"The Feather Thief"

[fiefoe]

Kirk Wallace Johnson's obsession with this curious case yielded a book that started in an exciting and quirky way, but went to a pretty dreary and empty ending.

• Edwin opened the next cabinet to reveal dozens of Resplendent Quetzal skins gathered in the 1880s from the Chiriquí cloud forests of western Panama, a species now threatened by widespread deforestation and protected by international treaties. At nearly four feet in length, the birds were particularly difficult to stuff into his suitcase, but he maneuvered thirty-nine of them inside by gently curling their sweeping tails into tight coils.
• Thirty-seven King Birds of Paradise, swiped in seconds. Twenty-four Magnificent Riflebirds. Twelve Superb Birds of Paradise. Four Blue Birds of Paradise. Seventeen Flame Bowerbirds. These flawless specimens, gathered against almost impossible odds from virgin forests of New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago 150 years earlier, went into Edwin’s bag, their tags bearing the name of a self-taught naturalist whose breakthrough had given Darwin the scare of his life: A. R. WALLACE.
• while on vacation from my job coordinating the reconstruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah for USAID, I sleepwalked out of a window in a PTSD-triggered fugue state and nearly died. I was left with broken wrists, a shattered jaw, broken nose, and a cracked skull, with scores of stitches across my face,
• He flipped open his fly box to reveal hundreds of tiny floaters, spinners, streamers, nymphs, emerges, stimulators, parachutes, and terrestrials. He had locally themed flies like the San Juan worm and the Breaking Bad–inspired crystal meth egg. He deployed subtle variations in thread color or hook size to match the insect hatches in each river or stream he fished. The flies he carried in May were different from those he used in August.
• one of the most strangely beautiful things I’d ever seen: a Jock Scott salmon fly, which, he explained, had been tied according to a 150-year-old recipe. It bore the feathers of a dozen different birds, flashing crimson and canary yellow, turquoise and setting-sun orange as he turned it this way and that. It was finished with a dizzying spiral of gold thread around the hook shank, and it was capped with an eyelet made from the gut of silkworms.
• The hobby seemed strange, searching for rare feathers to tie a fly you don’t know how to cast.

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• Wallace stood there, squinting through wire-rimmed glasses at the panicked birds as chaos engulfed him. He was so depleted of vitality, leeched by vampire bats and inflamed by the chigoe fleas that had burrowed under his toenails to deposit their eggs, that he wasn’t thinking clearly. All his notebooks, containing years’ worth of research on the wildlife along the ink-black Rio Negro, were in his cabin.
• Crazes spread like fire: the French led the way with conchlyomania, with conch shells fetching obscene prices. Pteridomania followed, as the British obsessively uprooted ferns from every corner of the isles for their fern albums. There was status in owning something rare, and parlor room vitrines laden with natural curios
• At stops along the way, he was startled to discover that many of his previous shipments had been held up by customs officials as suspected contraband. He paid a small fortune to liberate them and loaded them onto the Helen, which set sail on the twelfth of July, four years after he had first arrived in Brazil. <> Now, ten thousand bird skins, eggs, plants, fish, and beetles, more than enough to establish him as a leading naturalist and burnish a lifetime of research, were cooking in the belly of the Helen, seven hundred miles east of Bermuda.
• By morning, the ship was a charred husk. Mercifully, the wooden planks of the lifeboats had become swollen enough to seal off the leaks.
• Wallace didn’t have an answer to the origin of species, but he knew that geography was an essential instrument in the search. He railed against the sloppy way in which other naturalists recorded geographical data:
• The Birds of Paradise occupied a perch in the Western public’s imagination worthy of their mythical name. The first skins, brought to Europe by Magellan’s crew as a gift for the king of Spain in 1522, were missing their feet—such was the skinning practice of early Bird of Paradise hunters—leading Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, to name the species Paradisaea apoda: the “footless Bird of Paradise.” Many Europeans thus believed that the birds were inhabitants of a heavenly realm, always turning toward the sun, feeding on ambrosia and never descending to earth until their death.
• Gathering specimens was taxing, but protecting them against the constant threat of scavengers was maddening. Small black ants routinely “took possession” of his house, spiraling down papery tunnels onto his work desk and carrying off insects from under his nose. Bluebottle flies arrived by the swarm and deposited masses of eggs in his bird skins:
• It was only in the previous few decades that naturalists had perfected the art of skinning birds, by making a fine incision from the belly to the anus, stripping out their guts, scooping their brains out with a quill, cutting out the roots of the ears, extracting their eyeballs and replacing them with cotton, and applying a coating of arsenical soap to the skin. By the middle of the nineteenth century, guidebooks with ghastly tips abounded: fashion a noose out of a pocket handkerchief to strangle maimed birds, use No. 8 shot when hunting birds smaller than Pigeons, ... Tendons should be cut from the feet of larger birds of prey. Grebes should be skinned from the back instead of the gut. Toucans’ tongues should be left in their skulls. Instead of being sliced open, Hummingbirds could be dried over a stove and packed with camphor.
• The Peninsular & Oriental’s “Overland” route was the swiftest but costliest: seven thousand miles by sea to Suez, a sweltering caravan to Alexandria, and a steamer to London—a journey of seventy-seven days. Otherwise he sent his cases on a four-month voyage stowed aboard ships sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.
• The abundance of fruit, isolation, and safety provided by these islands created the perfect conditions for what would become known as runaway selection—over millions of years, the Birds of Paradise developed extravagant plumage and elaborate dancing rituals on meticulously prepared dance floors, all in the ostentatious pursuit of the ultimate goal: sex.
• He was overcome: “I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty.”
• As he read Wallace’s paper, he realized with mounting dread that the self-taught naturalist, thirteen years his junior, had independently arrived at the same theory he’d been quietly nurturing for decades. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he wrote in a letter to his friend, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell. “Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters,”
• forcing him to slip into the storeroom to sweep roaches into an empty biscuit tin. He nervously shielded the birds from sea spray and cold drafts, riding with them in the train’s chilly baggage car across the desert from the Red Sea to Alexandria.
• the founder of a new field of scientific inquiry: biogeography. The deepwater strait between Bali and Lombok, which he realized formed a dividing line between species found upon the Australian and Asian continental shelves, now appears on maps as “the Wallace Line.” Unfurling eastward across the Malay Archipelago is a 130,000-square-mile biogeographical zone now known as Wallacea.
• At the outbreak of the First World War, two years after Wallace’s death, German Zeppelins drifting silently eleven thousand feet overhead dumped 186,830 pounds of bombs over London and the coast.
• Before it all came to ruin, Walter Rothschild’s obsession had brought him the greatest private collection of bird skins and natural history specimens ever amassed by a single person. The collectors he employed risked life and limb in the pursuit of new species:
• In one of the stranger intersections of animal and man, the feathers of brightly colored male birds, which had evolved to attract the attention of drab females, were poached so that women could attract men and demonstrate their perch in society. After millions of years, the birds had grown too beautiful to exist solely for their own species.
• entire bird skins were mounted on hats so ostentatiously large that women were forced to kneel in their carriages or ride with their heads out the window.
• Considering the weight of a feather, this meant astonishing tallies: commercial hunters had to kill between eight hundred and one thousand Snowy Egrets to yield a kilo of feathers...By 1862 there were 120, and by 1870 the number had skyrocketed to 280. So many people were working in the feather-plucking and bird-stuffing business that trade groups sprang up to protect its workers, such as the Union of Raw Feather Merchants, the Union of Feather Dyers, and even a Society for Assistance to Children Employed in the Feather Industries.
• As the number of birds in the wild dwindled, the value of a feather doubled, tripled, then quadrupled. By 1900 a single ounce of the Snowy Egret’s finest plumes, which emerge only during the courtship displays of mating season, fetched $32. An ounce of gold was worth only $20.
• The skies were darkened with great clouds of migrating birds—in 1813 John James Audubon once traveled for three straight days under a single eclipsing horde of Passenger Pigeons.
• In 1889 Emily Williamson, a thirty-six-year-old woman from Manchester, founded a group called the Plumage League, dedicated to curbing the slaughter of birds. Two years later she joined forces with Eliza Phillips’s Fur and Feather meetings in Croydon in what was soon rechristened the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
• “The feather men are fighting for their iniquitous traffic with the same animosity as has so long animated the slave traders,” remarked a prominent naturalist in the New York Times.
• The arrival of the automobile meant that women could no longer wear large hats brimming with feathers in the cab of the car. Meanwhile the growing popularity of cinema rendered it unfashionable, even impolite, to wear large hats that obscured the screen.
• In the wake of each legislative victory came a band of scofflaws to test the limits of enforcement. In 1905 poachers murdered the first two game wardens dispatched to protect the endangered Snowy Egret in Florida.
• But as the eyes of the law were trained on rhino horns and elephant tusks, the birth of the Internet was bringing together a small community of obsessive men addicted to rare and illegal feathers: practitioners of the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.
• the troops, who, desperately hungry as their resupply ship had just been torpedoed, cast the two-thousand-year-old hooks into the nearby Sturma River. After they reeled in thousands of wild carp, the largest of which weighed fourteen pounds, Gardner reported back to command a “welcome change in the diet of the troops” and mailed the hooks to be kept for posterity in the Imperial War Museum in Hyde Park, not far from the Natural History Museum.
• to justify paying for such costly feathers, some needed to believe that the fish could distinguish between the twenty shades of green described in the masterworks on fly-tying. <> Kelson admitted in his book that the “classification” for selecting which salmon flies to cast was “artificial,” but he couldn’t seem to accept the full implications,
• The eye of the fly was to be fashioned out of a loop of silkworm gut. The head, horns, cheeks, sides, throat, underwing, and overwing all required special plumes. His analytical diagram of the fly reveals nineteen different components, to say nothing of the various styles and curvatures of hook. <> To tie like Kelson, his readers would need a silver monkey, a gray squirrel, pig’s wool, silk from the Orient, fur from the Arctic, a hare’s face, and a goat’s beard. There were single-tapered shanks and double-tapered shanks. Single-eyed and double-eyed hooks. Flat tinsel, oval tinsel, embossed tinsel, and tinseled chenilles. Seal’s fur, in bright orange, lemon, fiery brown, scarlet, claret, purple, green, golden olive, dark and light blue, and black. Cobbler’s wax. The list of materials needed in order to tie Victorian salmon flies was long, even before any mention of feathers.
• “To dress one fly,” marveled the author, “Schmookler will use up to 150 different materials, ranging from polar bear and mink fur to the feathers of wild turkeys, golden and Reeves pheasants, the African speckled bustard and the Brazilian blue chatterer.”
• Edwin was so captivated that he grabbed the remote and rewound the VHS, watching the sequence over and over, spellbound by the transfiguration of the simple feather. To tie a basic trout fly, the instructor employed a number of implements that looked as though they had spilled out of a Victorian surgeon’s bag... To make precise midcourse adjustments to the fibers of a feather, there was a needle-shaped device known as a bodkin. To grab hold of the narrow shaft of a feather, he used a tiny pair of hackle pliers. In the final stage of the tutorial, the instructor twisted the thread into a tight knot with a quick flourish using a whip finisher, an elegant device that resembled a deconstructed paper clip.
• Many trout flies were the half the size of a penny; salmon flies were huge, tied on jet-black hooks up to four inches long. Edwin could tie a trout fly in under a minute; a single salmon fly demanded ten hours or more behind the vise.
• By a happy coincidence, Muzzy’s hometown of Sidney, Maine, happened to be the site of the New England Music Camp for gifted young musicians. The boys were accepted, and Edwin began counting down the days until he could learn to tie his first salmon fly.
• The Durham Ranger, introduced in the 1840s by a Mr. William Henderson of Durham, England,... was like a snapshot of the British Empire at midcentury: employing plumes shipped up by Ostrich farmers in the Cape Colony, Blue Chatterer and Indian Crow extracted from British Guiana, and Golden Pheasant crated in the port of Hong Kong.
• he began to impart some of his strategies for finding feathers. Edwin found a retired ornithology professor willing to sell full bird skins on the cheap. He called up the Bronx Zoo, which sent him feathers from the autumn molt of Macaw, Spoonbill, Tragopan, and other species in their collection. He wrangled some Kori Bustard and Toucan feathers from species preservation societies.
• When Edwin first saw Couturier’s orenocensis fly, named after the orenocensis subspecies of the Indian Crow, he thought it was a painting. The fly, which Edwin once described as a “satanic moth,” was loaded with priceless feathers, including those from the Condor’s tail.
• The specimens safeguarded there represented about 95 percent of the world’s known species. Many of them had been gathered before the British Museum was founded in 1753.
• Ever since he tied his first Victorian fly, five years earlier, his pursuit of perfection behind the vise had been defined by struggle; he’d made do with unconvincing substitute feathers, while watching wealthy tiers outbid him at auctions of exotic birds... To now wade through a seemingly endless supply of birds unstoppered a river of creative possibilities in Edwin’s imagination. There was nothing he couldn’t tie. It was as if he’d stepped back 150 years to the era of Kelson and Blacker, when ships still sagged with crates full of exotic birds.
• In a community defined by its longing for the unobtainable, he would be king, and his extravagantly plumed flies would be unmatched.
• just as tiers longed to work with expensive feathers, flautists yearned to perform with flutes forged from the rarest metals. While a nickel-silver flute could be bought for fifty dollars, the prices skyrocket as the metal becomes scarcer, from pure silver to 12-karat gold, 24-karat gold, all the way to $70,000 for a platinum flute. Despite multiple studies demonstrating that experts couldn’t hear a difference
• And so no systematic audit of the Tring’s collection was ordered. Even if it had been, with over fifteen hundred cabinets housing 750,000 specimens and a small staff, a complete audit—which hadn’t been conducted for at least a decade—could take weeks.
• both had inquired about the possibility of buying some of the museum’s skins but had been turned away. Adele ruled them out as culprits but remained unaware of how close she had come to the thief, who had learned to tie his first salmon fly with Muzeroll, and had first heard about the Tring’s collection from Couturier.
• He pointed out a flatscreen TV in the corner, telling them he had stolen it from the Royal Academy’s International Student House—though no one had asked.
• (For all the 007 references, though, the British press neglected to mention that Ian Fleming had found his spy’s name after stumbling across a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by the American ornithologist James Bond.)
• As Chrimes continued and the evidence against him mounted, Edwin felt his most basic sense of self under assault. The prosecution was making him out to be some kind of demon.
• In the hierarchy of misbehavior that might trigger expulsion from an elite institution like the Royal Academy of Music, a felony theft of scientifically invaluable bird skins didn’t rate. Not only was Edwin going to graduate, he’d be flying to Germany on June 7 to audition for an orchestra. He couldn’t believe his luck.
• More recently, feather samples from 150 years’ worth of seabird skins were used to document the rising mercury levels in the oceans, which contributes to declines in animal populations and creates public health implications for humans who eat mercury-laden fish. The researchers described the plumes as the “memory of the ocean.”
• Initially, the story of the Tring heist—filled with quirky and obsessive individuals, strange birds, curio-filled museums, archaic fly recipes, Victorian hats, plume smugglers, grave robbers, and, at the heart of it all, a flute-playing thief—had been a welcome diversion from the unrelenting pressure of my work with refugees.
• It felt as though I was barging into a speakeasy that had already been tipped off: they had done a frustratingly good job cleaning up any trace of their connection to the Tring heist.
  But then I found a time machine.
  In October 2001 the Internet Archive
• I clicked on the November 29 snapshot, and my eyes bulged. It was like peeling back a layer of earth to find a perfectly preserved fossilized skeleton. There were dozens of posts about Indian Crow, Blue Chatterer, and Resplendent Quetzal skins for sale,
• “People don’t actually fish with this shit, right?!” Prum said. “So what is it about? It’s about this fixation, this obsession with originality. Well, there’s no fuckin’ originality in the world! Who are these guys? They’re dentists from Ohio! What claim do they have to originality in anything?!”
• “When I work on feathers,” he added, “knowledge is a consequence. When I pluck a feather and destroy it, we discover things about the world that nobody knew before.” By contrast, Edwin and the feather underground were a bunch of historical fetishists, practicing a “candy-ass, ridiculous, parasitic activity” that Prum would be glad to see go extinct.
• “I dunno,” he chuckled. “I think that things such as illegal poaching are probably hurting more. I think that, technically speaking, had the museum just put all those things up for sale, you would have nullified fifty Indian Crows’ worth of demand, which is fifty Indian Crows that would probably still be alive in the wild.”
  “Whoa,” I said, my poker face slipping for a moment. “You’re making the case that by taking the Tring’s birds, you saved live birds in the wild?”
  “Well, that’s a flowery way of putting it, and I wish that that were true.” He grinned, then added: “Maybe in a sense it technically is true.”
• “What did Edwin tell you to say to me?” I asked. “Did he tell you to lie to me?” <> “He said that you’re not my friend, that we shouldn’t become friends. He said ‘We don’t owe him anything,’ and that I should get you to pay for all the food and everything.”
• Under a streetlamp just outside town, I opened it up to find feathers arrayed like stamps, five rows per page, with plastic sleeves protecting the plumes, which glittered like tiny orange, sapphire, and turquoise gems against the black background.
• “I would know, I guess,” I grumbled, suddenly aware of the diminishing returns of my obsession.
• In the other current ran Edwin and the feather underground, and the centuries of men and women who looted the skies and forests for wealth and status, driven by greed and the desire to possess what others didn’t. <> In the war between knowledge and greed, it sure seemed as though greed were winning.
• “It’s really hard to convince people to quit using exotics!” Long texted. He was discouraged. “People just laugh at me and don’t really take me seriously.” I thought back to something Edwin had told me about his understanding of human nature: that there was an allure in what people knew to be taboo. When I’d asked Edwin why he didn’t just use substitute feathers that had been dyed to resemble the real thing, he winced: “The knowledge of its falsity eats at you . . . and all these people have been eaten by it. Including me.”
• the tale of Eddie Wolfer, a fly-tier known for owning a live Blue Chatterer. A couple of years earlier he had been rushed to the hospital to undergo surgery for a brain tumor. While he was getting a plate installed in his skull, two fly-tiers knocked on his front door and convinced his girlfriend to sell the bird, which they killed and sold at the next fly-tying show. “That bird was my pet,” he lamented in a post to the forum. “Those 2 SOBs have more money than God. How greedy people can be. You know who you are. I thought you were my friends.”