It’s always fascinating to hear of a life spent in a niche, the kind of job or purpose that no guidance counselor would think to pass on to some wondering student. And it’s always a fun surprise to learn how such niche paths can ripple outward to far-removed places. There’s plenty of that in The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney.
Roxie was never content to sit quietly and do what was expected of her—not when there were so many other interesting things to do and see and learn. An interest in biology led her to one thing and another, and soon she was wading in marshes and studying specimens. A low-paid job at a museum in her native North Carolina set her on a path to be a skilled taxidermist, and that expertise landed her a temporary gig at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Despite the sort of rampant sexism you’d expect from a workplace in the 1940s. Still, she found some allies, and her work did most of the talking for her as she tried, and succeeded, to get a full-time job within the museum. Her expertise and ingenuity brought more opportunities, including being a key player in the quest to correctly identify the sex of endangered Whooping Cranes.
The work that brought the most attention, though, was her ability to identify bird species from carcasses retrieved from the plane crashes they caused. In the 1960s, a flourishing aviation industry was hindered by a string of crashes. Were the crashes simply mechanical, or could a little ol’ bird really take down a full-sized plane? Her work on those cases led to more investigations, including criminal and court cases. As an expert witness in a highly niche area, Roxie was tasked with identifying feathers for cases from murder to poaching, and had to learn how to communicate to juries and withstand tough questioning as she went. Like any tough old bird, Roxie kept working and learning decades after many in her age group had already retired. All she needed was an apprentice, or two or three, to carry on the work after she finally hung up her microscope.
Roxie’s career stretched across seven decades, spanning the time when there was just one “great war” to the age of social media. It’s exhausting to think of all the changes that happened in that time (and, I imagine, exhausting to live through them), but Roxie’s persistent curiosity seems like she found them exciting, too. Well into her eighties she was learning about DNA and thinking about how it could help with bird identification in some cases, freeing up time for laborious microscopic identification. Also in her late years, she encouraged, sometimes forcefully, up-and-coming female scientists to get the degrees and other bonafides that would give them legitimacy to their male peers until they could prove themselves through their work.
Roxie’s life is fascinating on its face, but Sweeney’s writing lets it shine with an effective choice of details and events to illustrate such an illustrious life. The hand of the author here is barely seen or felt in either the organization or prose, a nifty trick to pull off especially in a work of well-sourced nonfiction. Sweeney also deftly shows both Roxie’s brilliance and the difficult personality traits she could sometimes exhibit in a way that feels personal and personable rather than either valorized or luridly looking under rocks for flaws. Like many people with single-minded brilliance, Roxie could be as demanding of others as she was with herself. Her second child and less-disappointing second marriage came about by mostly happy accident, and while she loved her children it was also clear that she found a greater knack for being a mentor than a mother. Her contradictions could come in other flavors besides successes and struggles, such as how proper and quiet she could seem sometimes while racking up an impressive number of traffic violations in her sports cars.
Because all in all, Roxie was a person, a brilliant individual who had all-too-human flaws. Roxie worked hard because it interested her and she felt she could make a mite of difference, and the fact that she made a greater impact on the world was the icing on the cake. It’s fortunate that she saw some of the fruits of her labor in life, but the fact that we can now learn about her in retrospect is a welcome cementing of her legacy.
Ring Reads 