01-08-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Feather Detective' Review: Her Eye Was on the Sparrow
A group of ornithologists, all male save for one, were enjoying a mixed-seafood stew in a South Carolina Lowcountry restaurant when Roxie Laybourne lifted the bones from the bottom of her bowl and identified them, in her measured North Carolina drawl, as having come from a Lesser scaup. One of the other ornithologists at the table snorted derisively that no one could state, with that kind of confidence and from the evidence of a few bones, what diving duck was used for the broth. To which another dining companion responded by firmly cutting him off: 'If Roxie Laybourne says those bones are from a Lesser scaup, you'd best believe they are.' The story, told to me by John Trott, a natural-history educator and mutual friend, encapsulates the everyday dichotomy Laybourne endured: that of being a powerful authority in an unlikely package.
Laybourne was an expert in the field of forensic ornithology, a sort of avian CSI. She came to the field after Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, en route from Boston to Philadelphia, crashed into Boston Harbor on Oct. 4, 1960, killing 62 of the 72 people on board. Witnesses described seeing a flash of fire from one of the plane's engines before the aircraft abruptly lifted, then plunged vertically into the water.
In the aftermath, a flock of European starlings was found scattered across the end of the runway. The prevailing belief, held by the Federal Aviation Administration, was that bird strikes were rare and didn't warrant much concern. Only the windshield was at risk; the massive jet engines were thought to be capable of ingesting and processing birds with barely a shudder.
The FAA turned to Laybourne, a 50-year-old ornithologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., to investigate. 'The idea that a few hollow-boned birds could destroy a massive piece of machinery and kill scores of people in the process was terrifying,' writes Chris Sweeney in 'The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne.'
