The Science of Birds - Solving Bird Mysteries with Forensic Ornithology

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

This episode is all about forensic ornithology. This is a field where specialists use scientific techniques to identify bird species from trace evidence. Evidence like maybe a bit of feather, a bone fragment, or a smear of blood. Forensic ornithology is used to solve intriguing wildlife crimes like smuggling and illegal hunting. But it’s also helpful in other situations that don’t involve criminal activity. We’ll get into that side of things too.Like a murder mystery novel, today’s subject is, pretty much by definition, morbid. I’ll be talking a lot about dead birds. Blood and guts and all that. I prefer my birds very much alive, thank you, and I’m sure you do too. But, despite the gore, I think you’ll find that forensic ornithology is a fascinating topic. It’s worth learning about, to better appreciate the ways people fight to protect birds.~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Links of InterestChuparosa articleThe Remarkable Life of Roxie LaybourneUS Fish and Wildlife Forensics LabForensic Ornithologist: Pepper TrailForensic Ornithologist: Ariel M. GaffneyPodcast Episode: Ariel Gaffney, "Bird Crime Fighter"The Feather AtlasFeather Identification Lab at Smithsonian[VIDEO] It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's SNARGE!Errors and Corrections10:32 - I said " Law enforcement offers..." when I meant "officers."32:55 - I said "Yellow-billed Cockatoos," when I meant Yellow-crested CockatoosLink to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteSupport the show

People transport illegal substances and items back and forth across the border between the U.S. and Mexico all the time. Drugs, guns, all sorts of fun stuff. We're all painfully aware of this problem. It's old news. But a few years ago, federal agents in the U.S. began to bust people who were smuggling a new and bizarre product brought over from Mexico. That product is dead hummingbirds, not just one or two dead birds here and there, but often dozens of them at a time. Each of the tiny hummingbirds is dried and bundled up, specially prepared and individually packaged. Often the hummingbird will be rolled in red paper or cinched up in a drawstring bag. There may also be colorful satin tassels involved. These strange

morbid trinkets are known as chuparosa. One word for hummingbird in Mexican Spanish is Chuporosa. Translated literally, it means rose sucker. Indigenous people in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America have revered hummingbirds for millennia. The mythologies of the Aztecs and Inca include stories about hummingbirds, which were said to have magical powers. And I certainly can't blame the Aztecs or other pre-industrial peoples for thinking hummingbirds are something extra special. They're amazing. They're captivating creatures. But some people today still think these birds are magical, not just figuratively, but literally magical. You see, those chuparosa's are peddled as love charms. A desperate or lonely person might buy a dead hummingbird in an effort to attract

a new lover, or keep the one they have. Many chuparoses are packaged with a little prayer printed in Spanish. One version reads, Divine hummingbird with your holy power, I ask that you enrich my life and love so that my lover will want only me. And you know, this is strikingly similar to what I say to the Rufus hummingbird that visits my backyard feeder in the summer. I often say to him, divine hummingbird with your godlike powers, I beg you to smite my enemies, of which there are many, and I ask that you grant me eternal youth. Oh, and if it's not too much to ask, could you buy me a PlayStation 5? But you see, I don't really expect anything to happen. I'm just joking around with my backyard hummingbird. He gets it. He knows there's no such thing as magic. Sadly, people who buy

Chuparosa trinkets apparently believe in witchcraft or whatever you want to call it. Their superstition fuels the black market for dead hummingbirds. Special agents in the U.S. and Mexican governments have been trying to track down the sources of chuporosas, and they're trying to figure out which hummingbird species are being killed to make these cruel and highly illegal products. The case of the chuporosas is just one of many bird mysteries being investigated by scientists in the special field of forensic ornithology. Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted,

guided exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is number 45, is all about forensic ornithology. This is a field where specialists use scientific techniques to identify bird species from trace evidence. Evidence like maybe a bit of feather, a bone fragment, or a smear of blood. Forensic ornithology is used to solve intriguing wildlife crimes, like smuggling and illegal hunting. But it's also helpful in other situations that don't involve criminal activity. We'll get into that side of things, too.

Like a murder mystery novel, today's subject is, pretty much by definition, morbid. I'll be talking a lot about dead birds, blood and guts and all of that. I prefer my birds very much alive, thank you, and I'm sure you do too. But despite the gore, I think you'll find. that forensic ornithology is a fascinating topic. It's worth learning about to better appreciate the ways people fight to protect birds. Let's dig into it, shall we? In general, you can think of forensics as the use of scientific techniques to solve legal problems. Most often, this involves the analysis of some physical evidence from a crime scene or wherever.

Ideally, results from a forensic analysis are meant to hold up in a court of law. You've probably seen this sort of thing on TV. By my count, there are currently about 72,000 shows about police procedures and crime investigations. Maybe you've watched CSI, Law & Order, or Dexter. Some of these shows are focused heavily on forensics. For example, one of the main characters of the original CSI series was Dr. Gil Grissom, a forensic entomologist. I have to admit, however, I've never actually watched CSI.

If only Gil Grissom had been a forensic ornithologist instead, that would have been way sexier. I would have been a big fan. The field of forensic ornithology in real life, was pioneered in the 1960s by a woman named Roxy Leiborne. She worked at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Her job there was to apply her taxidermy skills to prepare bird specimens for the museum's collection.

Then there was the horrific crash of Flight 375 in 1960. The plane smashed into Boston Harbor moments after takeoff, killing 62 of the 72 people on board. Investigators eventually figured out that the plane had run into a flock of European starlings, sternus vulgaris. The poor little birds had been sucked into several of the plane's engines, and down it went. Soon thereafter, the Federal Avian Administration, sorry, sorry, I mean the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, assigned Roxy-Laborne with an important task. She was to develop methods of identifying birds involved in airplane strikes.

And so it was that forensic ornithology was born. Roxy Laybourne was super cool. I'll link to an article about her in the show notes. A forensic ornithologist is sort of a middleman. Physical evidence gets dropped on their desk, they analyze it, and then they share their results. They aren't usually the ones collecting the evidence in the field, and they certainly aren't the ones busting the criminals

or making a case in court. The primary task of the forensic ornithologist is to identify bird species from the evidence they're given. If they can't get it down to species, they will try to narrow it down at least to family or just to order if that's the best they can do. In a moment, I'll go over the main types of evidence

and analyses used in this process. After the forensic ornithologist submits their findings on bird ID, they probably just open up the latest package of evidence on their desk and move on to the next case. That said, they might occasionally get the additional excitement of being called to testify in court. Yes, my forensic analysis confirmed that the feather at the crime scene belonged to a limpkin. A pumpkin? Are you suggesting to us, doctor, that pumpkins have, feathers? I'll remind you, you are under oath here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, your not a pumpkin, arimus guarana. It's a species of neotropical bird. It looks sort of like a

crane or heron, but it belongs to its own biological family. Never heard of it. Overruled. Order in the court. Admittedly, I have no idea how courtroom procedure works. Anyway, in recent decades, another name has come to be strongly associated with the field of forensic ornithology. That name is Pepper Trail. No, I'm not referring to some kind of spicy footpath or a trade route like the Silk Road. Pepper Trail is the actual name of a human being. Dr. Pepper Trail. He got his Ph. He got his Ph.D. from Cornell University. For over 20 years, Dr. Trail had the title of Forensic ornithologist at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory in Beautiful Ashland, Oregon. He worked on thousands of cases during his career. He analyzed evidence

from entire corpses, as well as from feathers, bones, and other body parts to identify over 800 bird species. Dr. Trail will pop up here and there later in the episode. He recently retired, and his successor at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory is Ariel M. Gaffney. She has a master's degree, and like her intellectual predecessor, Roxy Laybourne, Ariel got her start by preparing bird specimens for a museum. Then Ariel met Pepper Trail at a scientific conference, and the rest is history. Here's a quote from Ariel Gaffney. Quote, There are biologists who work on the study of wildlife and their habitats. There are law enforcement offers that investigate crimes, and my position as a forensic ornithologist allows me to

bridge the gap between both worlds. End quote. If you'd like to listen to an interview with Ariel Gaffney, I'll put a link in the show notes to an episode of a podcast produced by my fellow Oregonians, Hannah and Eric. Besides the lab in Ashland, Oregon, there's another place where forensic ornithology is used daily. It's the Smithsonian Institution's Featherer. identification lab in Washington, D.C. The program manager at the feather identification lab is Dr. Carla Dove. She's a specialist in using microscopic feather structure to ID birds. Carla has been carrying on the important work begun by Roxy-Laborne about 60 years ago.

The team at the feather identification lab processes over 8,000 cases a year. Many of these have to do with bird strikes, situations where an unfortunate bird or a flock of birds smashed into an unfortunate plane. Wait, wait, wait, what? Her name is Carla Dove? As in Dove, the bird? How fantastic is that? You know, this sort of thing makes me want to believe in the idea that some people choose jobs based on their names. The technical name for this is nominative determinism. You know, like Usain Bolt, the world's greatest professional sprinter. Did Usain Bolt choose? Did Usain Bolt choose? his sport based on his last name? And while we're at it, what about Pepper Trail? That's a cool

name too. Maybe not an example of nominative determinism, but cool nonetheless. If I could choose my own fitting bird-related name, maybe I'd go with something like Ivan Brush Turkey or Ivan Ferry Ren. I don't know. Anyway, there you go, kids. If you want to help birds and you love CSI, Scooby-Doo, or Sherlock Holmes, you too can become a forensic ornithologist, even if you don't have a last name like dove or trail or brush turkey. But I have to be honest with you, there probably aren't going to be many job openings out there, so I don't know. I guess just study hard and get good grades, follow your dreams, etc., etc. Also, I want to point out how this highly specialized field was pioneered by a woman during a time when science was dominated by white males. And the most

prominent forensic ornithologists working today are women, Ariel Gaffney and Carla Dove. Very cool. Let's have a look at the types of evidence used in forensic ornithology and the types of analysis. Feathers are probably the most common type of trace evidence used in this field. In many cases, an intact, undamaged feather can be matched to the correct species with relative ease. Flight and contour feathers often have patterns, colors, sizes, textures, and shapes that are unique to a species. An ornithologist will usually be able to determine the feather's position as well. for example whether it's a secondary feather from the wing versus an upper tail covered match enough of these features and you may find a match for your species

when a forensic ornithologist doesn't recognize a feather off the bat using only the extensive knowledge in their brain their next step is probably to use a reference collection these labs and museums have curated collections of individual feathers bird wings, or other bits and pieces, and entire specimens. An extensive reference collection will have multiple individuals of a species to account for natural variation. It may not be enough to have just one great blue heron specimen, for example. Better would be to have multiple individuals of both sexes and some juveniles and so on.

Ideally, anyway. The National Museum of Natural History, home of the Feather ID land, maintains one of the world's largest bird collections. It houses over 640,000 specimens. That's a wealth of useful reference material for when you're trying to nail down the species ID of a mystery bird. Pepper Trail created another valuable tool that serves as a reference collection for forensic work. He built an online database called the Feather Atlas. It contains high quality standardized digital images of bird feathers from 438 North American species. The feather atlas is really cool. It's fun to explore even for those of us who aren't

forensic ornithologists. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Now imagine you are a forensic ornithologist and the feather you receive as evidence isn't all pretty and intact. It's broken, dirty, and just a mess. In this situation, you may not be able to make a positive species ID using features like size, shape, pattern, and color. This is where it might make sense to bust out your microscope to look at the minute details on that scrap of feather. I talked about feather anatomy in episode 13 of the Science of Birds podcast.

If you listen to that, you might remember the word plumulaceous. It's a delicious mouthful of a word. isn't it? Plumelacious. I feel compelled to say it with a bad southern accent for some reason. Well, a plumelacious feather, or the plumelacious part of a feather, is fluffy. Think of down feathers. Or maybe you've noticed that some feathers have a relatively stiff part near the tip, but they're soft and fluffy near the base. That's the case with contour feathers, usually. The long, fuzzy barbs on a plumelaceous feather don't interlock. They drift free, to blow around seductively in the wind. And why am I overusing the word plumelacious and telling you all this? Because, at the microscopic

level, there's something very important these feathers can reveal to us. Attached to each barb are many tiny barbules, and each hair-like barbule has regularly spaced tiny bumps on it. These bumps are called nodes. Looking at these nodes in the microscope, ornithologists have figured out that their shapes are often unique to a group of birds. Many biological orders of birds have nodes of a particular diagnostic shape. For example, the nodes on the plumulaceous feathers of owls are cup-shaped. Owls are in the order stridiformies. Members of the order occipitryformies, hawks and eagles and the like, those guys have spines on their nodes. Passerines have their own node shape, and so do ducks, and so on.

It gets more complicated than this, as these things so often do, because, for example, node shape varies from one part of a feather to another. In any case, all of these details can be helpful for finding a species match, from the macroscopic features of a feather like size and shape, down to the shape and distribution of microscopic structures like nodes. As I mentioned, Dr. Carla Dove is an expert in all of those microscopic feather bits. As just one example, she published a paper back in 1997 in the journal The Condor. Here's the paper's title.

Quantification of microscopic feather characters used in the identification of North American plovers. Pretty cool, right? So if you're having a hard time with your plover ID, if you can't tell a piping plover from a snowy plover, try leaving your binoculars home next time you go birding on the beach. You can chase those little plovers around with your microscope instead. Feathers represent one aspect of what we call morphology. Morphology is the form of an organism. It's what we as humans look to naturally to.

tell one critter apart from another. It's not that common for a forensic ornithologist to get an entire bird specimen as evidence in a case. That would be just too easy, right? Instead, forensic ornithologists get paid the big bucks because their specialized knowledge of morphology allows them to ID birds from things like bones, claws, beaks, skin, and, of course, feathers. For example, woodpeckers have a distinctly shaped piga style. This is the name for the triangular bone formed by the fused tail vertebrae. It supports the tail feathers. Most woodpeckers use their tail feathers as a prop to brace themselves against tree trunks.

So that's why they have this special piga style. If someone yelled, Hey, think fast! Then hurled a piga style at your face, would you know that the bone belonged to a woodpecker? I'm guessing no. But a forensic ornithologist might have better luck. As specialists, these scientists have a deep understanding of how birds in general are put together.

And they understand the evolutionary context of the variation we see among birds in terms of their morphology, from one species to another, one family to another, and one order to another. It's also important for a forensic ornithologist to know which species or groups of birds are related to which. All of that is the evolutionary context. If you've watched any of those detective or crime scene shows, you know that genetic evidence from DNA comes into play a lot these days when it comes to forensics. My background is in genetics and all that jazz, so my knee-jerk response is to think that DNA can solve every bird mystery,

and it's the holy grail of all evidence. And I don't think I'm entirely wrong for thinking that way. But knowledge of morphology is super valuable. My understanding is that, more often than not, morphological analysis alone is enough to figure out a bird species ID, as long as the evidence itself is actually morphological. But sometimes the forensic ornithologist on a case is handed a Ziploc bag or test tube containing a clump of blood, gristle, and or pulverized guts.

The technical word for this disgusting melange is snarge. That's right, snarge. I know I joke around here from time to time, but I'm not joking now. Snarge is what you call the remains of a bird that seems to have been run through a blender. That's not far off from reality because snarge is often the end product of a bird strike. A bird hitting an airplane or being sucked into a turbine engine might leave behind only a splatter of muscle, feathers, and blood. And I don't care if you have three PhDs in ornithology, you probably aren't going to be able to draw upon your knowledge of morphology to ID a bird from a gooey pile of snarge. DNA to the rescue!

As long as the snarge sample isn't too degraded, it should be possible to extract and amplify some DNA from it, using PCR. This is another tool in the toolbox of the forensic ornithologist. With the right DNA sequence in hand, the next step is to compare the sequence from the sample to a reference library of similar sequences from other birds. The best library of this nature is the Barcode of Life database. You submit your sequence, wait patiently while the computer works its magic, and see if the analysis spits out any matches to a bird species in the database. This is the method called DNA barcoding. And you can probably see the parallel here to using a reference collection of dead birds in a museum.

Genetic analysis and morphological analysis complement each other. It's not that one is always better than the other. It might be cheaper and faster to use morphology alone, but DNA can sometimes reveal secrets that no other approach can. The last type of forensic analysis I want to talk about is stable isotopes. Remember from your third grade chemistry class that isotopes are different forms of an element. The isotopes of nitrogen, for example, are atoms that all have seven protons in their nucleus, but they differ in the number of neutrons they have.

And that's all the time and enthusiasm I have for explaining what an isotope is. There's a reason this podcast isn't called the Chemistry of Birds. For now, just think of stable isotopes as distinct chemical traces or flavors. They're stable because they aren't radioactive. These stable isotopes get incorporated into the bodies of organisms, based on what those organisms are absorbing from their environment. Isotopes in the bodies of animals come from what they eat. Scientists can then detect isotopes by analyzing the tissue samples from animals.

Here's the really cool thing. There are strong, consistent geographic patterns across each continent in the stable isotopes found in the environment. For example, we find certain isotopes of the element hydrogen in the Arctic of North America, and others down at the more tropical latitudes. Different places on the continent have different chemical traces. I know it would be more correct to say there's a geographic gradient in the ratio of a couple hydrogen isotopes, but that, not to mention the explanation for what causes this pattern,

is TMI for today. It's too much. What's important to understand is that if you have a bird feather, you can run a stable isotope analysis on it to determine where it most likely came from. Where it came from, geographically. This is awesome. Morphology and genetic data may not be able to provide that kind of information. I should point out that using isotopes to determine a bird's geographic origin isn't super precise. It's not like this method will spit out some GPS coordinates for a single point on the map. It's not, oh look, the analysis says our bird came from a golf course in Winnipeg, Canada.

Instead, isotopes tell us where birds came from at a broad geographic scale. Still, this can be powerful stuff. Not only have stable isotopes been a useful tool for studying things like bird migration, they can be great for solving legal cases involving birds. Isotope analysis can be used to combat the illegal transport and sale of wild birds. The diets of captive birds often have different isotope signatures than those of wild birds. Those signatures end up being recorded in the bird's feathers. A forensic ornithologist can use this fact to their advantage.

Here's an example. There was a study on cockatoos published in 2019 in the journal Animal Conservation. The researchers were from several universities in China and the study focused on birds in Hong Kong. The species was the yellow-crested cockatoo, Kakatua Sulphuria, its native to Sulawesi and nearby islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Unfortunately, this bird is critically endangered. The global population for the yellow-crested cockatoo in the wild is estimated at between only one and 2,000 birds.

One of the primary causes of the decline of this cockatoo is, not surprisingly, habitat destruction. But perhaps even more devastating to the species has been trapping for the pet trade. A few decades ago, over 100,000 wild yellow-crested cockatoos were captured and sold as pets. Since 2005, however, it has been illegal to capture or sell wild-born yellow-crested cockatoos under the CITES Treaty. That's C-I-T-E-S. It stands for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Sucing. species of wild fauna and flora, cites. But it's still okay to import and sell these birds if they were born in captivity. Problem is, if you're buying one of these birds, how do you know it wasn't

captured in the wild, illegally? This can be tricky. The researchers in this 2019 Hong Kong study made the observation that there was a discrepancy between, A, how many yellow-crested cockatoos had been legally imported into the city, and B, how many were being offered for sale in the local markets. It seemed likely that a bunch of the cockatoos in the markets were illegal. There were too many cockatoos. Trafficking of cockatoos and other exotic birds is an enormous problem. Just a few years before this study, a smuggler was caught in Indonesia with 21 live yellow-crested cockatoos stuffed in his luggage. The poor little birds were individually stuffed in to plastic water bottles. Birds like this can be sold for $500 or more in the illegal pet trade.

The scientists in Hong Kong wanted to develop a forensic method for determining whether or not a cockatoo came from the wild. They turned to stable isotope analysis. They figured out that because wild and captive birds have different diets, their feathers have significantly different stable isotope signatures. So if there's a legal question, about whether or not one of these cockatoos is wild, it's now possible to bust out some high-tech forensic ornithology and use isotopes to settle the case, at least potentially. This study concluded with the researchers simply explaining the effectiveness of their isotope method. It's not like they went on to tell how they scrambled out of the lab, hit the streets,

and chased down a bunch of low-life, greasy cockatoo smugglers. That would have been cool, though. I can imagine the scientists wearing dark sunglasses and black leather jackets. A loud rock and roll soundtrack is playing while the researchers run through a crowded Hong Kong market. They catch up to the fleeing bird smuggler and tackle him to the ground with some sweet martial arts moves. The scientists slap some handcuffs on the dirt bag and the crowd cheers. But, of course, I have a feeling that isn't how this all works in reality.

In any case, I really hope that this new forensic tool will help in the fight to save the yellow-crested cockatoo. You know, it's been a while since I did one of these mid-episode interruption promo things. So I want to take a moment here to tell you about some special artwork for sale in the Science of Birds Online Shop. As I've mentioned, I've teamed up with an artist from Tasmania, Australia, named Craig Williams. Craig is a cool dude and his bird paintings are gorgeous. He's been creating a one-of-a-kind painting exclusively for

each Science of Birds podcast episode for the last few months. He and I talk about the various bird species I'll be featuring in my episode, then we agree on the bird that Craig will paint. What species do you think he painted for this episode on forensic ornithology? If you guessed yellow-crested cockatoo, you are correct. I posted the paintings to Instagram, so please follow me there if you don't already. My Instagram handle is Science of Birds, all one word, of course. Also, each of these original paintings is for sale in the Science of Birds' shop. They're not necessarily cheap because, you know, they're original paintings by a talented artist. I can tell you from personal experience, the artwork is top-notch.

I bought one of Craig's paintings a while back of a brown falcon, and I absolutely love it. And get this, we donate 50% of each sale to BirdLife International to support bird conservation around the world. So there are lots of reasons to feel good about buying one of these paintings. You get a lovely piece of art, you support an independent artist, and you help to protect wild birds. We've sold a couple of these pieces already. As of right now, you can still go to the shop to buy paintings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Kurtland's Warbler, and the Scarlet Tanager. The yellow-crested cockatoo will be available soon if it isn't already.

And here is where I'm tempted to say, collect them all kids but seriously check out the paintings at scienceofbirds.com forward slash shop that's hard to say forward slash shop all right let's get back to talking about forensic ornithology I want to talk a bit more about real world applications of forensic ornithology first is the problem of wildlife trafficking this is an enormous subject and certainly deserves an entire podcast episode. The illegal trade in live birds, dead birds, and bird parts is a multi-billion dollar business, unfortunately. I talked at length about yellow-billed cockatoos. That's just one example among thousands. Parrots and hornbills and many other types of birds

are smuggled around the world. The tools and methods of forensic ornithology can be incredibly useful when it comes to fighting against bird trafficking. Let us return to the case of the Chuparos, the hummingbird love charms we started off with today. The flow of illegal dead hummingbirds northward across the border seems to be increasing. This may reflect a growing market for Chuporosa in both Mexico and the U.S. Is it possible that more and more people would rather turn to superstition and prey to dead birds when it comes to finding love, rather than just go out there and, I don't know, be a good person, maybe socialize, use dating apps and whatnot? How about anything that doesn't involve murdering animals? Sorry, I just don't have a lot of sympathy for people

who are willing to kill birds for stuff like this. Anyway, like most other birds, hummers are protected by multiple layers of laws, both internationally and in the US. There's CITES, which I mentioned earlier. There's also the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes the killing, trapping, and selling of birds illegal in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. On top of all that, there's the Lacey Act, which protects birds and other wildlife, and plants from illegal trafficking. And individual states often have their own laws against wildlife and bird trafficking. So yeah, chuparosa's are illegal on so many levels. Based on the numbers I've seen, federal agents in the field have confiscated nearly a thousand chuporosa specimens in the U.S.

It's probably more now. And most of them have ended up on the desk of Pepper Trail at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory in Oregon. These days, Ariel Gaffney would be the one receiving them. Dr. Traill's analyses found that some of the hummingbirds appear to have been killed by shotgun blast. Others were likely squeezed to death. It's almost certain that all of them had been wild birds. From those hundreds of specimens, Dr. Trail could identify about 20 hummingbird species, species like the black-chinned hummingbird, Rufus hummingbird, and amethyst-throated hummingbird. Identifying the species may help determine the sources of the chuporosa being smuggled. And species ID

also gives us a sense of which endangered or threatened hummingbirds are being killed for this illegal market. Unfortunately, the case of the chuporosa's isn't closed, and the story is far from over. Besides illegal trafficking, there are other crimes against birds that fall within the scope of forensic ornithology. There's poaching, for instance, aka illegal hunting and trapping, and there's illegal poisoning, too. One case that Pepper Trail worked on involved a restaurant in New England. Federal agents got wind that this restaurant had American woodcock on the menu. This species, Scolopax Minor, can be hunted legally for personal consumption. But you can't sell American woodcock meat commercially. That is illegal. The agents went undercover and ordered some

woodcock from the menu. To confirm the species ID, they sent breast meat and bones back to Pepper Trail. Forensic ornithology happened, and Dr. Trail confirmed that, yes, the restaurant was selling illegal American woodcock. That was the green light for the agents to swoop in and raid the restaurant. I really hope they were wearing dark sunglasses and leather jackets. In any case, they confiscated all the remaining dead woodcocks from the restaurant's freezer. So we have these criminal activities involving birds, including trafficking, both live and dead birds, poaching, illegal trapping, illegal sale, and poisoning. But there are also non-criminal applications of forensic ornithology. Let's shift gears a bit now to talk about them.

This field got its start with Roxy-Laborne identifying birds involved in collisions with airplanes. Sixty years later, this is still one of the biggest applications of forensic ornithology. In 2019 alone, the FAA recorded over 17,000 bird strikes in the U.S. Many more probably go unreported. Most of the feather and snarge samples get sent to Carla Dove and her team at the Feather Identification Lab. It's important to identify the birds involved in these strikes because that knowledge may be helpful in preventing future accidents. The number of bird strikes that cause harm to humans these days is vanishingly small, compared to how many birds are being hit by planes. Even so, airports,

airlines, and the government all need to stay vigilant to keep flying a safe mode of travel. And, you know, maybe kill fewer birds? One of the most famous bird strike examples comes from U.S. Airways Flight 1549. In 2009, the plane left LaGuardia Airport in New York, and minutes later, it smashed into a flock of Canada geese. The engines lost power. The pilot, Chesley-Sullenberger, better known as Sully, made the quick and difficult decision to land the plane on the Hudson River. Amazingly, no nobody died. Captain Sully and his crew were heroes, and there was even a movie about the event. Sully was played by none other than America's favorite movie star, Tom Hanks. Some forensic ornithology

came into play in the investigation. I don't think there was much question about the goose species ID, but Dr. Peter Mara at the Smithsonian's Migratory Bird Center wanted to figure out whether the geese were resident birds that live near the airport, or were they a flock of migrants. Dr. Mara had feather and snarge samples from the geese that hit Flight 1549. He contacted the Field Museum in Chicago, which he knew has an extensive collection of Canada goose specimens from across North America. DNA and stable isotopes to the rescue! First off, DNA and genetic analysis by Dr. Mara and his colleagues,

confirmed that, yes, indeed, the plane had hit a bunch of Canada geese. Then, by comparing the stable isotope signatures in the sully feathers to feathers from geese across the continent, they figured out that the unfortunate bird strike geese were migrants, just drifters passing through. Their isotopes matched those in feathers from geese way up north in Labrador, Canada. Here's a quote from the scientific papers abstract. quote, determining whether the geese involved in this bird strike event were resident or migratory is essential to the development of management techniques that could reduce the risk of future

collisions, end quote. Migratory geese might be more naive about the airport and about the local flow of airplane traffic. Resident birds, on the other hand, might be more hip to what's going on, more savvy. Maybe they're less likely to get in the way of an oncoming plane. There are many ways that forensic ornithology methods can be applied to solve bird mysteries in the context of conservation and basic research in bird ecology. Forensics have been used to identify bird species in the guts of dead Burmese pythons, for example.

Those snakes are invasive in the Everglades in Florida. They're an enormous problem. Officials at Everglades National Park have asked Carla Dove and her lab to help ID bird species that the invasive snakes are snacking on. So this is a conservation application. Another example involves the one and only pepper trail, the man the legend. At his lab, he analyzed over 2,000 dead birds that had been pulled out of various oil pits located around the U.S.

These are holes dug at oil and gas drilling sites to store oil and drilling fluids. The open pits are hazardous traps for birds and other animals. The dead birds sent to Dr. Trail were saturated in oil, and a lot of work had to be done to clean them up before identification. To the non-ph forensic ornithologist, these oil-covered carcasses would be unidentifiable in terms of species. Dr. Trail published a paper summarizing his findings regarding. the nightmare of oil pits. All of those 2,000-plus samples represented 172 bird species from 44 families. More than half of the birds killed in oil pits were ground-feeding species.

You've probably noticed the pattern here where I keep bringing up Pepper Trail and Carla Dove. There are very few people out there working as professional forensic ornithologists. And these two scientists are good at what they do and they've been prolific in their careers. As for using forensics in basic ecology studies, we could probably find many examples to talk about. Since time and your attention span are limited resources, however, I'll just mention one study. It was published in 2015 in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. This paper describes the first ever evidence of a snowy owl eating a razor bill. What's a razor bill, you might ask? It's an awesome little seabird in the family Alcadie, a cousin to the more familiar puffins. Razor Bills breed

on rocky coasts in the North Atlantic. In this study, the researchers examined the stomach contents of a snowy owl found dead at an airport in New York, but I don't think it was involved with an airplane collision or anything. In any case, the trace evidence in the owl's gut included some small feathers and bones. The researchers went to work and did all the things. They cleaned the samples and compared the feathers and bones to specimens in a museum reference collection. Importantly, it was microscopic details in some plumulaceous feather bits that gave the biggest clue. The researchers found that the node shape and pigmentation of the barbules matched those of birds in the family Alcidi, otherwise known as the Auk family, the family

of puffins and razorbills. One of the bone fragments was a furcula, a wishbone. That bone was what finally allowed the researchers to narrow it down even further, to conclude that the snowy owl had eaten a razor bill. This was the first documentation of that ever happening, which is super cool. And just who was the lead author in this study? I'll give you two guesses. There aren't that many possibilities, right? It was Carla Dove, of course. A final application of forensic ornithology that's worth mentioning is in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. Forensic ornithologists have sometimes been tasked with identifying the feathers used

to create artifacts like beautiful Native American headdresses or ceremonial items. One really cool example comes from a study of a 10th century Viking grave excavated in northern Norway. Besides a boat and an iron axe, archaeologists found a feather-stuffed pillow in the grave. I think it was underneath the head of the dead Viking. Even though the pillow was over a thousand years old, many of the feathers were in reasonably good shape.

Now, I'm not going to beat around the bush this time. This Viking grave study is another Carla Dove joint, as in she was the lead author and the work was carried out at the feather identification lab. What she and her colleagues found was that the Viking pillow feathers came from birds belonging to three orders. One, and Sarah Formes, which is the order of ducks and their cousins. Two, Suliformis, the order of cormorants, boobies and such. And three, caradreiformes, to which belong the gulls, shorebirds, and a bunch of others.

Microscopic feather analysis and comparison to the old reference collection at the museum allowed Dr. Dove to conclude that one of the bird species was definitely a great cormorant, phallicro-corax carbo. Another was an unidentified gull species, and another was probably a species of Ider, which is a sea duck. I've talked about Iderdown before, and how Nordic people have used these feathers for centuries because they make a superb and soft insulation. Nine out of ten lifeless Vikings recommend eider-down pillows for a restful and eternal slumber. With their fluffy grave pillows, those guys sleep like the dead.

I promised that I wasn't trying to find only examples of Carla Dove and Pepper Trail studies and cases. They just popped up organically as I was researching this episode in my various Google and literature searches. It just happened. Anyway, it's heartbreaking and infuriating to me to know that people are out there killing or capturing wild birds illegally for money, for superstition, or for any reason at all, really. But it's good to know there are also law enforcement agents and brilliant scientists out there working hard to identify bird species, to solve bird mysteries, and to help bring those criminals to justice. Hey, thanks for being here and listening to the episode. My intention was to keep it to about 30 minutes, but forensic ornithology is just so cool.

I kept finding more things I felt I just had to talk about. You've listened to the whole thing, and I really hope you enjoyed it. The Science of Birds podcast continues to exist in large part because of the generosity of my supporters on Patreon. Thank you guys so, so much. I want to welcome my newest patrons, Jennifer Kay, Ben Lane, May, Jai Siva, Jeff Davis, and Jim Carlton. I'm thrilled to have you guys in my Patreon community, and I want to thank you for signing up to help make this podcast possible. If you, dear listener, are not already a patron, and you've got a few extra bucks or pounds or loonies laying around, lying around, laying, I think it's lying, lying, lying.

In any case, I invite you to consider supporting this podcast. Just check out my Patreon page over at patreon.com forward slash science of birds. You can always shoot me an email if you have something you'd like to share with me. A comment about the show, a witty limerick, or perhaps what bird-related name you would choose for yourself. Maybe Sally Steamer Duck, or how about Reginald Flycatcher? I don't know, you're supposed to tell me. Anyway, my email address is Ivan at scienceofbirds.com. You can check out the show notes for this episode, which is number 45, on the Science

of Birds website, scienceofbirds.com. I'm Ivan Brush Turkey, and I wish you a super day. Cheers.