Feather Detective (2016)

Summary

Pepper Trail is the first to admit he has an unusual skill set. Give him a single feather or a small fragment of a claw or a cooked hunk of breast meat, and he’ll tell you the species of bird from which it came. As the world’s leading criminal forensic ornithologist, Trail is asked day in and day out to perform these exact tasks. Over the past 18 years he has assisted with hundreds of investigations, testified in federal court 15 times, and handled more bird carcasses than anyone should. “All birders have life lists,” Trail says. “I have a death list.” Trail isn’t joking. He opens a file on his computer and scrolls through a list of 750 species of dead birds he has identified throughout his career. The décor of his workspace at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, blends bird-nerd kitsch with macabre relics of closed cases. A “Waddling Penguin Pooper” wind-up toy sits on a bookshelf still in its original packaging. Atop a filing cabinet is a confiscated necklace made from the claws and skull of a cassowary. Nearby is a long, sleek feather ripped from an Andean Condor wing and attached to a pin that customs agents seized from a polka dancer coming into Chicago. “There’s actually a trade in condor feathers from Peru to Germany to decorate polka hats,” Trail says. If a Fish and Wildlife agent ends up working a case that involves any sort of bird part, there’s a good chance the evidence will land on Trail’s desk for inspection. Because not all birds are protected equally, his IDs play an important role in the legal process that helps agents and prosecutors determine what laws are being broken and what charges can be brought against the perpetrators. It should come as no surprise that ornithological forensics is an exceedingly obscure career path. The field didn’t even exist until the 1960s, when the late ornithologist Roxie Laybourne used feather fragments to determine that a flock of European Starlings had collided with an airplane an...