Feathers can turn up in the unlikeliest of places: the nostrils of a murder victim, the engines of a crashed airliner, the drying machine lint trap of a former KKK Grand Dragon who tarred and feathered a Civil Rights activist. These are just some of the cases that the world’s first forensic ornithologist, Roxie Laybourne, encountered during her storied and at times tumultuous career within the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Using nothing but her microscope and the museum’s massive collection of birds, Roxie pioneered methods for turning shredded fragments of feathers into accurate species identifications. Chris Sweeney, author of The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, unearths the history of this unusual and utterly consequential field of science and tell the story of the enigmatic woman who pioneered it.
Book sale and signing to follow.
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Chris Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and author of The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne. His writing has appeared in Audubon, The Guardian, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Wired, among many others. Over the years he has reported on everything from the mysterious death of a Golden Eagle to the cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping to a family’s fight against an ultra-rare disease. He currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and two young daughters.