The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  II.

  THE TRING HEIST

  7

  FEATHERLESS IN LONDON

  In the fall of 2007 Edwin Rist began his studies at the Royal Academy of Music. It had taken over a decade of devotion to the flute—a relentless schedule of private lessons, rehearsals, and practice—to earn a coveted spot at the school, whose alumni are launched into the finest orchestras or, like Elton John, pop superstardom.

  Edwin’s schedule was demanding—in between classes and practice, there was an endless offering of guest lectures and performances by distinguished musicians. He didn’t struggle with the transition from the solitude of homeschooling to college life in a big city. He was no stranger to the world of overachieving musicians, and he had little difficulty making friends, knowing instinctively how important it was to get along with everyone since they all performed together.

  But it only took four weeks after arriving to London for his other passion, the one he’d intended to set aside during his studies, to reassert its hold on him.

  On October 10, 2007, he logged onto ClassicFlyTying.com to see if anyone would be willing to split the cost of a hotel room at the upcoming British Fly Fair International (BFFI), a couple of hundred miles north of London at the upmarket estate of Trentham Gardens. Like the shows that he’d frequented in the United States, the BFFI would host dozens of fly-tying demonstrations, alongside some eighty vendor booths brimming with feathers, silks, vises, and hooks.

  “Unfortunately I’m not tying at the show (Customs wouldn’t like my birdie bag . . .),” Edwin wrote, referring to the feathers he’d painstakingly collected over the years, “but I’d still like to see some old faces.” A forum member reminded him that the fair was only an hour away from the fishing cabin of Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, built in 1671 on the banks of the River Dove.

  He’d been tying flies for nearly as long as he’d been playing the flute, and here he was, in the land that spawned his beloved art form, without any feathers or materials. As if to add insult to injury, when he set out for Trentham Gardens, an eight-hour train delay kept him from attending the BFFI.

  Two months into term, he visited the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, snapping photos of specimens and curios on display: cases full of stuffed Birds of Paradise, sapphires and diamonds. In the Mammals Hall next to a massive whale skeleton was an American mastodon—not Incognitum, from his hometown, but Missourium, exhumed in the 1840s from a spring in Missouri. Back at his dorm, he posted pictures of his visit to Facebook, including images of the Flame Bowerbird and the velvety-black Bird of Paradise known as Lawes’s parotia. But the magnificent collection he’d heard about from Luc Couturier, the vast repository with hundreds of thousands of birds, was somewhere out of sight, walled off from the public.

  * * *

  –

  In January 2008 Edwin received an invitation to demonstrate his mastery at the Bristol Fly Dressers’ Guild. He leaped at the opportunity. His host, a prominent British tier named “Terry,” asked what fly he hoped to tie. Edwin shared some recipes from Kelson’s The Salmon Fly but stressed that he was completely without materials.

  A month before the presentation, Terry took down the required materials for the Stevenson fly like a grocery list. Edwin had very specific requests: twisted silkworm gut, ultrafine white thread, a six-aught-size hook, Lagartun silk. When Terry, who had agreed to put him up in his Bristol flat for several days, asked what kind of food he liked, Edwin replied, “I will eat absolutely anything (as long as it’s not disgusting, a la McDonald’s), and in large quantities. . . . I am after all still a student, and a fairly starved one at that.”

  “I’m trying to sort out how I can bring over materials from home for next semester,” Edwin added. “Life without tying is fairly harsh, but having a fortune in feathers confiscated by customs would be worse.”

  To tie in England, he’d need to rebuild a collection of materials from scratch. He had poked around London’s antique shops in a vain search for Victorian-era hats and bird-filled natural history cabinets, and on the few occasions when he found a bird skin auction of a recently deceased aristocrat, the items were far beyond the reach of his student budget.

  The screen name he used to upload videos from his time at the academy to YouTube, edwinresplendant, might have reflected his longing. The emerald Resplendent Quetzal feathers were prized by anyone hoping to tie rarities like the Ghost Fly or Wheatley’s Fly no. 8 of 1849, which also calls for King Bird of Paradise plumes. But King Bird of Paradise feathers rarely appeared on the marketplace. The Resplendent Quetzal was endangered, listed in Appendix I of CITES, making it all but impossible to possess.

  His early efforts to source feathers thwarted, he found his thoughts returning again and again to the e-mail Luc Couturier had sent him, and he decided he needed to see the greatest collection in the world.

  * * *

  –

  According to the Natural History Museum’s website, its ornithological collection included 700,000 skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 specimens in spirit—full birds, pickled in large jars—4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs. Over two kilometers of shelves were needed to hold the birds in spirit alone. 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.

  Edwin clicked through to the “Access to the Collections” page and saw that researchers and artists could visit by prior appointment. He doubted the museum would grant him access if he said he was a fly-tier keen on seeing exotic birds. He considered his options. He had always wanted to write a book in the tradition of Kelson, to share his expertise with the next generation of tiers: perhaps he could request access in order to take photographs of beautiful specimens to include in it. But the museum was unlikely to admit someone without a background in writing, much less someone without a publisher.

  Finally, he struck upon a solution: he would write in the name of research. On February 9, 2008, four days before he was scheduled to tie at the Bristol Fly Dressers’ Guild, Edwin e-mailed the museum under his own name, saying that a friend at Oxford who was working on a dissertation on Birds of Paradise had asked him to take high-resolution photographs on his behalf.

  As part of its security protocol, the museum asked Edwin for the e-mail address of the Oxford student in order to verify his request. Edwin created a fake e-mail account under his friend’s name. When the museum sent the verification e-mail, they were in fact writing to Edwin. Access was granted, and a date was set in March for him to come photograph Alfred Russel Wallace’s Birds of Paradise.

  * * *

  –

  The day before the demonstration in Bristol, Edwin and Terry stopped at Veals Fishing Tackle, a short walk from the Broadmead shopping mall in the center of town. Edwin bought a pair of Jay wings, which were easy to purchase in the UK but prohibited in the United States. Across town Little Egrets, once sold by the millions for the millinery trade, flapped through the open-air section of the Bristol Zoo known as the Alfred Russel Wallace Aviary.

  That night they did a practice fly-tying session at Terry’s home, so that Edwin wouldn’t feel rusty. But there was no need for concern: the following evening he dazzled several dozen of Terry’s friends in the Fly Dressers’ Guild, tying the Stevenson. The fly’s body was a bright shock of orange-dyed seal fur, with silver tinsel threaded throughout. Wings of black-tipped orange Golden Pheasant feathers enveloped a pair of black-and-orange cream-colored Jungle Cock feathers. The pattern was remarkably similar to the first salmon fly he’d ever tied, with Muzzy: the Durham Ranger. Like Muzzy, Terry supplied Edwin with substitute feathers from ordinary birds for his demonstration.

  Terry had seen Edwin’s flies on the forum, but when he witnessed the eighteen-year-old’s talents in action, he was overcome. “He is the BEST salmon tyer I have EVER seen. He is probably in the top five in th
e world,” Terry raved in a note to the national president of the Fly Dressers’ Guild, urging him to book Edwin at as many of its chapters—which number several dozen throughout England—as possible. “Everyone who attended . . . was amazed.”

  When Edwin got back to his dorm room at the Royal Academy, he dashed off a thank-you note to Terry. “I look forward to coming back,” he added. “Hopefully by then I’ll have my own equipment and materials here and will be able to put on a real show.”

  * * *

  –

  On the day of his appointment to photograph the Birds of Paradise, Edwin returned to the South Kensington campus of the Natural History Museum in London. The curators in charge of the bird skin collection had told him to cut through the parking lot and ring the buzzer on a door to the Ornithology Building, located behind the public museum. He could scarcely contain his excitement as he wandered around the lot, high-end digital SLR camera in hand, searching for the entrance.

  A security guard noticed him and offered his help. When Edwin mentioned his appointment to visit the ornithological collection, the guard smiled and told him he was at the wrong branch of the museum, in the wrong city. The skins hadn’t been in London for decades.

  Embarrassed, Edwin returned to his dorm room and began researching how to get to the tiny town of Tring.

  * * *

  –

  The public portion of the Tring museum is a striking example of Victorian architecture, with steep-pitched roofs, red brick walls, high-peaked gables, chimneys, and dormers. Kids play in the adjacent park while parents refuel at the Zebra Café next to the museum entrance. By stark contrast, the building housing the largest ornithological collection in the world is a four-story brutalist fortress of concrete, looming in a corner of the museum complex.

  On November 5, 2008, Edwin strode through the main entrance of the Ornithology Building. A security guard standing behind a counter welcomed him and asked for his ID. He signed his name in the visitors’ logbook while the guard phoned the staff’s office to announce his arrival.

  A staffer escorted him into the bird vault, where the museum’s hundreds of thousands of bird skins are carefully stored in fifteen hundred white steel cabinets, occupying tens of thousands of square feet spread over several floors. The air was thick with the smell of mothballs, used to protect specimens against insect damage. To shield the birds from damage from ultraviolet rays, there were narrow windows that only let in a faint amount of sunlight.

  The staffer deposited the visitor in front of the cabinets marked PARADISAEIDAE, the Birds of Paradise. Before wandering off, he mentioned the locations of a number of other species he thought the photographer might like to see, gestured to a colleague in the corner of the room, and instructed Edwin to “let him know when you’re done.”

  Edwin opened the cabinet doors. Inside were rows of drawers, some two dozen in each cabinet. He slowly pulled one out to reveal a dozen adult male Magnificent Riflebirds lying on their backs. He removed his trembling hand from the drawer pull. He’d never seen a full skin before, much less a dozen of them. The birds, about a foot in length, had a robe of deep black feathers, accented by a breastplate of metallic bluish-green feathers that turned purple in the right light. Their eyes had been stuffed with cotton, and biodata labels hung from their legs, recording the altitude, latitude, longitude, date of capture, and name of the collector. Several bore the faded handwriting of Alfred Russel Wallace.

  The drawer below held another dozen, and the drawer below that, a dozen more, all in perfect condition. Riflebird feathers were rarely listed for sale on ClassicFlyTying.com, and when they were, their scarcity made them more valuable. In 2008 ten Riflebird breast feathers had sold for fifty dollars on the forum; with more than five hundred feathers per breast, a single skin might fetch $2,500. Tens of thousands of dollars were resting in the drawers of the first cabinet he opened alone, like lightweight, iridescent bricks of gold. And rows of cabinets stretched down the hallways for what seemed like miles.

  Standing inside the Tring museum was like being in the vault of Fort Knox, the repository of centuries of mining, where the United States’ gold bullion is stored. At some point, the value becomes incomprehensible.

  Once he pulled himself together, Edwin carefully removed one of the birds from the drawer, brought it over to a research table, and took a picture. After he returned it, he surreptitiously snapped a photograph of the cabinet.

  * * *

  –

  He moved to the cabinet that held the King Bird of Paradise. As Wallace described the specimens he’d gathered in the forests of Aru, ten of which were now within Edwin’s reach: “the head, throat, and entire upper surface are of the richest glossy crimson red, shading to orange-crimson on the forehead . . . shining in certain lights with a metallic or glassy lustre.”

  Edwin took a photograph of his favorite specimen, snapped another of the corridor of cabinets that housed hundreds of skins from all thirty-nine species of the Birds of Paradise, then moved on to the museum’s collection of Central and South American Cotingidae family of birds, which included the coveted Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer.

  He selected a specimen to photograph—the small Blue Chatterer’s turquoise body practically glowed in his hands. Most Blue Chatterer skins for sale were half destroyed, their feathers picked and plucked at by generations of tiers. A set of ten feathers could fetch fifty dollars. Here were dozens of flawless, untouched specimens, each of which could be sold for at least two thousand.

  Each time he photographed a new species, he snapped a picture of its location. His camera’s memory chip slowly filled up with a visual map of the vault.

  Edwin’s mind raced beyond the sheer monetary value of the Tring’s birds to the creative potential they represented. 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. Despite his fame in the community, there were so many flies that he still hadn’t tied—not least of which were the exorbitantly plumaged “thematical flies” of his mentor, Luc Couturier.

  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.

  He’d had two unsupervised hours to take as many photographs as he wanted. He knew Couturier had seen this room, and maybe only a few other salmon fly-tiers in the world. It had been an achievement to bluff his way in.

  But as soon as he walked out into the bright light of day, he knew he had to find a way back inside.

  8

  PLAN FOR MUSEUM INVASION.DOC

  Edwin wandered back toward the train station in an altered state, charged by a magnetic reaction to the birds he had just seen. He had to find a way to see them again.

  It won’t be easy, he thought as the train sped back to London. He’d gained access under false pretenses, and the museum was unlikely to fall for the same ruse twice. Since he had signed in using his real name, he couldn’t return under a different identity—too many staffers had seen him.

  For months, he thought about how to get back inside the Tring. At first it was a game, something to occupy his mind while he was sitting through lectures and practicing for ensemble performances. But as he descended deeper into his thought experiment, he realized that it wasn’t simply about seeing the birds again. It was about taking them.

  If he owned these birds, he would have an unrivaled stash of feathers for the rest of his life. In a community defined by its longing for the unobtainable, he would be king, and his extravagantly plumed flies would be unmatched. Even better, he could feature them in the book on fly-tying that he hoped to write, cementing
his place in history alongside Kelson.

  But his desire to possess the birds was driven as much by pragmatism as by obsession. The global financial meltdown of 2008 had dealt a blow to Hudson Doodles, the Rist family’s dog-breeding business, nearly wiping out its customer base. In the face of a recession, five-thousand-dollar dogs were unnecessary luxuries. Edwin occasionally sent a little money home from student loan checks, but he knew it wasn’t helping much.

  At the same time, auditions with orchestras were only a year or so off, and 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 that he’d be auditioning behind a screen—Edwin had his eyes on a $20,000 golden flute, roughly the equivalent of what four Indian Crows would fetch on the forums.

  At twenty, the idea of stealing the Tring’s birds glowed with potential—to advance his ambitions as a flautist, to give him the life and status he coveted, and to provide for his family. Even better, the birds would be an inoculation against future hardship: their value would only increase in time.

  And why, he asked himself, did the museum need so many birds, after all? What earthly good was it serving to lock up dozens of skins from the same species? With such a vast collection, would they even notice if a few went missing?

  Maybe, he thought, if he could persuade the curators to let him back into the building, he could put a couple of birds in his pocket without anyone noticing. It’d be easy to do this with species like the Cotinga, which were only six inches long and a tenth of a pound—the weight of a golf ball. But Indian Crows were a foot and a half long; Resplendent Quetzals were three and a half feet in length. How could he pocket a King Bird of Paradise without destroying its delicate tail feathers? Even if he found a way to conceal birds during a visit, how many trips would it take to build a respectable collection? How many times could he realistically do it before arousing suspicion?