“It’s harder to find antelope, gorillas, chimpanzees, and elephants. The forest is getting quieter now.”

Giles Bakande, Baka pygmy from Cameroon

Crime Buster, Bonnie Yates (Wildlife Forensic Morphologist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

If you “do the crime”—smuggling or poaching wildlife, that is—Bonnie Yates will do her best to see that you “do the time.” Bonnie is a wildlife forensic morphologist at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Lab in Oregon. Wildlife forensic morphologists study animal parts like bones, fur, and feathers in order to testify in court about wildlife law enforcement cases. When law enforcement officials seize suspected illegal animal parts or products, it’s Bonnie’s job to figure out what animal was killed and how its body parts were used.

A typical day starts with Bonnie picking up a sealed evidence container and taking it to her lab to begin her analysis, and she never knows what may be inside the container. It could be a complete zebra hide, a fang hanging on a necklace, a few broken leg bones from a kill site, or a single hair taken from the suspect’s dryer lint.

To figure out what the seized item is, Bonnie compares it with known items in her collection (such as different animal skulls or zebra skins from each of the endangered subspecies of zebra). She spends the rest of her day photographing the evidence, completing her notes, logging the data in a computer program that tracks the cases, and writing up her report.

One accomplishment that Bonnie is particularly proud of is developing a way to tell goat and ibex fleece from the fleece of the protected Tibetan antelope. Her technique has made it much harder for people to smuggle shahtoosh (the antelopes’ fleece). She’s also proud of the role she plays by testifying about her findings in court. In fact, she thinks it’s the most rewarding part of her job! Not long ago, Bonnie says, there weren’t experts available to identify animal remains. Poachers and smugglers were much harder to convict. Now that’s all changed. “Who knows how many poachers have avoided capturing endangered species because they’re afraid of getting caught and losing in court?”