- Welcome to the National Fish and Wildlife
Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon.
Our laboratory works very much like a police crime lab,
in that we identify evidence and we try to
link suspect, victim, crime scene together with that evidence.
The big difference is that our victim is a non-human animal.
I'm Ken Goddard and the directory of this laboratory.
When our agents seize evidence,
at a border, a custom center, wherever,
that evidence will be packaged and shipped to us.
Our job is to analyze evidence, collect it for wildlife
law enforcement investigations.
Our laboratory primarily supports wildlife laws in general,
specifically the endangered species act.
Sadly, we're the only full service crime
lab for wildlife in the world.
We would like not to be, but that's our reality.
The illness of wildlife trade is huge,
it's probably in the neighborhood of
17, 18, 19 billion dollars a year.
We're certainly impacting the trade,
but it's a desperately, difficult job.
Here are some of the scientists that
help us solve crimes against animals.
Our veterinary pathologist is Dr. Becky Kagan.
- My job is to autopsy all of the animals
that come in here and try to figure out why they died.
Today I have two birds: they're both bald eagles;
they're wild animals that are found dead.
My job is to figure out, was there a crime involved.
We can do CT scanning here at the lab,
we take photographs, we do alternate life source exam
to help us solve the puzzle of why this animal died.
- One aspect of our work that's typical of a crime lab
is we compare a known against an unknown.
For us to identify, let's say a feather
or maybe to identify the bones.
We would compare that against tissue from a known animal
or to a skeleton and the fellow responsible
for our huge collection, is Johnnie French.
- Our collection is 35,000 specimens, give or take,
everything that we have here,
is either been donated or was seized in customs.
The uniqueness of our collection helps us,
kinda keep abreast of what we see in the wildlife trade.
Most of the time, we have to remove meat from bone,
in order to examine specimens or to
get them into our reference collection.
Easiest way to do that is, take the carcass
and chuck it in the flesh eating beetle tank.
After the beetles are finished with the carcass
that we threw in there, we'll wash them a couple of times
and then the bones are ready for the collection.
- [Ken] Heading up our genetics section is Dr. Mary Curtis.
- The genetics team is important to the
functioning of the lab because we look at items
that other parts of the lab can't identify.
Items that might be crafted to the point
where you can't tell what their origin is.
So we have access to over 40,000 individual tissue samples
in our reference collection that
we use to identify different species.
- One of the more interesting people in our lab
is Dr. Pepper Trail, our ornithologist.
- I'm an ornithologist, a bird expert,
so I look at bird evidence and use
reference specimens to compare to evidence items
to confirm the identifications.
The kinds of evidence that we receive is incredibly variant.
We receive everything from complete dead carcasses
in good condition, to just bags of bones.
I've identified over 750 species in the course of my work
here, which would be a pretty good
life list for a lot of birders.
The magnitude of the international
wildlife trade is staggering.
Everyday, into our laboratory comes
remains of dead animals from around the world
and someone needs to provide the information needed
to bring wildlife criminals to justice.
It's sometimes a sad job, but it's
a very important job, and I'm proud to be a part of it.
(inspiring music)