The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

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. They thought females laid their eggs on the back of her mate, incubating them as they soared through the clouds. The Malayans called them manuk dewata, “God’s birds”; the Portuguese referred to them as passaros de col, “birds of the sun.” Linnaeus described nine species that had never been spotted since, known to the traders in the archipelago as burong coati, “dead birds.”

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty.”

“If this is not done,” he warned, “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.”

“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.”

“God has given you minds, dear girls. . . . Your life work is not simply to attract man or please anybody, but to mould yourselves into a grand and glorious womanhood.” Stanton lamented the sedentary, unstimulated life of the Victorian woman and urged her audiences to “remember that beauty works from within, it cannot be put on and off like a garment.”

“This beautiful bird is now almost extinct. The species fashion selects is doomed. It lies in the power of women to remedy a great evil.”

Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle,

Edwin never saw mastery as having an end. As an artist, believing he had perfected any technique was anathema to him: fly-tying was an endless search for perfection. Some days he tied better than others. Some days he made mistakes he thought he’d long since moved past.

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.

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.

He pointed out a flatscreen TV in the corner, telling them he had stolen it from the Royal Academy’s International Student House—though no one had asked.

sense how the crime would affect his family. When Anton, who was headed off to Juilliard that fall, learned that it was his own brother who had stolen the Tring’s birds, he burst into tears.

Ian Fleming had found his spy’s name after stumbling across a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by the American ornithologist James Bond.)

The man was Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, and Britain’s leading authority on autism and Asperger’s syndrome. He also happens to be a cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the comedian behind the famed Borat character.

They were archival relics of a lost era. In taking them, Edwin had been “stealing knowledge from humanity.”

When they brought the film to be developed at Broadmead, a shopping mall in Bristol, they accidently dropped a few of the photos on their way out.

In the hierarchy of misbehavior that might trigger expulsion from an elite institution like the Royal Academy of Music, a felony theft of scientifically invaluable bird skins didn’t rate. Not only was Edwin going to graduate, he’d be flying to Germany on June 7 to audition for an orchestra. He couldn’t believe his luck.

“This is a very positive result for us and sends a strong message that making money through crime never pays,” he added.

Jens returned the skins but was never compensated by Curtis.

The value of the outstanding Indian Crow, Cotinga, King Bird of Paradise, and Resplendent Quetzal skins alone easily topped $400,000, and this didn’t account for the missing Crimson Fruitcrows, Flame Bowerbirds, Magnificent Riflebirds, Superb Birds of Paradise, and Blue Birds of Paradise, which hit the market so infrequently that determining their true worth was difficult.

Plourde had first caught my attention when I stumbled across a fly he had designed as a response to the attacks of 9/11. To commemorate the departed, the America fly used gold tinsel, red, white, and royal blue silk, and the feathers of seven birds, among them Kingfisher, Kenya Crested Guinea Fowl, and Blue and Gold Macaw. America went for $350 at auction,

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

Edwin had drawn smiley faces on some of the Ziplocs with a Sharpie pen.

‘Borat’s cousin is interviewing me to see if I’m retarded.’”

under interrogation, he had admitted to selling nine birds. Nineteen had been returned by his customers to the museum following his arrest.