高中英语教学：Feather Detective.pdf

Feather DetectiveBy Pamela TuchschererImagine having a job where you can create a new science,save lives,and solvemurders.That s what Roxie Laybourne achieved as a feather detective.Shespent fifty-eight years at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural Historysolving bird mysteries.Born in 1910,Roxie Laybourne spent her childhoodwandering through the fields and woods of Farmville,North Carolina.She followedanything that crawled or flew.Seeing a bird,she1 d note the size and color and thenask her grandmother to identify it.When she was ten years old,her friends wantedto be nurses or teachers.Not Roxie.She wanted to be a turkey vulture.Lying in thegrass,she d watch the vultures soar above the trees and imagine herself ridingthe thermals.Soon she was flying kites and building model airplanes thatswooped through the air.A代er high school Roxie attended Meredith College inNorth Carolina,where she studied science and math.She was a serious student,butshowed her independence by being the first girl on campus to wear blue jeans.Shealso mowed the grass and trapped rabbits to cook in the dorm.With her love ofnatural history,Roxie spent weekends studying birds and animals on display at theNorth Carolina State Museum of Natural History.In time,a curator offered her avolunteer job in the taxidermy department.She removed dead animalsskeletons,muscles,and organs,then preserved their natural appearance by stuffingthem with cotton and wire.Roxie learned patience as she carefully smoothed thebirds feathers,so they lay naturally.She loved working with the staff.In her spiritof competitiveness,she didn t want to be better than they were,she wanted tomake herself better than she was.In 1944,Roxie was hired to work in the BirdDivision at the U.S.National Museum in Washington,D.C.She prepared birdspecimens called study skins for the collection.Unlike the lifelike taxidermy mounts,these birds looked lifeless.Yetz Roxie felt she had to take special care.Each bird wasa work of art,something to be treasured.After the birds were prepared,Roxie placed them on their backs,with their wings folded,inside thecollection room s cabinet drawers.The skins,looking Hke colorful burritos withidentification tags,assisted curators and researchers in identifying bird species.Toprotect the skins from being eaten by bugs,Roxie applied arsenic,a toxic chemical.It was a dusty and dangerous job.She left home each morning dressed in a ladys proper clothing-a dress,hat,and gloves.But when she arrived at the museum,she changed into her jeans,tennis shoes,and a lab coat to protect herself.Later inthe evening she d switch her clothes again before walking out in public.As Roxiecontinued her work as one of the few women researchers at the museum,shedeveloped an in-depth knowledge of birds by facing challenges and considering allpossibilities.She didn t feel like a woman breaking the barriers of science but wasgratified when a curator told her that they never thought of her as a woman,just asa scientist.One day Roxie was asked to identify a set of bird feathers.She realizedthat to pinpoint the type of bird it came from,she d have to discover a specific,distinguishing characteristic.Roxie had done similar work learning the familycharacteristics of plant structures while studying botany at George WashingtonUniversity.With her knowledge of the methodology and knowing that keeping anopen mind was the key to success,she was determined to find a feature that wouldtell her the family these particular feathers belonged to.To find the subtledifferences in the families feathers,Roxie carefully examined them and drewprecise pen-and-ink line drawings of what she saw on index cards.When she firststarted looking,she called it“going fishing/since she wasnz t sure where tolook.Examining the downy portion of the feather under the microscope,Roxiediscovered little branches,called barbs.These were divided into even smallerbranches called barbules.Looking like rows of single cells or segments,theyresembled tiny bamboo stalks with nodes,or knobs,all along the stalk.As Roxieexamined different birds feathers,she noticed that each species nodes hadunique shapes,like triangles,rings,or prongs.Similar to fingerprints,these“microstructures“were one of the keys in identifying many groups of birds fromtheir feathers.Roxie believed persistence overcame obstacles.Once she spent twoweeks making microscope slides of goose,swan,and duck feathers to study thedifferences between them.Eventually,Roxie created slides made from downy barbsof known birds in the museum collection to be used as a reference tool.Then onOctober 4f 1960,Roxie s career changed.On that date,an airplane took off fromBoston s Logan Airport.Seven seconds into the flight,the plane s engines strucka flock of birds.The plane crashed into Boston Harbor,killing sixty-two people.TheCivil Aeronautics Board investigating the accident wanted to know what type ofbirds were involved.The answer would be discovered at the Smithsonian Natio。