Birds & Eggs

The Feather Thief

     

     I do not often offer reviews of books I am reading, but I will do so in the case of The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession and the Natural History Heist of the Century, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I read it so quickly I am sure to forget what it was about even faster than usual, unless I attempt a brief summary for you. You also will enjoy it even though it is about the following things: fly-tying; the feathers of birds and a flautist (what the Brits call a player of the flute) who may or may not have Asperger’s. Hardly compelling ingredients, you’re thinking.

      At an early age Edwin Rist became obsessed with tying flies like the one pictured above which requires “the crest feathers of the Golden Pheasant from the mountain forests of China, black and fiery orange breast feathers from the Red-Ruffed Fruitcrow of South America, ribbon-like filaments of Ostrich herl feathers from South Africa, and tiny turquoise plumes from the Blue Chatterer of the lowlands of Central America". As an aside, such flies are rarely used for fishing, but they are highly valued piscatorial objets d'art that attract collectors.

      Such feathers are as rare as the birds from which they are plucked and it is illegal to trade in them. Fortunately Rist the flautist found himself at the Royal Academy of Music in London which is not too far from the Natural History Museum in Tring. It is full of feathers and Rist broke into it and “ stuffed into his suitcase 39 resplendent quetzals, 47 Indian crows, 98 blue chatterers, 37 king birds-of-paradise, 17 flame bowerbirds and so on.”

     Kirk Wallace Johnson the author becomes obsessed with Trist and the fly-tyers and with finding out what happens to the criminal and what became of the proceeds of the crime. It is a very interesting story and along the way one learns about Alfred Russel Wallace (the collector of the feathers held at Tring), Lionel Walter Rothschild (the original owner of Tring), exotic birds and the use of feathers in Victorian fashions. 

 For those of you who rely on opening sentences to choose a book, here they are:

“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. Sweat and sea spray clung to him as the balsam and rubber boiled and hissed below deck. He sensed the flames would soon burst through. The crew of the Helen raced frantically around him, heaving belongings and supplies into the two small lifeboats that were being lowered down the ship’s flank.”

Post Script:

     One of the funniest books I have ever read has the word 'Feathers' in the title. Consisting of several short pieces, my favourite is The Whore of Mensa. It is about intellectual call girls, the kind a man wants if he is more interested in the mind than the body and where in the whore house one finds "pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair [lolling] around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively." Among the services rendered in such an establishment: "For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartók records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master’s, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine’s over Freud’s conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing—the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York."

    You can read these short stories in the book below. Most of them appeared in The New Yorker and you can find "The Whore of Mensa" in the Dec. 16, 1974 issue (it is readable via the Internet, but I won't put the link in out of fear it will soon rot).


What About the EGGS?

     I mentioned that word in the title and will offer a few articles about some oologists who are even more obsessive than the feather collectors. Stealing and collecting birds’ eggs is big business. Start with the fascinating story in The New Yorker:

“Operation Easter: The Hunt for Illegal Egg Collectors", Julian Rubinstein, July 15, 2013.

See also:

"Inside the Bizarre, Secretive World of Obsessive Egg Thieves: Audubon talks with filmmaker Tim Wheeler, whose documentary exposes the underworld of Britain’s illegal egg collectors. Audubon, By Emma Bryce, January 06, 2016.

"Journalist Joshua Hammer recounts the story of egg thief Jeffrey Lendrum and his latest jail sentence," CBC Radio · Posted: Jan 23, 2019

See the entry in Wikipedia for The Jourdain Society, and the one for Colin Watson.