The Feather Thief
Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
by Kirk Wallace Johnson
The recap
In the summer of 2009, a young American music student broke into a natural history museum outside London and left with hundreds of rare bird skins, some of them gathered by Victorian naturalists on dangerous expeditions. Why would anyone steal dead birds? Kirk Wallace Johnson first heard the story while standing in a New Mexico river with a fly rod, and it refused to let him go. His investigation leads into an obscure, fervent world of hobbyists who tie elaborate Victorian salmon flies using the plumage of exotic and protected species, trading feathers online for startling sums. Johnson moves between centuries: the explorer Alfred Russel Wallace risking his life to collect specimens, the feather-crazed fashions of the 1800s, and the modern tiers who still crave the same impossible colors. Part detective story, part natural history, the book asks what we owe to scientific collections, and how far a private obsession can push an otherwise ordinary person.
Why read it
For true-crime fans who want something stranger than murder, and for anyone curious about the hidden lives of museum collections and the people who covet them.
Fun facts
- 01
Johnson first heard about the heist from a friend in the middle of a cast while fly fishing on New Mexico's Red River, a pastime he had taken up while recovering from PTSD after years of aid work in Iraq.
- 02
Of the 299 bird skins taken from the museum at Tring, only 174 were later found intact, and just 102 still carried the labels that make specimens scientifically useful.
- 03
Some of the stolen birds had been collected around 150 years earlier by Alfred Russel Wallace, who worked out the theory of evolution by natural selection alongside Darwin.
- 04
The book was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger, and Kirkus gave it a starred review.
