The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

After sifting through the Ziplocs, they concluded that the total number of skins still at large was sixty-four.

with the help of the Wayback Machine, I exhumed another fifteen sales. My excitement mounted when I realized that all the posts had been made by the same person, seemingly working on Edwin’s behalf. Under the screen name Goku, this person created the forum posts, uploaded photos of the birds, fielded orders, and appeared to be handling the financial transactions.

Goku = another screen name for edwin??

“What I see is a story of the struggle for authenticity . . . to try to make what people are doing meaningful. What they’ve done is enshrined this in a period where English fishermen were members of a colonial power that ruled the entire globe and could extract fascinating things from it, then sell them in commercial markets. “But that dream is extinct,” he said. “That world is gone. “When I work on feathers,” he added, “knowledge is a consequence. When I pluck a feather and destroy it, we discover things about the world that nobody knew before.” By contrast, Edwin and the feather underground were a bunch of historical fetishists, practicing a “candy-ass, ridiculous, parasitic activity”

“Don’t worry,” he reassured his buyers: “unless you want me to, I will not say where any given bird is from.”

Goku, who had posted numerous links to eBay auctions of Edwin’s stolen birds, was, in fact, Long Nguyen.

I’m not a scientist,” he acknowledged, “but I do view it as a shame that they’re in a box in the dark, where an idiot with a rock can go in and take them.” It was a curious stance: he almost seemed to blame the Tring.

technically speaking, had the museum just put all those things up for sale, you would have nullified fifty Indian Crows’ worth of demand, which is fifty Indian Crows that would probably still be alive in the wild.” “Whoa,” I said, my poker face slipping for a moment. “You’re making the case that by taking the Tring’s birds, you saved live birds in the wild?” “Well, that’s a flowery way of putting it, and I wish that that were true.” He grinned, then added: “Maybe in a sense it technically is true.”

justice had been thwarted: eighteen months of advance planning, at least tens of thousands of dollars in profit, irreparable damage to the Tring’s collection and future research, and not a single night behind bars for the perpetrator. For that, he had a diagnosis from Dr. Baron-Cohen and the precedent of the Bristol grave robber with Asperger’s to thank.

in the lead-up to his sentencing hearing, “I started thinking Eyes! I can’t look there!” He bulged his eyes and waved his hands comically. Before I could say anything, he said: “The other one was Ohhh autistic people, they sort of have tics, so I was sort of sitting in chairs, rubbing my hands together.” He made a strange panting noise and started rocking in his seat. “Just some body motion which is repetitive and autistic, and before you know it, you’re sitting in a chair rocking back and forth, not making eye contact . . . because those are symptoms.” He was smiling slightly. I leaned back, trying to mask my reaction to the statement that, with the prospect of prison looming, he’d become what he needed to be.

Long had made his share of mistakes, but it bothered me that he seemed to be suffering the consequences of the Tring heist more than Edwin himself. Edwin had used him, setting him up as a fence, so that anyone digging into the crime would find a great big X marking someone else.

There was no other way to interpret Edwin’s actions than as creating a smokescreen, implicating a friend who idolized him while he took the money and ran.

Two years after the diagnosis spared Edwin from prison, the American Psychiatric Association expunged the disorder from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The controversial shift—dropping Asperger’s as a stand-alone disorder only nineteen years after it was included in the previous edition—happened “in large part because studies revealed little consistency in how the diagnosis was being applied,”

I sent several inquiries to eBay, but the company never replied. It wasn’t until I sent it a list of hyperlinks to current auctions of endangered bird species, and asked how I was meant to interpret the commission that eBay earned in facilitating those illegal sales, that they wrote back.

He added that the company “actively enforces this policy through a rules-based filtering system and reporting mechanisms available to eBay members and government agencies; and through removal of products and/or sellers as appropriate.” When I asked how the filtering system worked, and whether he could provide statistics on the number of auctions that had been halted by eBay, he was unwilling to share.

The Tring’s spreadsheet had been the fragment of a map that launched my expedition, but all I ever discovered were ruins. Of the sixty-four skins I set out to find, I knew that the remains of two were in South Africa with Ruhan Neethling. If Long helped Edwin sell twenty skins, that brought it down to forty-two. If Couturier’s skins were from the Tring, and Delisle’s count was right, then I was down to twenty-two. But I was always too late.

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 generations, trusting that the march of scientific progress would forever present new ways of looking at the same ancient skins. In the other current ran Edwin and the feather underground, and the centuries of men and women who looted the skies and forests for wealth and status, driven by greed and the desire to possess what others didn’t. In the war between knowledge and greed, it sure seemed as though greed were winning.

I thought back to something Edwin had told me about his understanding of human nature: that there was an allure in what people knew to be taboo.