FWS Scholar: Pepper Trail
By: Usfws Conservation Library
Tags: Scholar, Wildlife, Biology, Birds, Forensics

Pepper Trail grew up in New York with a keen interest in birds. His dad was a professional photographer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and encouraged Pepper to the explore the outdoors. At the age of three, Pepper fed an orphaned crow his family found, raised and released. When he was just 10 years old, he decided to start his birding life list, which began his interest in traveling the world and studying birds.

Pepper earned a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology at Cornell University. As an undergraduate student he used every opportunity to spend time at the renowned Laboratory of Ornithology. Following that, he earned a Master’s from University of California at Davis while conducting his field research on the behavioral ecology of Acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona.

Pepper Trail while doing a field study for his doctoral research with the Guianan cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola rupicola). Photo Courtesy of Pepper Trail.

Pepper returned to Cornell for his Ph.D. in Ornithology where he lived in Suriname, South America. His doctoral research was a field study of sexual selection in a spectacular tropical bird, the Guianan cock-of-the-rock. This four-year study resulted in numerous publications, including “Active Mate Choice at Cock-of-the-Rock Leks: Tactics of Sampling and Comparison.”

“But it wasn’t without challenges, my research station was nothing more than a thatched roof hut with a hammock to sleep in and kerosene for cooking and light,” Pepper said.

This was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Pepper Trail then moved to San Francisco and became a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences, one of the country’s major natural history museums. For the next eight years he worked with the distinguished ornithologist, Dr. Luis Baptista, on a variety of projects, including the evolution of song in White-crowned Sparrows and the evolution of Darwin’s Finches. He also authored over 100 species accounts of pigeons and doves for the monumental Handbook of Birds of the World series.

A collection of many birds and their plumages in storage at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon. Photo Credit: USFWS

Pepper moved his family to American Samoa where he worked as a wildlife biologist with the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources. In Samoa, he worked on the ecology and conservation of native forest birds and flying foxes. He also conducted a study of the phenology of fruiting in rainforest plants that were important food sources for these species.

Later, in 1998, he was hired as the ornithologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory, in Ashland, Oregon. Although Pepper had never anticipated a career in wildlife law enforcement, his background of field work in many parts of the world, combined with extensive museum experience, proved to be ideal preparation for work in forensic ornithology. The primary responsibility of his position is to identify feathers, and other bird remains, that are evidence in wildlife crime investigations of the FWS Office of Law Enforcement. All the identifications he has made are based on morphological characteristics, and are dependent upon the Lab’s extensive collection of reference specimens. Since 1998, he has worked on more than 2,000 cases, involving over 80,000 identifications of bird parts, belonging to more than 800 bird species.

Pepper Trail, educating visitors to the USFWS Forensics Laboratory. Photo Credit: USFWS

Although kept very busy with casework, Pepper Trail has managed to find time for a variety of research projects. He studied the hybridization between the endangered Northern Spotted Owl and the Barred Owl, a species which has aggressively expanded its range into the Pacific Northwest over the past several decades. This was published in Conservation Biology (2004). He’s also written extensively on characters useful for identification of partial bird remains — most recently a paper on distinguishing the bones of Bald and Golden Eagles, published in the Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management.

Pepper has been involved in many collaborative efforts building the field of wildlife forensics and the federal effort to enhance rigor of forensic science, as well as trying to control the illegal wildlife trade. A big accomplishment within his Service career was creating a website to help Federal agents quickly identify feathers to support their law enforcement actions, known as the Feather Atlas of North American Birds.

The feather atlas team who built a database of over 400 species represented by nearly 1,900 scanned images of flight feathers. Photo Credit: USFWS

To learn more about Pepper Trail’s work in forensic science, ornithology, wildlife biology, check out more of his publications here; discoverable via USFWS Conservation Library. #FWSscholar