‘Feather Detective’ Roxie Laybourne’s Career in Six Objects

Feathers can turn up in some unusual places: The nostrils of a murder victim who was smothered with a pillow. The cockpit of a jet that hit a flock of geese and crashed. Even the dryer lint trap of a white supremacist who tarred and feathered a Civil Rights activist. Those are just some of the cases that landed on the desk of Roxie Laybourne, the pioneering Smithsonian scientist who developed methods for feather identification on her way to becoming the world’s first forensic ornithologist. 

In 2020, I wrote an article for Audubon about a tragic 1960 airplane crash in which an Eastern Air Lines flight struck a flock of European Starlings and nosedived into Boston Harbor, killing 62 people. It was the first of many calamities that Laybourne investigated, and it forever changed her life and our understanding of feathers.  

In the years since that article, I have rummaged through archives, tracked down Laybourne’s old colleagues and acquaintances, and pored over court transcripts while writing The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne. During the course of research, I came across some surprising and amusing objects in the Smithsonian Institution archives and at the National Museum of Natural History. Here are six standouts—and the stories behind them: 

Cloacascope

While Laybourne is best known for her feather identification work, she took on assorted ornithological odd jobs over the years. One such project: developing and field-testing a method for sexing Whooping Cranes via cloacal inspection, a vital aid to captive-breeding efforts. This prototype “cloacascope” helped to open and illuminate the cavity so she could look for anatomical determinants of sex: either a pea-sized oviduct in females or what she described as genital papillae in males. Her methods were effective, but prodding a nervous crane’s cloaca came with risks. “There is always the problem of causing the elimination of feces and excretion of excessive amounts of urine,” she wrote in her notes. “This obscures the diagnostic characters.” 

Gynandromorphic Evening Grosbeak  

Laybourne didn’t publish much scholarly work; she even once quipped, “Goodness knows, there’s enough of that literature without me adding anything to it.” But in 1967, she authored a research note in The Auk describing a remarkable Evening Grosbeak. Collected in Arlington, Virginia, the bird displayed bilateral gynandromorphism—exhibiting female characteristics on one of half of its body, male on the other. It’s not the only gynandromorph in the National Museum of Natural History’s bird collection, but it’s the most striking. “It should be recalled that this grosbeak had the ovary on the left and the testis on the right, but that the male plumage appeared on the left and female coloring on the right,” Laybourne noted in her description. 

Homicide Envelope  

For all her talents and hard work, Laybourne wasn’t known for her organizational acumen. Colleagues complained about the stacks of case reports she piled on shared work tables, and her office was a wreck of paperwork, specimens, and envelopes filled with feathers. Case in point: This American Ornithologists’ Union envelope, in which Laybourne stuffed feather fragments from a homicide investigation in Florida, circa 1975. Fifty years later, the envelope—and the feather fragments sent for identification—are stored in Laybourne’s archives, which I discovered when they spilled onto my lap. Thankfully, the accompanying paperwork indicates that the feathers came from chickens and were not tied to the suspect.  

Whooping Crane Skin 

In the 1960s, Laybourne, who spent the early part of her career working as a taxidermist, began hosting a weekly bird-skinning class at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, teaching students how to prepare specimens for research collections. It was open to the public, and hundreds, possibly thousands, of students passed through over the decades. Among her first students was an affable teenager named Dan Tallman, who forged a lifelong bond with Laybourne and went on to become an ornithologist and professor of biology. Tallman fondly recalled the evening Laybourne asked him to prepare this embryonic Whooping Crane, recovered from an unviable egg at a zoo. The bird was as delicate as it was rare, and Tallman later joked that it was the only time he recalled sensing that Roxie was nervous about his skills. It turned out beautifully and remains a valuable research specimen in the museum’s collection. “The pinnacle of my skinning career,” Tallman said. 

Astronaut Memo 

Laybourne identified the remains of well over 10,000 airplane-struck birds during her career. Most of these bird strikes didn’t cause significant damage to airplanes, but a handful turned into horrific and historic affairs, including one that occurred on Halloween 1964. That morning, NASA astronaut Theodore Freeman was completing a training flight near Houston when his jet hit a flock of birds at an altitude of approximately 2,000 feet. The windscreen shattered, the engine faltered, and Freeman ejected too late, suffering fatal injuries. With the space race in full swing, the accident and investigation were of national interest, and Laybourne, as noted in this memo, was instrumental in confirming that Freeman hit a flock of Snow Geese.

Snowpiercer Book 

Perched on a shelf in the Smithsonian Feather Identification Laboratory is a sleek coffee table book about the making of Snowpiercer, the 2013 post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick set on an enormous train. Directed by Bong Joon Ho and starring Tilda Swinton, the film earned critical acclaim and a cult following. But what does it have to do with birds or Laybourne? It turns out that costume designer Catherine George drew inspiration from Laybourne’s looks when dressing Swinton’s character: the train’s maniacal lieutenant, Minister Mason. According to the book, Bong and George were enamored with the iconic picture of Laybourne surrounded by hundreds of specimens in the museum’s bird collection (which also appears on my book’s cover), and Swinton embraced the sartorial concept. “[That] image was so important for Mason’s look,” George said.

Access to scope, specimens, and book courtesy of the Division of Birds at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The Feather Detective, by Chris Sweeney, 320 pages, $30. Available here from Simon & Schuster.