The result is a really good read, a suspenseful true-crime narrative that reads like a novel yet also probes real-life questions focused on the purpose of natural history museum collections and the ethics of closely gated “hobbyist” communities. He roots the theft in the history of collecting bird skins, in the brief life history of Edwin Rist, in the secretive world of classic fly tying, and in his own efforts to follow up on a police investigation that got the man but not all of the loot.
Author Kirk Wallace Johnson does more than simply tell a quixotic heist tale, though. What? Why? That’s pretty much the reaction of anybody hearing this for the first time. The Feather Thief is the story of Edwin Rist, a 20-year old flutist from New York State, who, on a June evening in 2009, broke into the British Museum of Natural History at Tring, grabbed 299 bird skins, and, ignoring an almost priceless elephant portfolio edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America nearby, packed the skins into a suitcase and took an early morning train back to London. There’s more than one obsession in The Feather Thief, and though the mind boggles at the lengths to which the obsessed go in order to satiate their passions, as a birder I couldn’t help but feel a sense of kinship.
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