The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

In June 2009, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist traveled to the Tring museum, a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History housing one of the world's largest ornithological collections. He stole hundreds of bird skins, including specimens collected 150 years earlier by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin's. The feathers were highly valuable to fly-tiers who practiced the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Two years later, Kirk W. Johnson learned about the heist from his fly-fishing guide in northern New Mexico. Intrigued by the crime, Johnson embarked on a years-long worldwide investigation to understand what motivated the theft, whether Edwin faced consequences, and what happened to the stolen skins. His search led him into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, uncovering a story about obsession and humanity's destructive impulse to exploit nature's beauty.