.
an impassioned memo to Fish and Wildlife. “I would be a dissembling coward if I did not admit that I was shocked and distressed by what I saw. The two birds are merely existing, shut up in a ridiculously small pen scarcely large enough for a pair of tame ducks,” Allen wrote.
Douglass successfully ran out the clock on Roxie. After nearly six weeks on the road, she boarded an Eastern Air Lines flight back to Washington without ever setting eyes on Douglass and without ever examining any of his zoo’s six Whooping Cranes.
Government officials rushed to clean up the mis-sexed mess, changing the crane’s name to Canus, a portmanteau of Canada and U.S. <> Over the next four decades, Canus became the most prolific progenitor the Whooping Crane community had ever seen.
Freeman was self-deprecating with an “adaptable but excitable disposition,” as one air force performance review put it.
few people would have expected the first astronaut fatality to be attributed to a bird—it was the banality of tragedy cloaked in feathers.
* The field of ornithology largely excluded women, while idolizing all types of problematic personalities, from sexists to racists to fabulists. John James Audubon, America’s most influential ornithologist, was an anti-abolitionist who bought and sold slaves while collecting ecological intel from African Americans and Native Americans that he met during his field expeditions.
A Black teenager skinning birds in the back rooms of the Smithsonian was a surprising sight to many people, including Paul Banko, a teenager from Virginia who also spent the summer of 1964 skinning birds under the supervision of Roxie. Working alongside Baskerville was the “first personal contact with Black kids” Banko ever recalled having, and Roxie’s equal-opportunity approach to bird-skinning struck him “as very progressive for those racially turbulent times.”
* Widowhood: Grief is formless. It can be a bog of melancholy for some people, a fount of self-destruction for others. Roxie found liberation through it. Marriages and children had long stifled her ambitions... However glib it may sound, E.G.’s death afforded her a level of independence that she’d not been privy to since her days in North Carolina, and she decided that it was time to go all in on her career.
* One such instance, and one of the first truly high-profile criminal cases to come Roxie’s way, occurred in April 1971 outside of Detroit... Prostate on the roadside and dazed from the blow, Brownlee laid motionless as the men slathered him in tar and then dumped a bunch of feathers on top of him... The case made national news and Miles’s conviction was a big win for the feds, for feather forensics, and for Roxie.
When her eldest son, Clarence, got married, Roxie hosted and catered the ceremony and reception on her property. About halfway through the event, while guests were still feasting and partying, she repaired to the kitchen and began a deep clean of the oven. One of her new in-laws asked her why she wasn’t outside enjoying the company, to which Roxie barked about how the stove needed cleaning and it didn’t make any sense to wait until after the party
* To manage the pressure of testifying, Roxie turned back to her days in Meredith College’s theater troupe and started treating her courtroom appearances as if she had been cast in a leading role. Once you raise your hand and are sworn in, you are no longer you, she told herself. You are an actor, and your audience is that jury.
Deedrick was the first person who was in the right place professionally and intellectually to take on the challenge, and Roxie didn’t want him to lose interest or patience. During those first few skinning classes, she was uncharacteristically effusive, telling Deedrick that he was the best skinner she had ever had in her class.
Separately, scores of women across the Smithsonian banded together under the Smithsonian Institution Women’s Council and found an ally in Gloria Steinem, who spent part of 1978 working in the Smithsonian’s Castle as part of a fellowship... Roxie wasn’t involved with the women’s council, and the council wasn’t focused on federal agencies that happened to have employees based in the museum, like Fish and Wildlife. She clung to the belief that it was better to keep her head down, her mouth shut, and her eyes on her work.
* The tricky part for Zug was that Jones’s complaints appeared to have merit and he couldn’t just blow off the head of the Fish and Wildlife lab. He drafted a memo in late 1978 that excoriated Roxie for misusing her status as research associate and instructed her to remove anything pertaining to her feather-identification research from the museum. The memo noted that while Roxie would retain her affiliation with the Smithsonian, she could only access the collection for certain work... They weren’t fanboys of Roxie by any means and could have kept mum. Instead, unbeknownst to Roxie, they rallied behind her and drafted a collective response to Zug, contending that Zug misunderstood Roxie’s work and was misstating the problem. While never mentioning Jones, the trio explained that Roxie’s use of the collection for feather identifications for law enforcement and the FAA were “entirely appropriate.” They added that Roxie’s research associate status wasn’t tied only to her blackbird research, but also to her long-running and very popular bird-skinning class and to work she did to identify feathers and bird parts for a litany of scientific colleagues... The men also apparently saw this as an opportunity to get Roxie to clean up her office
Loons are well adapted for the water, where they spend most of their time, and have a distinct anatomical structure in which their legs are tucked far back on their bodies. This helps make them excellent swimmers, but renders them slow and clumsy on land. If one alights on a hard surface such as pavement, it often becomes stranded, unable to gather the necessary speed to lift off.
* Standing there, looking at an animal she loved crammed awkwardly in a hole she broke her back digging, Roxie knew what needed to be done: out came the hacksaw, and off came Star’s legs.... “What I love about it, is that it’s Roxie in a nutshell,” Katherine Urbano, her granddaughter, said, describing the anecdote as the perfect encapsulation of how Roxie’s sentimental warmth collided with her unrelenting pragmatism.
Few people understood the contours of Roxie’s personality as well as her youngest son, Rob, who grew up second to her workload, absent a father, and with health issues to boot. In addition to his double cleft palate as a child, Rob later developed a bacterial infection that left him with ankylosing spondylitis,
They were private, reserved, and at times volcanic in their temperaments. A thread of codependence bonded mother and son, and they were emotionally and physically anchored in Manassas.
They found Musgrave and his two employees guilty of multiple counts, including conspiring to kill protected birds. Unsatisfyingly, the high-profile trial and the extensive police work amounted to nothing more than a few misdemeanors. Musgrave the baronet incurred about $10,000 in fines and was barred from working on game preserves in the U.S. for one year. None of the men served any jail time—one of them allegedly fled to England before the sentence was even handed down.
devised DNA extraction and sequencing procedures to monitor the caviar trade. That process once helped take down a New York food distributor who was harvesting roe from American paddlefish and selling it as high-priced sevruga caviar. Paddlefish are the ichthyological equivalent of an old-growth tree, capable of living over fifty years.
Airport authorities started hiring wildlife management teams to control bird populations. Extreme measures were sometimes required. <> At JFK, a colony of Laughing Gulls in the nearby Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge grew from 15 nesting pairs in 1979 to more than 7,600 pairs in 1990... the Department of Agriculture pushed forward with a shoot-to-kill program that exterminated 63,000 gulls from the airport over a decade stretch.
The air force innovated itself into a conundrum in the late 1980s: it had made huge strides in developing fighter jets that could fly at downright-frightening speeds while just a few hundred feet off the ground. That’s also the elevation most birds fly at. Adding to the problem was that conservation efforts dating back to the 1960s had started to pay dividends
* One time Roxie helped them determine that a series of collisions at a base in Turkey involved storks—large birds that posed a grave threat to pilots. It seemed like an odd bird to have repeated problems with, and the BASH team didn’t know how to deal with it until they got boots on the ground and discovered the base was overrun with terrestrial snails, a favorite snack of storks. The solution? Assigning 250 soldiers to handpick every snail they could find off the runways and surrounding property.
As one BASH team member later told Roxie, her identifications for the air force were “the cornerstone in developing a [bird strike] database second to none and quite frankly envied throughout the world.”
DNA testing was quickly becoming the gold standard of species identification and appeared poised to supplant morphology. That didn’t render Roxie’s knowledge moot. To identify feathers without understanding the barbules that make them unique was like using a supercomputer to test mathematical models without knowing how to do long division.
Roxie had learned a lot from mentoring Sabo that she could apply to her budding relationship with Dove. She learned the power of kindness, and she learned the power of vending machine snacks and carbonated caffeine. Like a chameleon of calories, Roxie adjusted her tastes to match the mentee.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton named Goglia to the National Transportation Safety Board, the first certified airplane mechanic to ever be appointed to the agency... One day in the late 1990s, Goglia was sitting in his office when he got a call from someone at the Smithsonian asking if he’d like to come over to the National Museum of Natural History and meet Roxie. Goglia’s heart raced. He knew of Roxie’s work and he knew that she’d been involved with the Boston crash.... He and Roxie spent the whole afternoon together. They talked about Flight 375, how bad it was, and how it changed everything... It was a cathartic afternoon for Goglia, two strangers whose lives and careers were shaped by a shared tragedy and the birds that caused it.
Most airworthiness standards pertaining to birds for commercial aircraft have not been updated since the 1970s, when a Tundra Swan downed the Vickers over Maryland. Some experts, including Richard Dolbeer, worry that population increases of large birds have outpaced the FAA’s requirements for bird strikes. There’s no right side of the debate.
The pattern on the geese Sully struck was completely different from that seen in the resident New York birds and most closely resembled the isotopes seen on feathers from a population that probably hailed from Canada. The origin story had potential legal implications: if the geese were from a domestic flock, Dove explained, it could have bolstered the argument that airport authorities weren’t doing enough to keep local birds from loitering.
As for identifying the badly degraded feathers that sat before Dove on this December morning, DNA samples and isotope analysis were of no use. These bird parts didn’t come from an airplane engine. They came from the gut of an invasive Burmese python that someone captured and killed near the Everglades... What concerns Dove is that the birds of the Everglades didn’t evolve with this type of predator. In the last century, the population of Florida’s wading birds has declined by roughly 90 percent thanks to the usual culprits—hunting, development, pollution. A new species of snake to contend with is the last thing these birds need.
