Now fighting for its existence, the feather industry ran sophisticated campaigns to denigrate groups like the Plumage League and the Audubon Society, calling them “faddists and sickly sentimental.” The Millinery Trade Review, sizing up the growing stigma, issued a call to arms: “there is no alternative but for the importer and manufacturer to take up the gauntlet and meet these people in a battle royal.” Lobbyists representing groups like the New York Millinery Merchants Protective Association, the Textile Section of the London Chamber of Commerce, and the Association of Feather Merchants warned lawmakers that any laws curbing the feather trade would eliminate jobs in a moment of economic insecurity. “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.
In the end, the conservationists won out. A procession of new bills tightened the net around the global feather trade. In the United States, the Underwood Tariff Act, passed in 1913, banned the importation of all feathers, and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act outlawed the hunting of any migratory bird in North America. In 1921 the UK passed the Importation of Plumage Prohibition Act. In 1922, an amendment was passed to ban the import of Birds of Paradise into the United States.
Other forces helped bring an end to feather fever, in particular the outbreak of World War I, which ushered in a period of austerity. Fashion trends shifted from ostentatious to more practical designs as women went to work in munitions factories and other positions vacated by men who’d gone off to fight. 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 an era when women were expected to remain at home and had yet to be granted the right to vote or own property, the abolition of the feather trade was ultimately their work.
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The desire to possess something beautiful, however, could never be fully eradicated. Despite the gains of the conservation movement, some from the older generation of women found it difficult to give up the “time-honored” custom of wearing feathers now shunned by their daughters and granddaughters. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a new profession emerged to meet their demand: the wildlife trafficker. 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. That same year authorities in the Hawaiian island of Laysan arrested a group of Japanese hunters with three hundred thousand dead Black-Footed Albatrosses in their possession. In 1921 a passenger debarking from a cruise ship in New York was found to have five Bird of Paradise feathers and eight bunches of Egret plumes hidden in the false walls of his suitcase, along with sixty-eight bottles of morphine, cocaine, and a pouch of heroin hidden within a bag of nuts. The following year the New York Times reported that customs inspectors were trained to observe the neck and waist of disembarking sailors: if the neck was small but the torso large, an arrest would be made: “On one occasion a suspiciously well-timbered and pompous ship captain was searched and a mere core or kernel of human being was found running through a huge structure of feathers.”
The smugglers grew ever more creative in their attempts to evade the authorities. An Italian cook working on the Kroonland was found with 150 Bird of Paradise plumes hidden in his trousers and another eight hundred back in his room. Two Frenchmen were busted in London for concealing Bird of Paradise skins inside a shipment of egg cartons. An international Bird of Paradise smuggling ring was found to be operating out of a rural Pennsylvania town. Officials in Laredo, Texas, apprehended two men fording the Rio Grande with 527 skins of the New Guinean birds. There were reports of high-speed boat chases off the coast of Malta with exotic birds smuggled from the North African coast stashed in the hull, and midnight meetings in Bavarian forests to buy “parrot sausages,” in which live birds had their beaks taped shut before being stuffed into women’s hosiery to sneak past the authorities.
Undaunted, the conservationists scored another major victory in London in 1933, when nine nations ratified the Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State. Often described as the Magna Carta of wildlife conservation, the convention listed forty-two species under its protection: most were large African mammals like gorillas, the white rhinoceros, and elephants, but a few birds were included. Though the list of protected species was incomplete, the convention provided a moral, legal, and operational framework in the battle against wildlife traffickers. In 1973 the London Convention was replaced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES, which has 181 signatories. Comprised of three appendices that gauge the severity of threat to various species, CITES protects 35,000 species of plants and animals. Among them are nearly fifteen hundred birds, including Alfred Russel Wallace’s beloved King Bird of Paradise.
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As the twenty-first century approached, U.S. Customs officers were no longer checking the necks of seedy sailors. Women had long since stopped wearing hats, much less ones festooned with exotic birds, which enjoy more legal protection and defenders than ever before. The membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds now numbers more than a million, maintaining more than two hundred nature reserves throughout the UK. The Audubon Society, for its part, counts over a half million members.
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.
5
THE VICTORIAN BROTHERHOOD OF FLY-TIERS
In late 1915 a ragtag group of soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force was entrenched just south of the Macedonian border, alongside an ancient Greek cemetery in Amphipolis, when an errant shell blew apart the entry to a nearby tomb. Inside, Dr. Eric Gardner, an army medic, discovered a skeleton from 200 B.C., clutching a handful of bronzed fishing hooks. Gardner distributed them to 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.
That ancient hooks would still function so well is a testament to the simplicity of the contract between man and fish: bait a crooked piece of metal, tie it to a line, and cast it out. Worms work well for bottom-feeders like the carp, but if the fish preys on winged insects skating the surface, like the trout, it helps to tie a couple of feathers to the hook.
The earliest recorded use of feathers for fishing occurs in the third-century-A.D. writings of a Roman named Claudius Aelianus, who described Macedonian trout fishermen who tied “crimson red wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles.” And while the practice assuredly continued over the coming millennia, no texts on fly-fishing survive from the Dark Ages. Fly-tying didn’t reappear until 1496, when Wynken de Worde, a Dutch émigré running a newfangled printing press in Fleet Street in London, published A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, which included crude “recipes” for a dozen trout flies, one for each month, known by fly-fishing fanatics as the “Jury of Twelve.” March’s Dun Fly called for a black wool “body,” with “wings” fashioned from the “blackest drake” mallard. The Yellow Fly of May recommended a body of yellow wool, with wings made from dyed yellow duck plumes. Although the Treatyse focused on trout, it referred to the salmon as “the most stately fish that any man can angle
for in fresh water.”
If there’s a gap between what a fisherman casts to a carp versus a trout, there’s a chasm between trout and salmon. The freshwater trout demands exquisitely realistic flies, meant to mimic the color, size, life cycles, and behavior of a wide range of aquatic insects. To “match the hatch,” trout fishermen must know when to cast a nymph, which replicates the phase of the insect’s life when it clings to underwater rocks, and when to deploy a dun fly, when the insects rise to the surface to split the “shucks” that cover their wings. Trout are picky, fickle, and flighty: anglers who don’t pay close attention to the river’s ecosystem won’t have much luck hooking them. Trout flies require materials that are drab, common, and cheap: elk hair, rabbit fur, wool, and chicken feathers.
A salmon fly, by vivid contrast, is made not to resemble anything in nature but to provoke. The fish being stalked are returning from the ocean to their natal rivers to spawn eggs in gravel beds, known as redds, before dying. After they die, their carcasses release loads of nutrients that attract small larvae and other insects that will eventually become the first meals for their newly hatched offspring. During these annual journeys, known as salmon runs, the fish stop feeding, but they protect their redds from intruders by biting with canine teeth and hooked lower jaws. Salmon don’t lunge at an angler’s fly because it resembles an insect: they attack it because it’s a foreign object in the place where they’ve just buried their eggs.
Catching trout requires paying close attention to nature. Salmon can be caught with dog fur tied to a hook and a bit of luck. But aristocratic anglers weren’t about to let that get in the way of the romance of casting a beautiful fly to the “king of fish” in the idyllic countryside.
“Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration,” wrote Izaak Walton in 1653 in The Compleat Angler. Beckoning to the next generation of “Brothers of the Angle,” Walton described a world coursing with magical waters. There was a river that extinguished lit torches but kindled unlit ones; another that turned rods to stone. There were rivers that danced when music was played, and others that brought madness to anyone that sipped from their waters. There was a river in Arabia visited by sheep whose wool turned vermilion red upon drinking, and a river in Judea that flowed for six days of the week before resting on the Sabbath.
Of course, there were also mythic rivers closer to home, like the Dee, the Tweed, the Tyne, and the Spey, but they were far from London and inaccessible to anyone but locals or those with the means to travel across rutted terrain, ancient Roman roads and narrow bridle paths. It wasn’t until the Victorian era, nearly two centuries later, that the railways opened up the legendary rivers to the lower classes. Suddenly, it wasn’t just lords and kings joining the Brotherhood of the Angle, but laborers hopping a train for a break from industrialized city life.
In order to limit the intrusions of these interlopers, British lords fenced off lands and made waters private, in a series of laws known as the Enclosure Acts. Working-class anglers were suddenly barred from rivers they’d spent a lifetime fishing: landowners sitting on a good stretch of salmon water started charging a premium for the right to cast a fly.
By the end of the nineteenth century, there was “very little water left in Britain which wasn’t firmly controlled either by landlords or clubs,” according to the fly-fishing historian Andrew Herd, as nearly seven million acres were fenced off to the general public and protected by trespass laws. The old order was restored; only the wealthy could afford “game fishing” for the noble salmon, while the common man was limited to “coarse fishing” for lowly bottom-feeders like the carp.
With most waters now private, the sport of salmon fishing “rapidly accumulated a burden of tradition and convention.” Private fishing clubs and individual aristocrats began to develop their own fly patterns, designated for each river. The flies soon took on a flashy appearance, using the pricey plumes of exotic birds. Even though there was no genuine advantage conferred by such flies, they were adopted with “near hysteria” by anglers who were, according to Herd, “egged on by local tackle dealers who had much to gain from parting the new breed of . . . salmon fisherman from their money.”
After all, the ports of London were bursting with shipments of exotic bird skins intended to feed the feather fashion trade. While women competed for the rarest of plumes for their hats, their husbands showed off by tying them into their hooks. By the time the first book to consecrate the art form emerged, William Blacker’s 1842 Art of Fly Making, the recipes had shifted from using Chicken feathers to those of South American Cock of the Rock, the Indian blue Kingfisher, the crest of the Himalayan Monal Pheasant, and Amazonian Macaws.
The Art of Fly Making was the first book to provide detailed step-by-step instructions for tying various salmon flies, and it identified the rivers on which they supposedly worked best. “They will be found most killing in the rivers of Scotland and Ireland,” he promised his customers, but only if they used the correct color: fiery brown, cinnamon brown, claret, sooty olive, wine purple, stone blue, or Prussian blue. Blacker was an expert merchandizer, selling his book, the flies, the feathers, the tinsel, silk, and hooks. To achieve perfection, he recommended owning the plumes of thirty-seven different birds—among them the Resplendent Quetzal, the Blue Chatterer, and the Birds of Paradise.
For those who couldn’t afford exotic birds, he provided instructions on dyeing ordinary feathers: for Parrot-yellow, a tablespoon of turmeric should be mixed with ground alum and crystal of tartar. The liquor of walnut rinds helped with subtle browns. Indigo powder dissolved in oil of vitriol yielded a deep blue. But to most, a dyed feather was never as good as the “real thing.”
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As the Victorian era progressed, salmon flies became ever more elaborate, and the authors of fly-tying books began to preach a pseudoscience to justify the need for such expensive and exotic materials. The greatest evangelizer of them all was the aristocratic playboy George Mortimer Kelson. Born in 1835, he dedicated most of his youth to cricket, long-distance swimming, and the steeplechase, but the passion that would eventually eclipse all others was fly-fishing and the stratified world of Victorian fly-tying.
His 1895 work, The Salmon Fly, is the art form’s apotheosis: brashly confident, dismissive of amateurs, and obsessed with hard-to-get feathers. He opened with an entire chapter extolling the scientific rigor of his work, though his methods were questionable at best. To penetrate the mind of the salmon, Kelson dove into rivers with flies of various colors, prying his eyelids open to see what they looked like underwater. His first attempt was with a fly called the Butcher, but whenever he tried to make out the Blue Macaw or yellow-dyed Swan feathers, he stirred up the mud on the bed of the river and lost sight of them. When he took the Butcher over to a gin-clear ice-cold river, he spent so much time studying it underwater that he became slightly deaf.
“Exactitude is needed in applying our principles,” he wrote, outlining the various factors that might cause a salmon to rise for an artificial fly, such as “predisposition for certain shades of color” and variations in the clarity of the water or the weather. So exact was his craft, at least in his own view, that he recommended one pattern, the Elsie, for salmon hiding between a large, upright rock and a nearby boulder.
Kelson smirked at the “uninitiated,” the “novice,” and those “so low down in the scale of ignorance” that they couldn’t tell a Jock Scott fly from a Durham Ranger. Of course, neither could a salmon, but in order 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, indignantly recounting the time when a salmon ig
nored his flies for a simple fly tied by an amateur angler: “At times salmon will take anything, at times nothing. . . . In a fever of excitement the King of Fish will exercise his royal jaw upon a thing it were an outrage to call a Salmon fly . . . a one-sided, wobbling, hydrocephalic bunch of incongruous feathers.” But before long he was back to preaching about the principles of symmetry and the harmony of “balanced” colors in a fly.
For Kelson, fly-tying had a kinship with the fine arts—he claimed the practice would instill a “mental and moral discipline” in his disciples. “We have here a well-bred hobby noteworthy of the attention of the greatest amongst us who are fishers, whether Divines or Statesmen, Doctors or Lawyers, Poets, Painters, or Philosophers.” For such great men, Kelson’s bible included eight stunning hand-colored plates depicting fifty-two finished flies, with lofty names like the Champion, the Infallible, Thunder and Lightning, the Bronze Pirate, and Traherne’s Wonder.
The Salmon Fly included detailed recipes for some three hundred flies, laying out which materials were required for each part. 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.
The Feather Thief Page 6