Over the next eight hours, Muzzy introduced the brothers to the arcane tricks of tying Victorian flies, regaling them with stories about the godfathers of the art form like Blacker, Traherne, and Kelson, who tried to one-up each other with increasingly extravagant flies.
He spoke of the magic of tying with “real” feathers instead of substitutes like Turkey feathers, which have a round quill that is vexingly difficult to lash to a hook without it slipping. As Edwin tried flattening them with needle-nose pliers, Muzzy rhapsodized about how much easier it was to tie with Indian Crow.
At one step in the process, Edwin slipped on a pair of white silk gloves to prevent the oils in his hands from tarnishing the fly. The lost era of the art form seemed so close: he was communing with it, using the same types of tools, following the rules of century-old books. The only thing that had changed was the law, which placed the feathers in Kelson’s book frustratingly out of reach.
As the boys tied, Muzzy tried to make small talk, but he could see how engrossed they were by their partially completed Durham Rangers. They would check in on each other’s work, offering compliments and critiques before firing off another technical question at Muzzy. When he asked what they did for fun back home, he wasn’t surprised by their response: they tied flies.
* * *
–
On the second day, they tied the Baron, a fly praised by Kelson for use in the rivers of Norway. The original recipe required feathers from twelve different species of birds across the globe, plucked from Ostriches and Peacocks, Indian Crows and Blue Chatterers, Swans and Summer Ducks, Jays and Macaws, Golden Pheasants and Jungle Cocks.
In How to Dress Salmon Flies, one of the Victorian compendiums of fly-tying published in 1914, T. E. Pryce-Tannatt encouraged aspiring tiers to get Duck and Partridge skins from friends who hunted local game birds, but when it came to finding Brazilian Blue Chatterer skins, the Brit had no practical advice: “I only wish I possessed such a friend!”
Of course, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 had made it illegal to buy feathers of birds as common as the Blue Jay—even if one dropped lifeless from the sky and landed at Edwin’s feet, he could be fined for picking it up.
After sixteen hours of instruction, Edwin had tied his first two flies. Before they piled into the car for the drive home, Muzzy approached Edwin with a small envelope. “This is what it’s all about,” he murmured to the boy, who opened it to find $250 worth of Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer feathers in tiny Ziploc bags, enough for about two flies. The feathers were legal but rare and prohibitively expensive to a thirteen-year-old.
“Don’t tie with them yet—not till you’re ready,” he told the wide-eyed boy. “You gotta work up to these things.”
* * *
–
Back in Claverack, Edwin and his brother commandeered the garage and converted it into a laboratory for Victorian salmon flies, where they built upon the foundation Muzzy had laid. They called themselves the Fly Boys.
Working with substitutes, they boiled, steamed, oiled, glued, bent, twisted, crimped, stripped, trimmed, and massaged the fibers into shape. When they hit a wall, they’d call their teacher or experiment by trial and error until they figured it out. When Edwin ran out of wax, he went into the yard with a power drill and bored a hole into a pine tree, collecting the sap that bled out.
He learned how to use a cauterizer to burn away any unwanted feather fluff. When the cauterizer broke, he turned a blowtorch on his awl-like bodkin until it was red hot and ready to burn off extraneous fibers.
The learning curve was steep. Sometimes, after hours hunched over the vise, Edwin’s fingers would slip up, and the fly would unravel. There were disasters, like when their dad flipped on the overhead fan in the garage and inadvertently stirred up a tornado of formerly organized feathers.
Edwin relentlessly pursued his hobby, trying to replicate what he saw in Fly Tyer and in Kelson’s and Blacker’s books. Once he was skilled enough, he emulated the masters by inventing his own flies, with names like the Weirdo Fly and Edwin’s Fancy. “They would spend all day out there if we let them,” Edwin’s mom told a local journalist who had come to profile the Fly Boys. “But occasionally, my husband and I force them to come in and eat.”
That fall Edwin was accepted as an early admit to nearby Columbia-Greene Community College. The thirteen-year-old planned to study fine arts.
But Edwin’s artistic pursuits behind the fly-tying vise were hampered by the fact that he didn’t have the “real” feathers. Through brute repetition, he had developed the technical skills needed to tie Victorian flies, but he was constantly frustrated. To an untrained eye, his creations looked exactly like Kelson’s, but to him, they were adulterated, compromised by the use of substitutes like Turkey and Pheasant.
It was only when he finally got online that he realized he wasn’t alone in his obsession.
* * *
• • •
After a member of ClassicFlyTying.com, the largest online forum for Victorian fly-tiers, wrote in a post, “There is something . . . to a fly tied with the old materials,” Bud Guidry, the site’s administrator, responded swiftly. “I’ve met this ‘Something.’ I’m haunted by it constantly now,” wrote Guidry, a shrimp-boating Cajun from the tiny bayou town of Galliano, south of New Orleans. It’s “like a drug, nothing else matters, nothing else compares. . . . When it touches my fingers I feel the history. I’m taken back to a time when fish were as big as logs, fresh from the sea . . . reds, yellows and shades of blues. Their texture and color have that power to push you to do your best, there is nothing else that compares to that power.”
But the opportunity to experience that “something” was available only to the wealthiest tiers, those who could afford feathers from the birds cited in the original recipes, now even more expensive and elusive than they were in Kelson’s day. Aware that their flies were a kind of status symbol, they presented them in decadently staged photographs: one hooked a Jock Scott, with fifteen different species of birds—Toucan, Bustard, Macaw, Indian Crow, and more—into the cork of a bottle of twenty-year single malt, a cut-crystal scotch glass nearby. The backgrounds of such pictures were often littered with piles of priceless feathers, whole skins of rare birds, or patches of polar bear and monkey fur, an homage to Victorian excess.
Edwin was desperate to gain access to this level of tying. On Muzzy’s recommendation, he reached out to one of the kingpins of the exotic feather trade, a grizzled, chain-smoking retired detective from Detroit named John McLain, who ran a website called FeathersMc.com. “If you’re going to tie good flies you have to have good materials,” proclaimed McLain’s site, which offered nearly every kind of feather.
For Edwin, a fourteen-year-old student, the prices were astronomical. The Argus Pheasant, a near-threatened bird that roams the lowland hill forests of the Malay Peninsula, is prized by fly-tiers for its thirty-inch quills that are marked with olive-colored eye spots known as ocelli. Linnaeus named the species after Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology that never slept. McLain sold its feathers for $6.95 an inch, making a single quill worth more than $200.
Ten Blue Chatterer feathers went for $59.99. Ten Indian Crow feathers, each no larger than a fingernail, sold for $99.95, with a limit of one packet per customer “to ensure everybody that wants some of the real thing will be able to get them.”
With dreams of Argus, Edwin went to work, wading into the waist-high ferns behind his home to gather firewood for his neighbors, who paid him a few bucks an hour to run pine through their wood splitter. When McLain got a call from a teenager wanting to buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of Argus and other feathers, the former detective was suspicious. “Do your parents know you’re calling me?” he asked. Edwin put his mom on the line.
When the feathers finally arrived, Edwin handled them gingerly. He had worked so hard for them that he was reluctant to
cut into them: it was like learning how to sculpt on a priceless slab of marble.
As McLain got to know Edwin, he quickly realized that the boy’s appetite for feathers far outstripped what he could afford, so 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.
He began to scour eBay for exotic birds—in the early days of the auction site, sellers occasionally posted antique bird cases with little knowledge of the rarity of each species—but was usually outbid by grown men with deeper pockets. Sometimes when a rarity like the Blue Chatterer was listed, tiers would join forces to outbid others, splitting the spoils among themselves. Others bid on antique salmon flies, solely to razor them apart for their feathers. Everyone searched for Victorian hats, but they rarely appeared on the auction site. When a well-known fly-tier died, community members would publicly express their condolences and privately move on the feathers he left behind.
Supply never kept up with demand. McLain sold a lot of valuable feathers, but when it came to the most sought-after—Blue Chatterer, Indian Crow, Resplendent Quetzal, and Birds of Paradise—there was a veritable drought. Most of the posts on ClassicFlyTying.com were made by tiers obsessively searching for plumes: some threads read like confessionals, where the authors admitted the birds they coveted most in wistful tones. Indian Crow, Blue Chatterer, and Resplendent Quetzal topped the list.
It was a seller’s market; anyone who found a new source of the rare birds stood to make a lot of money, fast.
* * *
• • •
As Edwin’s prominence in the community grew, master tiers would occasionally send him a few feathers to help him complete a particular fly. One of them was Luc Couturier, a French-Canadian renowned for his extravagant flies. In 2001 he earned the distinction of tying all twenty-eight Traherne flies, named after a nineteenth-century British soldier whose flies were seen by many as the pinnacle of the art form. Kelson himself had declared him “the master of infinite elaboration . . . there are no salmon flies in creation requiring so much patient work to dress well as Major Traherne’s.” A single fly, known as the Chatterer, called for an astonishing 150 to 200 Blue Chatterer feathers—which, if anyone could locate such a quantity, would cost nearly $2,000.
Couturier was an evangelist for taking salmon flies to new aesthetic heights, breaking free of a slavish adherence to nineteenth-century recipes. He pioneered what he called “thematical flies,” inspired by a close study of a particular species of bird: chiefly, the Indian Crow, Blue Chatterer, and Birds of Paradise.
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. After Edwin came across Couturier’s Paradisaea Minor Fly, celebrating the Lesser Bird of Paradise, he nervously reached out to the Québécois master, asking him for guidance.
When Couturier replied, Edwin felt as though he had a message from Michelangelo or da Vinci in his inbox. They struck up a correspondence, trading several e-mails a day as Edwin absorbed his secrets. Couturier sent him rare feathers and special hooks and even designed a fly dedicated to Edwin and his brother.
In a 2007 article written for the website of Ronn Lucas, a legendary hook maker, Edwin wrote, “Fly-tying is not merely a hobby, it is an obsession we seem to devote a substantial part of our time to . . . examining feather structure, designing flies, and coming up with new techniques for getting exactly what we want out of a fly.”
He scrimped and saved to pull together enough materials for one such creation, nicknamed the Blacker Celebration Fly in honor of the art form’s patriarch, William Blacker. The fly included feathers from the Indian Crow, Golden-headed Quetzal, Flame Bowerbird, Superb Bird of Paradise, and Cotinga. When he posted a picture of it on the forum, the community was gobsmacked. “Good grief, Edwin!” replied one tier: “The only materials on that fly that aren’t on the CITES list are the flosses, the tinsels and the GP crests!” referring to the Golden Pheasant. “Do you and Anton live in an aviary, perchance? That at least would explain how you get your young hands on so many rare and exotic feathers!”
* * *
• • •
Even as his hobby became an obsession, Edwin had other things in his life. He was traveling to New York City each week for flute lessons and performances, having earned a spot in the New York Youth Symphony’s orchestra, chamber music, and composition programs, as well as in the Interschool Orchestra of New York.
At sixteen, Edwin became a regular at the American Museum of Natural History, when David Dickey, his former biology tutor, secured him an internship in the herpetology department. He was given a key card to the back offices and was taught about the procedures for handling the museum’s collection of reptile and amphibian skeletons, which were stored in a locked room monitored by security cameras.
Around that time, his parents were debating how to make use of their spare land in Claverack. Lynn had wanted to grow an herb garden, while Curtis thought it’d be fun to raise American bison, which had come back from the brink of extinction, thanks to Congress’s 1884 decision to authorize the army to protect the final few hundred from poachers. They settled on breeding hypoallergenic Australian Labradoodles—a cross between a Labrador and a poodle—that would fetch up to several thousand dollars a puppy. Edwin pitched in as webmaster for the newly named Hudson Doodles business.
But whenever there was free time, he was back in the garage tying flies. He was now teaching others in the community, sharing twenty-page step-by-step instructions with close-up photos and running commentary on ClassicFlyTying.com. He wrote with the chatty confidence of a host on a cooking show, noting that the “fly looks a little droopy” in one picture, but that when preening a fly, it is “ridiculously easy to over rub or break a crest” feather. He took questions from grateful tiers, happily sharing his tricks.
Within a few years of first laying eyes on Muzzy’s salmon flies, Edwin and his brother had joined the small fraternity of masters. In early 2005 Dave Klausmeyer, editor of Fly Tyer, formalized their ascension by proclaiming: “They are two of the finest young gentlemen you’d hope to meet, and they prove that the future of fly tying is in good hands.”
But Edwin never saw mastery as having an end. As an artist, believing he had perfected any technique was anathema to him: fly-tying was an endless search for perfection. Some days he tied better than others. Some days he made mistakes he thought he’d long since moved past. He approached the art form with a humble, monkish devotion. As Muzzy put it, in a profile on Edwin and Anton that ran on McLain’s website: “All they need to remember is they are entering a school you never graduate from.”
Like Couturier, he was trying to achieve something transcendental. Fly-tying had become a search for something more profound than tying turkey feathers to a hook. “I’m toying with the idea of tying a series with each species of Cotinga and Crow,” he told John McLain, referring to the five different subspecies of Indian Crow and seven species of Cotinga—the Blue Chatterer—one of which was on the endangered species list, “but that may not be practical right now.”
And while the demands of the flute took priority, visions of all the Victorian patterns he had yet to tie floated through his mind like apparitions, always beckoning. He regarded the “future of fly tying” moniker as an obligation to strive even harder, but the higher he climbed, the more difficult it was to distinguish himself. Couturier had tied all twenty-eight Traherne flies. It took years for Marvin Nolte, another master, to tie 342 flies for a private collector in Wyoming.
There were dozens of recipes in Blacker’s Art of Angling and close to three hundred in Kelson’s The Salmon Fly. At his current rate, Edwin would be chasing feathers for a hundred years before he had enough to tie them all.
* * *
• • •
In 2006, at sixteen, Edwin earned an associate’s degree in fine arts from Columbia-Greene Community College, with a spot on the president’s list.
Having decided to become a professional musician, he applied to the Juilliard School in New York City and the Royal Academy of Music in London, two of the most competitive music institutions in the world, which admitted only a handful of flautists each year. He dreamed of becoming the principal flute chair in the Berlin Philharmonic: it was perhaps the most coveted spot there was, but he knew it was pointless to pursue anything but the best.
Following his older brother’s lead, Anton enrolled at Columbia-Greene as a thirteen-year-old, with aspirations of performing as a concert clarinetist.
In the spring of 2007, Edwin was accepted by the Royal Academy of Music in London. He would live on the southern edge of Regent’s Park, home to the London Zoo, which had housed the first live Birds of Paradise that Wallace had brought back from the Malay Archipelago.
Suddenly the Berlin Philharmonic didn’t seem like such an outlandish goal. That summer, as he packed his things, he decided to leave behind his fly-tying materials and feather collection. He was worried customs officers in the UK might seize them, but more important, he was going to London to study the flute, not to tie flies. He needed to stay focused.
On the eve of his departure, he got an e-mail from Luc Couturier, telling him about a magical place in England he had to visit. Attached were photos of the bird-filled drawers of the Natural History Museum in Tring.
The Feather Thief Page 8