I don't want to have it haunting me a year from now. It was time to call in the world's premier feather expert, a tiny woman at the Smithsonian Institution named Roxie Laybourne. She won't reveal her age, but she's been studying feathers for more than 50 years. She can examine a feather that's been chewed up by a jet engine and tell if it came from a laughing gull or a Franklin's gull. She can identify many by touch.
Eagle feathers are smooth, vultures are rough.
It was Laybourne who identified the whistling swans that collided with a DC-10 and the herring gull that broke through the canopy of a Harrier military jet. Her only evidence was a tiny fragment of down from the pilot's shoulder patch. Laybourne took the dime-sized clump and examined it under the magnifying glass she wore around her neck. She took a closer look under her microscope. No, Laybourne said, nothing here but dirt and vegetation.