The retail model carried significantly more risk. If he sold to fewer people, he was much less likely to get caught. He probably wouldn’t need to post anything online, thereby avoiding leaving a trail of incriminating evidence. If anyone asked where the skins came from, he could just say that he found them in a London antique shop or some unpublicized Victorian estate sale.
Retailing would also require considerably more work, both in terms of the feathers themselves—harvesting them and searching for matching pairs from each side of the cape, wing, throat or breastplate—and on the business side, drafting copy and photographing each feather for every posting. He’d need packaging, probably thousands of Ziploc bags. He’d need to handle distribution, figuring out how to send his product to buyers without attracting attention. He’d need to manage the finances, setting up accounts for online payments, not to mention customer service. When he wasn’t at rehearsals, there would be the time-sucking distraction of constantly running down to the post office to mail feathers to impatient customers.
He decided to try more than one approach. He would sell some individual feathers on the forum and eBay, and at the same time reach out privately to a few people who he knew might be able to afford a full skin.
Laying out each skin on a dark gray piece of fabric, he trained his camera on the portions that would be most prized by his fellow tiers, concealing the labels tethered around the birds’ legs, the words MUS. BRIT. stamped in the corner.
Using tweezers, he began the first harvest, plucking the rich, orange feathers from the breastplate of an Indian Crow. When he was younger, his dad had shelled out $2,500 for a full Indian Crow skin from a collector on his deathbed in New Jersey—beating the line of eager fly-tiers waiting at the door—but Edwin had never been able to bring himself to pluck all the feathers. Now, with forty-seven of them on the desk before him, he had no qualms tweezing the plumed bounty from the bird. The rest of the bird’s black plumage was worthless to fly-tiers, so once he’d removed the breast feathers and matched them into pairs, he tossed the skin into a large cardboard box by his closet. He started on the next one, and before long he had a small pile of bagged feathers. With only six feathers not much larger than a pinkie fingernail, a single baggie might fetch a hundred dollars.
* * *
–
With his departure for summer break imminent, Edwin packed the birds and packets of feathers into a large cardboard box, carefully scattered mothballs inside to protect his collection from any interested insects, and stowed it in his closet, which he secured with an additional lock. Everything he wanted to sell was ready for distribution when he returned. So long as he snipped the tags from the skins before sending them off, no one would ever connect them to the Tring.
As he boarded his flight home, weeks after the heist, nobody was looking for him. No one at the Tring even realized anything was missing.
10
“A VERY UNUSUAL CRIME”
Over a month after the theft, on the morning of July 28, 2009, when Mark Adams showed up for work at the Tring, he had no idea how bad his day was going to get. While guiding a visiting researcher down the fluorescent-lit hallways into the bird collection, Adams pointed out the locations of various avian families and genera along the way. Pyroderus scutatus is here, he said, as he opened a cabinet, just as he’d done countless times before with other researchers. But when he pulled out a tray of Red-Ruffed Fruitcrows, known to fly-tiers as Indian Crow, all the adult male skins were gone.
Heart racing, he yanked out another tray. Empty. Another tray. Empty. With the exception of one adult male skin wedged out of sight in the back corner, all that remained of the species were juvenile males, which hadn’t yet grown their cherry-orange breast feathers.
An all-hands-on-deck call was sent out, and the Tring’s staff scrambled to see if anything else had been stolen. They checked other brightly colored members of the Cotinga family in nearby cabinets and discovered more empty drawers. Scores of Blue Chatterers were gone. They flung open the cabinet doors to the Trogon family, which includes the Resplendent Quetzal, and found them empty. They expanded their search to include the Birds of Paradise and realized that dozens, including five of Wallace’s, had vanished. Only the dull-colored females were left behind.
They rang the Hertfordshire police to inform them that the case of the broken window needed to be reopened.
Over the next couple of weeks, fifteen hundred cabinets were opened and thousands of trays pulled, as the devastated curators took stock of the loss: 299 birds from sixteen different species. While it was too early to know for sure, they were beginning to sense that it hadn’t been a scientific theft, since an obsessive collector trying to complete a collection of species would have taken the females and immature specimens as well. As their sweep continued, it became clear that whoever did this was after exotic birds with iridescent plumage.
Who would steal a bunch of dead birds?
At first the question seemed almost comical to Detective Sergeant Adele Hopkin as she headed over to the museum. A single mother with shoulder-length brown hair and a warm yet no-bullshit demeanor, she had been on the force for nearly twenty years, making detective just a few years prior to the break-in. She worked plainclothes units. Did undercover work. Did her time on the drug squad and also worked the safe neighborhoods programs, protecting vulnerable residents from fraud and harassment. As detective sergeant, she was now running a team in the Hertfordshire county constabulary investigating robberies, burglaries, and violent assaults.
She didn’t live far from the museum but hadn’t visited often. Before getting the call that day, she’d never heard of Alfred Russel Wallace and had little sense of the importance of the Tring’s collection. She did, however, understand that the investigation was already hampered by the length of time it had taken for the museum to realize it had been burgled. Whoever did this had quite the head start: had it not been for the request from the visiting researcher to examine the Indian Crow skins, it’s unclear how much more time might have elapsed before anyone noticed something was missing.
CCTV surveillance footage was held for twenty-eight days. It had been thirty-four days since the break-in. As discouraging as this was, Adele doubted that the footage would’ve solved the crime for them. Tring wasn’t a heavily monitored town, and she knew there weren’t any cameras on the stretch of road between the town and the train station: “It’s about four miles of nothing,” she said.
The thief’s motive wasn’t clear, nor were his methods. Had the birds been taken all in a single night or over several months or even years? After all, it had been a decade since the last full inventory of the collection. Was it a single perpetrator or more than one? Did they arrive by car or on foot? Could it have been the work of a crime syndicate? For years, a network known variously as the Irish Travellers, the Rathkeale Rovers, or the Dead Zoo Gang had been involved in a series of thefts of rhino horn and Chinese jade from museums across the globe, including in the UK.
Initially, Adele wondered if it was an inside job, someone sticking the precious specimens down their trousers, a couple of skins at a time, but she quickly ruled out the possibility. Interviews with the museum’s staff revealed how crushed they were by the theft.
She asked the museum to point out the window that had been broken. The beat policeman had inspected it back when it was first reported, but she wanted to take another look.
It was about six feet off the ground. A tall enough person could hoist himself in, but it wouldn’t be easy. Her eyes swept the area beneath the window and settled upon a gutter meant to catch bits of cladding and debris that might fall from the roof. Crouching down, amid the broken glass, she found a bit of a latex glove and a glass cutter. On one of the shards, she found a drop of blood. She bagged up the evidence her colleagues had missed and sent it off to the national forensics laboratory.
* * *
–
; As Adele poked around the crime scene, the museum was beginning to come to terms with the scope of the theft and the specter of a public relations crisis. The loss of so many irreplaceable skins, which would create a significant gap in the scientific record, was a deeply embarrassing blow. That it had apparently been so easily accomplished only made things worse.
As the tally of missing skins mounted, so did the scale of the Tring staff’s sense of failure as custodians of natural history. Mark Adams was hit hard by the burglary; he saw himself and the others as just one link in the centuries-long chain of curators entrusted with looking after the specimens, and they had failed.
But it wasn’t the first time the Tring had been burgled.
In 1975 a man in a wheelchair appeared at the museum’s entrance, asking to speak with a curator about the egg collection. Mervyn Shorthouse explained that he’d been severely injured in an electrical accident at work and was now on disability, and that eggs were now his only joy in life.
“The museum took pity on him,” recalled Michael Walters, then head of the Tring’s egg collection, and granted access on compassionate grounds. Over the next five years, Shorthouse paid over eighty-five visits to the Tring’s eggs—until a suspicious curator spotted him slipping some of them into his pocket. When police searched him outside the museum, they found 540 eggs in his baggy overcoat and in his car. Back home were another ten thousand. It was soon discovered that the “electrical accident” that had disfigured Shorthouse had in fact occurred in the midst of another theft, when he had attempted to steal cable by hacksawing through a live high-voltage line.
At the trial, the prosecutor lamented the “incalculable damage to part of the national heritage” and established that Shorthouse had been selling eggs to other private collectors, often removing any identifying markings to cover his tracks. Shorthouse was sentenced to two years for his crimes, while Walters spent the next twenty-five years and the rest of his career trying to sort through the damage to the integrity of the collection.
In another infamous case, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was banned from the British Museum’s Bird Room for unauthorized removal of specimens. But Meinertzhagen, a distinguished officer in the Levant during the First World War and a prolific birder and ornithologist, had Lord Walter Rothschild lobby the London museum to revoke the ban. After only eighteen months, the colonel was allowed back in, but for the next thirty years, the curators remained suspicious that he was stealing birds. Upon his death in 1967, his private collection of twenty thousand specimens was donated to the museum, but it was decades before the scientific community realized what Meinertzhagen had been up to: in an attempt to burnish his legacy as a world-famous collector, he had replaced the labels on birds collected by others and fraudulently claimed them as his own discoveries. In doing so, he cast into doubt the veracity of the invaluable biodata on the labels of many of the affected species, none of which were part of the newest theft.
Dr. Prys-Jones, the bird collections manager at the museum, had spent a depressing amount of time over the past two decades evaluating the extent of Meinertzhagen’s fraud. He knew that there had been a series of bird skin thefts in previous years at other museums, whose curators hadn’t rushed to publicize what happened. Between 1998 and 2003 a pest controller at the Australian Museum named Hendrikus van Leeuwen had stolen more than two thousand skulls and skeletons during his unregulated nighttime access to the collection. More recently the Naturkunde Museum of Stuttgart had suffered a loss of bird skins—mostly from the Cotinga family—but the thief was never caught, and as so often happened, the burglary was not made public.
Prys-Jones was particularly invested in tackling the challenges faced by natural history museums throughout the world. In November 1999 he convened a conference in Aston Clinton called “Why Museums Matter: Avian Archives in an Age of Extinction.” One hundred thirty curators from twenty-five countries participated, representing natural history museums in Europe that housed nearly four million bird skins among them. The Tring was the most prestigious, with four times as many skins as the second-largest collection, in the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, and dwarfing the few thousand skins held by museums in Luxembourg, Norway, and Italy. All faced similar pressures: public funding was on the wane, while the threats posed by theft were constant.
Following the conference, the electronic Bulletin Board for European Avian Curators, eBEAC, was established to bring together the extensive community of curators and to help time-strapped staffers stay abreast of the countless obsessions driving black markets for particular specimens. If a museum suffered a theft by an organized network, other curators throughout the world would be on heightened alert. The Tring volunteered to host the computer running eBEAC.
In this case, the system hadn’t worked: the Tring’s staff had had no idea that these particular species had become valuable enough to steal.
* * *
–
Making the theft public would mean risking their reputation, but the museum’s directors reasoned that it was worth risking embarrassment to try to recover the skins. Plus, Adele needed leads. It would take a while to get forensics results from the national fingerprint database, and if there wasn’t a positive match to a known criminal, she wouldn’t have anything to go on. Their best hope was that a member of the public might come forward with information.
Beyond finding the culprit, she had another urgent mission: after the Meinertzhagen and Shorthouse affairs, in which labels were either removed or changed, it was vital that she recover the birds with their biodata labels intact. Finding them without their tags would create an impassable void for researchers, as few meaningful inferences could be drawn from a skin without knowing the date and geographic details of its collection. An educated guess could be made based on the types of materials and cotton used to stuff a specimen, but it would be a painstakingly slow and less-than-conclusive process.
* * *
–
With Adele’s assistance, the museum drafted a press release announcing the theft.
“It is very distressing that we should have been deliberately targeted in this manner,” Richard Lane, the Natural History Museum’s director of science, lamented in the release. “Our utmost priority is working with the police to recover these specimens to the national collections so that they can be used by future generations of scientists.”
“This is a very unusual crime,” Adele’s supervisor, Detective Inspector Fraser Wylie, was quoted as saying. “We are appealing for anyone who may have seen any suspicious activity around the museum in the time around when the break-in was, before it or subsequently.” The police included their contact information along with a Crime Stoppers hotline number where anonymous tips could be shared.
A handful of media outlets in the UK, including the BBC and the Telegraph, ran brief articles, and a few sites like Nature.com and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries posted about it, but the release found its widest distribution in the various online fly-tying forums: FlyFisherman.com, FlyTyingForum.com, and Edwin’s favorite online haunt, ClassicFlyTying.com.
11
HOT BIRDS ON A COLD TRAIL
“Somebody stole birds from a museum!” Anton exclaimed on the other end of the line. “It’s on the forum!”
Edwin had just returned to London from summer break. He hurried over to his computer and found the press release. A statement from Detective Inspector Fraser Wylie caught his eye: “We would ask any collectors of such specimens to keep a watchful eye out in case they are offered anything resembling them.”
The police were still groping in the dark: Wylie suggested the birds might have been stolen by a “gang of thieves” on behalf of a collector, and that 299 birds would fill up to six garbage bags. When asked by journalists why these particular birds might have been targeted, he shared his working theories—that a dressmaker or jeweler might have commissioned the
theft in pursuit of iridescent feathers for their craft. “We keep an open mind,” he added, mentioning one other theory: “There may also be a need within the fishing market.”
At that point, with a formal investigation under way and a public call for leads, Edwin knew that it was too late to return the birds to the Tring with a simple apology. He considered stowing the birds away for years, maybe decades, selling them only after the police stopped searching. Or he could go ahead with his plan, making sure that he supplied a good enough cover story for each sale he made. How bright were these people anyhow, he reasoned, if it took them a full month to realize they’d been robbed? Surely they’d forget about them soon enough.
* * *
–
In October, shortly after starting his third year at the Royal Academy, Edwin purchased eleven hundred small Ziploc bags, 2.25 by 3 inches, ideal for storing individual feathers. He also ordered five hundred medium-size bags, 4 by 5.5 inches, perfect for storing patches of feathers sliced from the skin. On November 12, he logged on to ClassicFlyTying.com, navigated to the “Trading Floor” section of the forum, and created a new post: “Indian Crow Feathers for sale, Buying new flute!”
“The time has come for me to upgrade my instrument,” he wrote, “and I am selling some crow feathers to help this along.” In describing his wares, he used P.S. for the Latin binomial Pyroderus scutatus: “There are two subspecies, P.S. Scutatus, and P.S. Granadensis. All are super A quality. I have limited numbers of Granadensis so first come, first serve! There is no limit on the number of feathers you can buy at a time. Prices are: Scutatus large—10 feathers/$95; 10 medium/$85; 10 small/$80. Granadensis 10 large/$120; 10 medium/$95; 10 small/$90.” The post included high-resolution photographs of the black-and-orange-tipped feathers.
The Feather Thief Page 11