The Feather Thief

Johnson Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. New York: Viking 2018. Print

First Sentences:

By the time Edwin Rist stepped off the train onto the platform at Tring, forty miles north of London, it was already quite late....

A few hours earlier Edwin had performed in the Royal Academy of Music's "London Soundscapes," a celebration of Haydn, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, he'd packed a pair of latex gloves, a miniature LED flashlight, a wire cutter, and a diamond-blade glass cutter in a large rolling suitcase, and stowed it in his concert hall locker. 



Description:

Who could possibly be interested in the true crime of stealing feathers from a British museum? But in the hands of a skilled storyteller like Kirk Wallace Johnson, such a tale can become a gripping, informative read. This is the case with his recent book, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

Johnson opens the book with the step-by-step events of that June night in 2009 when 20-year-old flautist Edwin Rist broke into Tring Museum, a branch of the British Museum of Natural History. The Tring was the repository for the world's largest collection of aviary specimens. 

Overall, the museum houses one of the world's largest collection of ornithological specimens: 750,000 bird skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 birds preserved in spirit, 4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs, gathered over the centuries from the world's most remote forests, mountainsides, jungles, and swamps.

The museum didn't even notice their loss for an entire month.

The remainder of the book is devoted to author Johnson's personal quest to answer these questions through conversations with feather collectors, police reports, news articles, and interviews with Rist himself. Through years of pursuit of the facts, the truth behind this odd crime are eventually revealed.

We are introduced to the world fascinated by exotic locations and newly-discovered biology of the mid-1800s. Johnson details the hazardous explorations of men such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace into the wilds of the Galapagos, Malaysia, and the Amazon rain forest to discover, capture, and provide evidence of new species to the world's museums. Through these observational studies particularly of birds, Wallace and Darwin simultaneously arrived on the theory of diversity and "Survival of the fittest." Their collected specimens offered evidence of their theory and thus were purchased and preserved in museums.

Yet Rist did not steal these historic specimens. He took only skins with the brightest plumage and for one purpose: to sell these rare and valuable feathers to the fly-tying community seeking to re-create beautiful Victorian-era salmon lures. These valuable lures require multiple feathers from rare birds, a fad begun in Victorian times when exotic birds were more plentiful. Feathers then were shipped to America and Europe regularly from far-flung jungles to supply decorations primarily for hats and other clothing. It was a highly-lucrative business in the 1800s and now had become even more so in the 21st century.

When the Titanic went down in 1912, the most valuable and highly insured merchandise in its hold was forty crates of feathers, second only to diamonds in the commodities market.

The author himself takes a personal interest after hearing about the heist during his own fly-fishing vacation. He became obsessed with returning the missing skins to the museum. To gather information, he entered the fanatical world of obsessive fly-tiers who would do anything to obtain desirable feathers. We also learn about the historical men who originally gathered the specimens and the museums who sought to document the animals for future scientific study.

It is a fantastically interesting book, full of surprises about a world of exotic animals and the people who obsessively study and use them in science and recreation. Historically, The Feather Thief opened for me an entirely new world of Victorian anthropology, fishing, tying, social fashion styles, and the efforts to provide the rarest of materials to satisfy a hungry market.

It's a wonderful book, even more gripping because it is a true account. It also packs a surprising ending, so I loved it from page one to the end.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession .   

Non-fiction glimpse into one man's obsession with finding the "ghost orchid" in the swamps of Florida, and the underworld of rare flower theft and sales. Extremely well-written and fascinating.