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

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Surely, there have been all manner of occasions where people have tried – even succeeded – in stealing such things?

You wonder how the author found the willpower to keep going on in his investigation, when he hits so many dead ends. He started by attending a fly-tying symposium, where he felt like an outsider and even received vague threats: Rist was now a no-go subject for this community.These intriguing tales include that of Darwin rival Wallace’s extreme hardships trying to gather rare birds from around the world and losing many of them in a sinking ship; the incredibly wealthy Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild’s museum at Tring, which his father built for him when he was 29 to house his extensive collection of animals and birds, alive and dead; and the sad history of 19th-century women demanding the most exotic birds for their fashionable hats, which resulted in hundreds of millions of birds being killed. It’s thus (and I say the following with awareness of how painful the story is, read on) very welcome that a handsome and highly readable popular book has been written about it. So crazy how it twists your mind into actually caring about some feathers and what happened to them. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish.

It was especially hard to read about their cavalier attitudes towards the robbery, explaining away the disappearance of irreplaceable artifacts by asking why museums needed so many of these bird specimens in the first place.

It then explores how these discoveries lead bird feathers to be used brutally in fashion and hobbies like fly-tying. Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist-deep in a river in New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide first told him about the heist.