Obsessed With Pretty Things With Feathers

A review by Ellen Paul

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Viking Press, 2018

308 pages, hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14870

Edwin Rist.

The name sounds Victorian. It sounds nefarious. It befits a man who would skulk through the dark streets of Tring, England, where the Victorian-era home of the second Lord Rothschild housed the bird collection of London’s Museum of Natural History. Using a glass cutter–a low-tech Victorian-era invention–Rist tried to break a back window. When that failed, he used a no-tech rock. Once inside the museum, he purloined nearly three hundred bird skins, including some collected by the Victorian-era naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace on his excursion to the Malay Archipelago. 

Rist, though, was no Victorian dastard. The World Wide Web arrived when Rist was a toddler of two. By the time he was a pre-teen obsessed with finding feathers of brilliant hue for his fly-tying hobby, eBay was ready and waiting to sate his appetite for the plumage of rare birds. Ignoring the warnings of experienced fly-tyers about international restrictions on trade, he sought out the rich blues of cotingas, the flaming reds of birds of paradise, and the citrine adornments of Flame Bowerbirds. At the age of sixteen, he had reached the upper echelons of fly-tying. At his level, this was more than just a pastime. Indeed, Rist described it with language that will sound familiar to serious birders: “Fly-tying is not merely a hobby, it is an obsession we seem to devote a substantial part of our time to.” The accumulation of material and gear, the endless thirsting after the impossibly rare, the British Fly Fair International–odious though Rist might be, birders can’t help but understand this addiction. 

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