As more and more museum curators shared stories of specimen thefts, I thought of the two currents of humanity running through the story of the Tring’s birds. In one coursed Alfred Russel Wallace, Rick Prum, Spencer, Irish the undercover detective, the league of curators who had shielded the birds from Zeppelins and the Luftwaffe, and the scientists who probed each skin for insights, adding to our collective understanding of the world in tiny increments. Here were humans bound across centuries by the faith-based belief that these birds were worth preserving. That they might help future
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