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You wouldn’t know it, looking at the tiny elderly woman in the white lab coat bent over a table in a halogen-lit government office, you wouldn’t know she had spent her youth doing science with her whole body: extracting herself from a deadly mudflat with stubbornness and applied physics; narrowly escaping permanent tendon damage after severe sunburn on the tops of her feet during a daylong barefoot tide pool expedition; managing to return ashore by manually rigging a rudder after her boat’s steering apparatus had broken and left her stranded in the open ocean; surviving blood poisoning in the pre-penicillin era after handling snails with bare blistered hands.
Trained as a mathematician and a plant ecologist at a time when seven percent of women attained a university education, Roxie Laybourne (September 15, 1910–August 7, 2003) had done her graduate thesis on moss — that splendid training ground for scaling attention. Struggling to find a job, she spent a decade working at the taxidermy and exhibition departments of museums. Eventually, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service — which also employed Rachel Carson — hired her at the small laboratory the agency ran at the National Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds, expecting her to do little more than steward the existing bird collection.
Instead, she went on to pioneer forensic ornithology.
With nothing more than a microscope and a mind, Roxie Laybourne developed a revolutionary method of identifying birds by the shapes and patterns of particular microstructures in their feathers known as barbules — a technique she would apply to help federal agents solve murders, conservationists bring poachers to justice, and airlines dramatically lower the incidence of bird-induced plane crashes.
In The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne (public library), Chris Sweeney writes:
Nothing on earth compares to feathers, in form or function. They are a remarkable output of millions of years of evolution, first originating in dinosaurs and slowly morphing into a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and textures. Made of beta-keratin, the same rigid protein that forms reptiles’ scales, feathers are light and soft, yet strong enough to withstand the punishing forces of high-speed aerial acrobatics and long-distance journeys over harrowing landscapes and through treacherous conditions.
[…]
For all the variation in how they look and what they do, most feathers follow a similar structural blueprint. There is a central shaft, the lower tip of which is called the calamus or quill and the upper portion of which is called the rachis. Branching off the central shaft are the barbs — there are pennaceous barbs that are bladelike and plumulaceous barbs that are soft and fluffy and tend to be clustered near the base of the feather. Branching off the barbs are tiny microstructures invisible to the naked eye called barbules.
Delicate and invisible to the naked eye, barbules need to be both clean and undamaged for their shape and pattern to be revealed under a microscope — a difficult task given dead birds are often covered in dirt, debris, and decaying matter, and cleaning agents powerful enough to remove these are too harsh to preserve the barbules. Part of the loveliness and defiant originality of Laybourne’s work is that she saw science not as a sterile endeavor separate from daily life but as part and parcel of the same messy, gritty stuff that is the raw material of living. Sweeney describes how she approached the challenge of cleaning the fine down she wanted to study, which she did with equal parts diligence and delight:
The trial-and-error process of finding the right soap stressed out Roxie. She worried that liquid detergents and dish soaps could leave behind residues that affected the microscopic barbules that she wanted to inspect. She settled on Ivory Snow powdered soap, mixed in a beaker of warm water. She’d drop the feather pieces into the sudsy bath and use forceps to whip up a small whirlpool. The feathers would bend and swirl, the barbs clumping together and forking apart. Stir too hard and the feather fragments twisted with one another — potentially bad news if the airlines only sent a little bit of material. Stir too gently, and the grime remained in the barbules. Depending on the condition and the size of the feather pieces, the water turned various shades of gray during the cleanse. Roxie would change it out several times as needed, until the fragments looked as if they had just been preened by their previous owner.
After they were sufficiently clean, they had to be dried in a manner that helped restore their natural fluff, another delicate process. On occasion, Roxie used the wall-mounted hand dryer in the women’s room. When the lab was outfitted with lines for compressed air, Roxie insisted that some feathers fluffed up better if she administered it in a musical rhythm rather than a steady, hissing stream. When dealing with doves, she preferred a cha-cha cha-cha-cha, cha-cha cha-cha-cha.
Washing and drying feathers is the type of tedious bench work that senior scientists often pawn off on lowly postdocs and grad students. Roxie found that she extracted enormous value from the almost ritualistic process of cleaning and re-fluffing the fragments, developing an intimate connection with the raw material of her new trade.
The key to all great science and all great art, the hallmark of the best experiences we can have, might be precisely this — the singing combination of ritual and rigor, applied with diligence and delight.
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