The Feather Thief

About this book

A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods The Lost City of Z and The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009 after performing a concert at Londons Royal Academy of Music twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwins obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skinssome collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwins Alfred Russel Wallace whod risked everything to gather themand escaped into the darkness. 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. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers Johnson was catapulted into a years-long worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime and one mans relentless pursuit of justice The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession and mans destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.