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 and caused a fatal accident. Yet the size and scope of Trail’s caseload—more than 100 cases a year, involving well over 1,000 pieces of evidence—attests to the fact that this little-known arm of law enforcement plays a critical role in conservation.
Sometimes Trail receives a blob of black sludge from an oil pit containing a decomposed bird and has to extract the feathers, restore them, and ID the species. Other times he gets the smashed remains of an animal demolished by a wind turbine. He has investigated high-end artifacts smuggled into the country—an indigenous Amazonian crown made from curassow body feathers, toucan throat feathers, and Scarlet Macaw tail feathers, for example—and cheap dream catchers peddled at tourist traps across the Southwest. The findings go both ways; the evidence in question might be made from perfectly legal turkey feathers or the feathers of a protected sub-adult Golden Eagle.
In 2013 Trail received a shipment of 43 hummingbirds. The carcasses, which were each about the size of an index finger, had been dried out and stuffed into red paper tubes that were decorated with matching satin tassels. Accompanying each was a Spanish-language prayer meant to invoke the mystical powers of la chuparosa, a colloquial Mexican name for the hummingbird, in order to help a man find his true love. That the animals were intact—no birdshot wounds, no decapitations, and with minimal damage to the colorful plumage—led Trail to suspect that they had been gently squeezed to death one by one in a human hand.
Trail didn’t know what to make of them. “When they first appeared, it was like, ‘Holy crap, what in the world is this?’ ” he says. A special agent had obtained the birds during an undercover buy from a man who was smuggling them in from Mexico. Following protocol, Trail unwrapped the birds from their ceremonial garb, identified the different species, and filed the necessary paperwork. A year later, another shipment arrived. And then another. The victims spanned at least 10 species, including Violet-crowned, Magnificent, and Blue-throated hummingbirds—dazzling border species that attract birders to southern Arizona each year.
As familiar as Trail is with death, these hummingbirds pack an emotional punch. “Their very tininess makes them delightful and charming. Their extraordinary flying ability makes them impressive and awe-inspiring,” he says. “Our power compared to their power is so great that it seems particularly perverse and cruel to kill them.”
At age 63 Trail has identified enough dead birds for a lifetime, and he is looking at the prospect of retirement with greater fondness. More uplifting pursuits surely await the gentle soul who in his downtime pens award-winning poetry, dresses up as Charles Darwin to deliver scientific lectures, and leads high-end birding expeditions to exotic locales around the world.
But at the moment, Trail’s retirement would spell disaster for the only wildlife-forensics lab in the world. “Pepper is one of a kind,” says Ken Goddard, director of the lab. “If something happens to Pepper, we’re S.O.L.”
Pepper Trail didn’t set out to make a name for himself in the dark world of avian-associated crimes. He was born in Virginia—his great-grandfather was Paris Pepper Trail, and his great-uncle was Peach Trail—but grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York. A boyhood spent exploring the outdoors and admiring wildlife led to a degree in biology and a Ph.D. in ornithology from nearby Cornell University.
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