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

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We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. Prum, it turns out, was performing his own amateur sleuthing on the case and was thoughtful enough to compile and save some mass of relevant online documentation before it was deleted, all of which proved useful to Johnson’s investigation. It’s a fascinating look at a crime (which not only stole property but potential knowledge from the museum), obsession, and man’s destructive need to conquer and own nature.

I decided I should at least give it a try, because all those positive reviews had to mean something, right?In 2009 while studying at London's Royal Academy of Music, Edwin began to put forth a plan to steal rare bird specimens from the British Museum of Natural History in hopes to sell to wealthy tiers so he may be able to purchase himself a new flute. You wonder how the author found the willpower to keep going on in his investigation, when he hits so many dead ends. Indeed, the book is (to my knowledge) the best compilation and (almost certainly) most thoroughly complete account of what happened. She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host in 2020 and aGracie Award for best on-air talent in 2021.

I also enjoyed learning about what museums do with old bird specimens, and how they contribute to scientific progress. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities. I was definitely fascinated with this crime, as well as reading once more about the limitless human cruelty towards nature. This extraordinary book exposes an international underground that traffics in rare and precious natural resources, yet was previously unknown to all but a few.As well as recounting a crime this text provokes its readers to think about human obsession and greed about the fate of avian species which, by an accident of plumage, have vanished from the earth. I found it such a chore to get through that I become thoroughly dispirited and bored, and I put the book down and left it for months. I picked this book up for a couple of reading challenges, but I ended up really enjoying it (it's surprisingly difficult to find a non-violent true crime book! Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish.

Ji įvykdyta iš aistros žvejybinėms muselėms, pagamintoms iš retų ir net jau išnykusių paukščių plunksnų. In Part 2, Johnson turns to the events leading up to the Tring heist, how the heist went down, and its immediate aftermath. Johnson goes deep into the exotic bird and feather trade and concludes that though obsession and greed know no bounds, they certainly make for a fascinating tale. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist.My craving for adventure came in the story of Alfred Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, whose first expedition to collect specimens in exotic places ended with all being lost in a ship fire. The feather-tiers don’t come out of this at all well, closing ranks and even deliberately stifling and deleting communication so that discussion about the Rist case was (and is) minimised or expunged. For example, the Victorian-era hobby of salmon fly-tying was primarily controlled by the elite because it involved the use of rare and expensive bird feathers. Throwing themselves into the hobby, they soon discovered the extreme costs and rarity of some of the required feathers.

A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man’s “unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost. It was nearly another year and a half before the police knocked on his door, having been alerted by a former law enforcement officer who encountered a museum-grade bird skin at the Dutch Fly Fair and asked where it came from. He was at the 21st International Fly-Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey, on the prowl for stolen bird feathers.

Like it or not, the Edwin Rist episode is now an important, indeed instructional, part of ornithological and museum history. If you enjoyed this article and want to see me do more, more often, please consider supporting me at patreon.