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

by Kirk Wallace Johnson ($18.00, paperback), available to order online here or call the store, 505-988-4226)

Review by award-winning writer, historian, and distinguished professor emeritus, Dr. Sara Dant, author of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. 

Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century had its genesis in cold Red River waters north of Taos. The writer and founder of The List Project, a non-profit Iraqi refugee resettlement organization, hoped the zen of fly-fishing might alleviate his PTSD exhaustion from 8 years spent relocating thousands of desperate Iraqi colleagues to safety in the United States. Instead, he traded one obsession for another.

Johnson’s guide that afternoon told him the seemingly impossible story of a young American concert flautist who broke into the British Natural History Museum (Tring) to steal dead birds. Edwin Rist had come to study music in London, but soon emerged as a prodigy in the obscure art of Victorian salmon fly-tying. These elaborate concoctions were never meant to see water. They were art. One salmon fly might require 150 different materials – mink fur, silk threads, silver monkey hairs – along with rare, spectacular feathers. Not surprisingly, the market for truly exceptional specimens created a “feather underground,” where wealthy collectors paid thousands of dollars for the few, perhaps now-endangered exotic bird skins remaining. A young twenty-something like Rist either had to settle for dyed imitations or find a new source for the real thing.

Rist’s shocking solution was a 2009 heist that looted 299 birds from the Tring museum’s collection, some hundreds of years old. He stuffed them in a suitcase and dreamed of the wealth and status the beautiful plumage would bring: four Indian Crows alone could fetch $20,000 and he had forty-seven!! It took the museum more than a month to discover the burglary. In 2010, Rist was arrested and confessed to the crime, but an Asperger syndrome diagnosis (by Sacha Baron Cohen’s father!) spared him a prison sentence. Today, Rist lives and performs in Germany.

Johnson’s riveting page-turner reads like a Tom Clancy thriller and includes stories of Darwin-rival Alfred Russel Wallace’s harrowing collecting expeditions, Rist’s efforts to cash in on his haul, and the author’s desperate five-year search for the lost birds of Tring. Ultimately, most of the specimens Rist stole disappeared on eBay and evaporated into the black market. On the positive side, however, Johnson’s investigations surrounding the heist triggered a sustainability movement in the fly-tying world led by his original New Mexico guide: www.ziafly.com. 

The Feather Thief is a powerful at-what-cost reckoning with the harvest and commodification of nature. It’s a book that you can’t shake. The research is deep and broad; the writing is captivating. Johnson’s opening sentence reads: “Alfred Russel Wallace stood on the quarterdeck of a burning ship, seven hundred miles off the coast of Bermuda, the planks heating beneath his feet, yellow smoke curling up through the cracks.” Hang on for the ride...it’s worth every page.

Sara Dant