The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

The hobby seemed strange, searching for rare feathers to tie a fly you don’t know how to cast.

something about the devilish relationship between man and nature and his unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.

the middle of the nineteenth century, the terra incognita that had once hazily marked unexplored forests and islands was rapidly vanishing from maps.

Wallace didn’t have an answer to the origin of species, but he knew that geography was an essential instrument in the search. He railed against the sloppy way in which other naturalists recorded geographical data:

Without precise information on the range of different species, it would be impossible to know how or why species diverged. The tags, in his view, were nearly as important as the specimens to which they were attached.

The first skins, brought to Europe by Magellan’s crew as a gift for the king of Spain in 1522, were missing their feet—such was the skinning practice of early Bird of Paradise hunters—leading Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, to name the species Paradisaea apoda: the “footless Bird of Paradise.” Many Europeans thus believed that the birds were inhabitants of a heavenly realm, always turning toward the sun, feeding on ambrosia and never descending to earth until their death.

The abundance of fruit, isolation, and safety provided by these islands created the perfect conditions for what would become known as runaway selection—over millions of years, the Birds of Paradise developed extravagant plumage and elaborate dancing rituals on meticulously prepared dance floors, all in the ostentatious pursuit of the ultimate goal: sex.

“It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions . . . while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands . . . we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. “This consideration,” he concluded, “must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.”

The “civilized man” he feared was already gnawing at the edge of those virgin forests. In ports throughout the archipelago, commercial hunters and traders exchanged sacks of the dead birds with outstretched plumes, slaughtered at the peak of mating season to feed a marketplace that was taking root in the West. After twenty million years, their predators were on their way.

June 18, 1858, Charles Darwin wrote in his journal: “interrupted by letter from AR Wallace.” As he read Wallace’s paper, he realized with mounting dread that the self-taught naturalist, thirteen years his junior, had independently arrived at the same theory he’d been quietly nurturing for decades.

Darwin wrote that “what strikes me most about Mr. Wallace is the absence of jealousy towards me: he must have a really good honest & noble disposition. A far higher merit than mere intellect.” Wallace’s extraordinary achievement in deducing the role of evolution through natural selection has been largely forgotten. But his relentless attention to the geographic distribution of species—enabled by meticulous details on specimen tags—eventually shored up his legacy as the founder of a new field of scientific inquiry: biogeography.

“future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve.” He challenged the antievolution religionists, “professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.”

Savage response to Creationists

To protect them from Hitler’s bombers, the curators secreted Wallace’s and Darwin’s bird skins in unmarked lorries to manors and mansions throughout the English countryside. Among the safe houses was a private museum in the tiny town of Tring, built by one of the richest men in history as a twenty-first-birthday present for his son. Lionel Walter Rothschild would grow up to earn many distinctions: the Right Honorable Lord, Baron de Rothschild, member of Parliament, adulterer, blackmail victim, and one of the most tragically obsessive bird collectors ever to roam the earth.

“I can’t agree with you in thinking that Zoology is best advanced by collectors of the kind you employ . . . No doubt they answer admirably the purpose of stocking a Museum; but they unstock the world—and that is a terrible consideration.”

the Age of Extermination: the greatest direct slaughter of wildlife by humans in the history of the planet. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, hundreds of millions of birds were killed, not for museums but for another purpose altogether: women’s fashion.

In one of the stranger intersections of animal and man, the feathers of brightly colored male birds, which had evolved to attract the attention of drab females, were poached so that women could attract men and demonstrate their perch in society.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred million pounds of feathers were imported into France.

By 1900 a single ounce of the Snowy Egret’s finest plumes, which emerge only during the courtship displays of mating season, fetched $32. An ounce of gold was worth only $20.

many in the West derided the very concept of extinction as folly, in part due to the assurances of religion, and in part due to the bounty of the “New World.”

The desire to possess something beautiful, however, could never be fully eradicated.

the birth of the Internet was bringing together a small community of obsessive men addicted to rare and illegal feathers: practitioners of the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.

Catching trout requires paying close attention to nature. Salmon can be caught with dog fur tied to a hook and a bit of luck. But aristocratic anglers weren’t about to let that get in the way of the romance of casting a beautiful fly to the “king of fish” in the idyllic countryside.

The new tiers were dedicated to an art form that could no longer be legally practiced without great difficulty.

The specimens safeguarded there represented about 95 percent of the world’s known species.

Tens of thousands of dollars were resting in the drawers of the first cabinet he opened alone, like lightweight, iridescent bricks of gold. And rows of cabinets stretched down the hallways for what seemed like miles.

At twenty, the idea of stealing the Tring’s birds glowed with potential—to advance his ambitions as a flautist, to give him the life and status he coveted, and to provide for his family. Even better, the birds would be an inoculation against future hardship: their value would only increase in time.

no systematic audit of the Tring’s collection was ordered. Even if it had been, with over fifteen hundred cabinets housing 750,000 specimens and a small staff, a complete audit—which hadn’t been conducted for at least a decade—could take weeks. Dr. Robert Prys-Jones, the museum’s collections manager, was relieved that nothing appeared to be missing. A brief police report was written up, and the case of the broken window was considered closed.

They only checked 3 valuable collections and nothing else??? Shoddy police work to say the least

he had logged 299 skins from sixteen different species and subspecies.

had it not been for the request from the visiting researcher to examine the Indian Crow skins, it’s unclear how much more time might have elapsed before anyone noticed something was missing.

Had the birds been taken all in a single night or over several months or even years? After all, it had been a decade since the last full inventory of the collection.

The loss of so many irreplaceable skins, which would create a significant gap in the scientific record, was a deeply embarrassing blow. That it had apparently been so easily accomplished only made things worse. As the tally of missing skins mounted, so did the scale of the Tring staff’s sense of failure as custodians of natural history.

Shorthouse was sentenced to two years for his crimes,

That is... Not a lot of time

Beyond finding the culprit, she had another urgent mission: after the Meinertzhagen and Shorthouse affairs, in which labels were either removed or changed, it was vital that she recover the birds with their biodata labels intact. Finding them without their tags would create an impassable void for researchers, as few meaningful inferences could be drawn from a skin without knowing the date and geographic details of its collection.

How bright were these people anyhow, he reasoned, if it took them a full month to realize they’d been robbed? Surely they’d forget about them soon enough.

A solid point actually

Adele ruled them out as culprits but remained unaware of how close she had come to the thief, who had learned to tie his first salmon fly with Muzeroll, and had first heard about the Tring’s collection from Couturier.

One of the working theories was that a fly-tier was behind the theft, and any Web search for the species in question would have yielded a number of hits at ClassicFlyTying.com, including discussions of Edwin’s bird skin sales on eBay.

Why did that not happen?? Internet wasnt THAT unknown in '09

No more than a couple of hundred visitors were likely to have entered the vault during the previous calendar year: if their culprit had staked out the museum under false pretenses, surely his or her name would be in the logbook. The name Edwin Rist was, of course, there, on a page dated November 5, 2008. If they had run an online search for “Edwin Rist,” they would have found a number of websites connecting him to the world of salmon flies and his eBay listings. But six months after the robbery, they were still in the dark.

Even as the online residue of his transactions spread and spread, Detective Hopkin and the Tring curators were still without a suspect.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked casually. Nearly a year earlier, he had seen reports about the Tring heist, so when he saw the Dutchman’s museum-grade skin, something fired in his mind, and his suspicions flared. “Some kid in England named Edwin Rist.” When he got home, Irish logged onto ClassicFlyTying.com and began clicking through the items being sold on the Trading Floor. The night before the Dutch Fly Fair, a listing had gone up: “Flame Bowerbird male full skin for sale.” The post had already amassed 1,118 views. He discovered several other links on the forum to eBay listings of Birds of Paradise, in which forum members mentioned that the skins were located in England. Irish found that most of the auctions were posted by the same seller. He rang the Hertfordshire Constabulary and told them to look into the eBay username “Fluteplayer 1988.”

There was at least one instance of good police work, finally

Five hundred and seven days after he broke into the museum, Edwin opened the door, glanced at Adele, and asked, “Is something wrong?”

Of the 299 skins that Edwin had taken, 174 intact specimens had been recovered in his apartment. Unfortunately, only 102 skins still retained their labels.

it wasn’t some petty theft to which he’d pleaded guilty—the birds were worth about a million dollars, and he’d broken all sorts of international conventions protecting endangered species by trafficking skins and feathers throughout the world.

The same tiers who were overjoyed by the flood of rare materials Edwin had introduced were now outraged to learn how the college student had obtained them.

his undiagnosed [Asperger’s] led him to commit a crime which he now regrets.”

As he neared his ruling, Gullick explained the bind Gibson had put him in: “were I to pass a substantial prison sentence upon you, which would be wholly merited by the value if not pricelessness of the items that you stole, no doubt on one view, the public would commend me, and on another view the Court of Appeal in my judgment would severely criticise me in the light of the attitude which they display in the case of Gibson as to the appropriate course that trial Judges should take when faced with somebody suffering from this syndrome.”

He turned to Edwin. “All that can be done is to try to support you and attempt to ensure that this sort of behavior is not repeated.” Then the sentence came down: twelve months, suspended. So long as he didn’t commit any new crimes during that period, Edwin would never spend a night behind bars.

Of the 299 stolen, only 102 intact birds had been recovered with their labels attached. Seventy-two more had been seized from Edwin’s apartment without any labels, and another nineteen skins—all missing their tags—had been mailed to the museum by customers who were either named by Edwin or were compelled by conscience to return them.

But while Edwin skated, Darren Bennett was sentenced to ten months in prison for stealing two pounds of horn-shaped plaster.

right, because Darren didn't have autism *eye roll*

Many of these birds were already in museum storage cabinets before the word scientist was even coined. Over hundreds of years, each advance—the discovery of the cell nucleus, viruses, natural selection, the concept of genetic inheritance, and the DNA revolution—ushered in new ways of examining the same bird:

the preservation of these birds represented an optimistic vision of humanity: a multigenerational chain of curators had shielded them from insects, sunlight, German bombers, fire, and theft, joined by the belief that the collection was of vital importance to humanity’s pursuit of knowledge. They understood that the birds held answers to questions that hadn’t yet even been asked. But their mission depended, in large part, on trusting that those who came to study in the collection shared this belief.