![]() ![]() In what ways do you think the Internet enables these types of obsessions? Do you think Rist would have pulled off his heist-or even attempted it in the first place-without the resources of the Internet?ģ. Many of the fly-tying community’s conversations and transactions take place online, from discussion forums to eBay to Facebook. Why do you think fly-tiers are so obsessed with rare bird feathers?Ģ. The Feather Thief shines a spotlight on the dark, illegal underbelly of a seemingly innocent hobby: fly-tying. Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller: We have, for instance, those exotic missing bird skins, that, like the Maltese falcon of yore, seem to have vanished into thin air we have eccentric suspects - those rabid salmon fly-tiers, some of whom don't ask too many questions about the source of those endangered bird feathers for sale on the Internet.1. If the missing birds couldn't recovered, it would be an even bigger blow to the scientific record. Without their labels identifying exactly where the birds had been captured, the specimens were no longer of scientific value. Of the 299 bird skins Rist had stolen, only 174 were found in his apartment still intact out of those, only 102 specimens retained their labels. ![]() It took over a year for British police detectives to trace the theft to Rist and by then he'd made a fortune online, illegally selling the bird skins or bags of assorted feathers to salmon fly-tying devotees. Many of those birds bore tags identifying that they'd been collected 150 years earlier by a naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a colleague of Charles Darwin. Once inside, Rist stuffed hundreds of rare bird skins into a suitcase he'd brought along. In 2009, Rist - who was then a 20-year-old American student at the Royal Academy of Music in London - broke into the Tring Museum, a suburban outpost of the British Natural History Museum that was established during the Blitz. Then, the guide went on to tell Johnson the bizarre story of a master fly-tier named Edwin Rist. The ornate flies, the guide explained, were more of an art form than a fishing tool they're composed of the iridescent jewel-toned feathers plucked from many of the rarest birds in the world, like the Indian crow and the king bird of paradise. On this fateful trip, Johnson's guide began telling him about his own hobby of Victorian salmon fly-tying. Suffering from PTSD as a consequence of years of aid work in Iraq, Johnson had taken up the meditative sport of fly-fishing. In his prologue, Johnson tells us that he stumbled on this mystery one day while standing waist-high in the Red River of New Mexico. But, we may also come to understand why it's important, ecologically speaking, to care about what happened to the feathers of what Johnson calls, "the missing birds of Tring." And it's a story that focuses on the feather-dependent Victorian art of salmon fly-tying and its present-day practitioners, many of whom lurk online in something called "The Feather Underground."īy the end of Kirk Wallace Johnson's absorbing book, The Feather Thief, we readers learn more than we probably ever wanted to know about feathers. It's a story that leads readers from 19 th century scientific expeditions into the jungles of Malaysia to the "feather fever" of the turn of the last century, when women's hats were be-plumed with ostriches and egrets. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Feather Thief Subtitle Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century Author Kirk Wallace Johnson ![]()
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