The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  McLain seemed to have anticipated my question. “Ask Tring the last time they counted all their birds!” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They have an inventory, and okay, now there’s a shrinkage. How do they determine what was taken?” he asked. “They could have trickled out over a period of ten years! Maybe somebody borrowed one to show their show-and-tell at school, you know, somebody put it in the wrong drawer, you know, a thousand reasons!”

  He paused to let his theory sink in. “All I’m saying is based on what I know . . . they thought two hundred and ninety-nine specimens were taken, but they didn’t know for sure, because they didn’t know how many they really had to begin with! ’Cuz nobody counted them!”

  I was at a loss for words.

  “They didn’t count them!” he exclaimed, as he stood up. “They didn’t count them the day before Edwin came. They didn’t count them once a year. They didn’t count ’em!”

  With that, he stamped out his cigarette and headed back inside.

  Disoriented, I walked back to my car. Had I imagined a mystery where there was none? Could someone else have taken skins prior to Edwin? Could it be that the Tring simply had its numbers wrong—that, in a collection with hundreds of thousands of specimens, they couldn’t possibly have a precise sense of the numbers? What if everything had been recovered from Edwin’s apartment the day of the arrest? What if there were no missing birds?

  There were only a few people who could answer these questions. Shortly after returning from Somerset, I sent Edwin an e-mail, asking if he’d be willing to tell me his story. He politely declined. Given that he was still within the window of his probation, I wasn’t surprised.

  That left the curators at the Tring. But every time I wrote the museum, trying to arrange an interview, they sent noncommittal replies, attaching press releases I’d already seen.

  * * *

  –

  Unless I could determine if the Tring had an accurate count of the missing birds, I was at an impasse. Finally I gave up waiting and bought a ticket to London, informing the museum that I was on my way with a list of questions.

  19

  THE LOST MEMORY OF THE OCEAN

  It was mid-January when I boarded the Midland rail to Tring, gliding through snow-dusted fields, crows shivering on the winter-stripped trees. Hopping off at the town’s small station, I wondered on which bench Edwin had anxiously waited with his suitcase of stolen birds. Above one hung a large poster for the English National Ballet’s production of Swan Lake; the lead dancer wore a tutu made of feathers.

  I bounded up the station steps and briskly walked the two miles into Tring. Like Edwin, I’d studied the route so many times that I didn’t need a map. There was the Grand Union Canal, with a houseboat anchored in frigid water a hundred yards downstream. Beggar’s Lane. Pendley Farm. The Robin Hood pub. I turned onto Akeman Street as naturally as if I’d grown up there, passing the police station en route to the museum. I had sent a last-second interview request to Detective Sergeant Hopkin but hadn’t yet heard back from her.

  I had an appointment the following day with the Tring’s curators, but having come this far, I couldn’t wait until then to start poking around. I wandered through the galleries, snapping pictures of taxidermy birds and bears that had been on display for more than a century.

  I turned a corner and stumbled upon two high schoolers making out next to the rhinoceros exhibit. After they scampered off, I couldn’t help but notice a small security camera mounted on the wall. I approached a placard hanging next to the rhinos:

  FAKE HORN

  The horns on these rhinos are fake, because of the real threat of theft for their supposed medicinal properties. Although fake horns have no value, the market for real horns now threatens many species in the wild.

  I assumed that the sign and cameras had been installed in response to the events of August 27, 2011. Only a few months after Edwin’s sentencing, a forty-two-year-old Brit named Darren Bennett had punched through the front window of the museum and hammered the horns off the Indian and white rhino specimens. With only six left in existence, the northern white rhinoceros is a functionally extinct species, after centuries of being hunted for the perceived medicinal benefits of their horns. In the past few decades, the demand has been fueled by Chinese men who believe it will cure erectile dysfunction, and Vietnamese clubgoers, who take it as a party drug. Though the horns are composed of keratin, the same protein responsible for fingernails and horse hooves, the four kilos stolen by Bennett would have fetched over $350,000 on the black market.

  Had they been real, that is. Months earlier, after Europol issued an alert about an organized crime network of rhino horn thieves responsible for dozens of museum burglaries, the Tring had replaced the real horns with plaster replicas.

  But while Edwin skated, Darren Bennett was sentenced to ten months in prison for stealing two pounds of horn-shaped plaster.

  * * *

  –

  I arrived for my meeting the next day with a simple goal: before embarking on some half-baked mission to hunt down the missing skins, I wanted to hear directly from the curators that their numbers were correct—that there were, indeed, unrecovered birds. McLain had called the museum’s competence into question, and given that Bennett’s break-in happened so soon after Edwin’s, I wondered if McLain might have a point: just how easy was it to rob this museum?

  I walked in the front door of the Ornithology Building to the sound of a security alarm, beeping frantically. The guard at the entrance smiled as if nothing were amiss and asked me for my passport. As I signed my name into the guest log, I asked about the alarm.

  “I’m doing my very best to ignore it,” she said with a wink, before explaining that it had been triggered during a routine cleaning of the sprinkler system’s smoke heads.

  I started flipping through earlier pages in the guest log in search of Edwin’s name but was quickly intercepted by a young press flack, who escorted me to a fluorescent-lit conference room. As I waited for the curators, I peered out a window onto the brick wall that Edwin had climbed and wondered if it had been the one he’d smashed.

  In the corner were several cream-colored plastic trays, containing many of the skins that had been recovered from Edwin’s apartment. Most of the birds were still sealed in crime scene evidence bags. One tray was loaded with individual Ziploc bags, stuffed with Indian Crow feathers. Edwin had drawn smiley faces on some of the Ziplocs with a Sharpie pen.

  * * *

  –

  Dr. Robert Prys-Jones and Mark Adams arrived, not appearing excited to discuss the events of June 23, 2009, especially with a refugee advocate moonlighting as an amateur bird heist investigator.

  I began by relaying some of the curious opinions about the role of natural history museums I’d heard at the Somerset show. Some fly-tiers had questioned why, with hundreds of thousands of bird skins, museums needed so many “copies” of the same bird—they’d be better off selling them, wouldn’t they? Hoping to provoke a response, I told the curators that several tiers had suggested that “what they do—heralding the beauty of these birds by tying them into flies—is better than locking them in some museum basement.”

  “The United Kingdom doesn’t spend millions of pounds on the Natural History Museum so the stuff isn’t used. . . . It’s underwriting a resource that is of immense importance scientifically!” said Prys-Jones, peering at me through his glasses, his brow furrowed. “I’m not able to make an intelligent response to that nonsense.”

  The world already owed a debt to the knowledge unlocked by these specimens, he and his colleague explained. Wallace and Darwin had drawn upon them to formulate their theory of evolution through natural selection. In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists compared historic specimens in the museum’s egg collection to show that shells had grown thinner—and less viable—after t
he introduction of the DDT pesticides, which were ultimately banned. 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.”

  Many of these birds were already in museum storage cabinets before the word scientist was even coined. Over hundreds of years, each advance—the discovery of the cell nucleus, viruses, natural selection, the concept of genetic inheritance, and the DNA revolution—ushered in new ways of examining the same bird: a researcher peering at a skin through a simple microscope in the early nineteenth century couldn’t have comprehended what would be revealed by mass spectrometers in the twentieth or by nuclear magnetic resonance and high-performance liquid chromatography in the twenty-first. The Natural History Museum’s curators made the bird skins available to hundreds of scientists each year, hailing from increasingly specialized branches of inquiry: biochemists, embryologists, epidemiologists, osteologists, and population ecologists.

  Scientists can now pluck a feather from one of the Tring’s eighteenth-century specimens and, based on the concentration of carbon and nitrogen isotopes, understand the bird’s diet. This in turn allows them to reconstruct entire food webs throughout history and to see how species have changed or where they migrated when food sources vanished.

  Specimens in the collection are currently aiding efforts to preserve the endangered California Condor by extracting DNA from ancient bone samples. The budding field of de-extinction, also known as resurrection biology, relies in part upon extracting DNA from museum specimens in order to bring lost birds like the Passenger Pigeon back to life.

  I realized that the preservation of these birds represented an optimistic vision of humanity: a multigenerational chain of curators had shielded them from insects, sunlight, German bombers, fire, and theft, joined by the belief that the collection was of vital importance to humanity’s pursuit of knowledge. They understood that the birds held answers to questions that hadn’t yet even been asked.

  But their mission depended, in large part, on trusting that those who came to study in the collection shared this belief. Edwin had preyed upon that trust in order to plot his heist. And now, with so many skins missing or separated from their tags, there was a devastating hole in the scientific record. The only hope of closing that gap was to recover as many of the skins as possible, with their tags attached.

  To underscore his point, Prys-Jones walked over to the trays of bird remnants and removed a Flame Bowerbird, sealed in a plastic bag, its tags missing. The seventeen skins Edwin stole, he explained, constituted not only the Tring’s entire collection but more than half the Flame Bowerbird specimens in all of the world’s museums: a serious blow to modern research.

  Another tray contained what remained of the Tring’s Resplendent Quetzals. Of the thirty-nine birds, which are protected by CITES, the museum had recovered twenty-nine with their tags still attached—but Edwin had sliced off the two-foot-long emerald-green tails from many of them. Next to the full skins were freezer-size Ziploc bags stuffed with hundreds of small iridescent green-tipped feathers, presumably plucked from the bodies of skins that were still at large.

  Intact, the Resplendent Quetzal is nearly four feet long, from beak to tail. In early press accounts of the theft, police had speculated that the birds might have filled up to six garbage bags. But Edwin’s lawyer later claimed that a single suitcase was used.

  “Have you ever thought about how he managed to get all these birds out logistically?” I asked.

  “I’ve thought a huge amount,” exclaimed Prys-Jones, momentarily letting his emotions show before he caught himself and fell silent.

  “We’ve got no evidence or knowledge of how he did it, other than what he told the police,” Adams said. The press officer shifted in her seat.

  “But do you think he had an accomplice?”

  “As you will be aware,” Prys-Jones volunteered, “Rist pleaded guilty. This meant there may not have been a level of investigation that might otherwise have been.”

  In doing so, Edwin had, in effect, halted the search for the Tring’s missing skins. While the museum’s curators were relieved that a third of the birds had been recovered with their tags attached, they no longer had Adele to help them search for the skins that were still missing.

  Or possibly missing.

  What if McLain was right—that all the detectives in the world wouldn’t have found the missing skins because the Tring didn’t know how many birds were stolen in the first place? As we stood next to the destroyed birds that they’d been charged with protecting, I felt like a jerk asking, but I hadn’t come this far to leave without knowing the truth. I told them that some fly-tiers believed the Tring wasn’t missing any skins, that everything had been recovered the morning of Edwin’s arrest.

  “They think any discrepancy in the numbers is due to poor record keeping . . . that you’re just making guesses,” I said, wincing as I added McLain’s suggestion that they “should ‘check in another drawer.’”

  Prys-Jones glared at me as though I’d just slapped him in the face. “What knowledge does he have of Tring? Zilch!”

  “Just shows that he doesn’t know how a collection runs,” Adams murmured.

  At that, Prys-Jones handed me a spreadsheet he’d brought to the interview. It meticulously noted the exact number of skins gathered from Edwin’s apartment the morning of the arrest (174), the number of those with tags (102) and without (72), and the number of skins subsequently returned by mail (19).

  * * *

  –

  “What if I can help you get the missing skins back?” I blurted out, surprising myself.

  Adams gestured at the pile of Ziploc bags, filled with scientifically useless feathers, and told me that the birds would need to be recovered intact, with their tags attached.

  As the press officer chimed in to say that my time was up, I realized how animated I’d grown during the interview, charged by the idea of reopening the investigation that had ended the morning of Edwin’s arrest. I smiled and said I would find it difficult to be as restrained as Prys-Jones and Adams were, had I been in their position.

  “We’re British. We’re not American,” Prys-Jones said.

  “But how does it make you feel that he never went to jail? That he still got a degree from the Royal Academy?”

  “If he’d gone to jail, how would it materially alter the situation we now find ourselves in, scientifically?” he replied.

  “Emotionally, wouldn’t it have been somewhat satisfying?”

  “What is the wider interest in an individual’s emotional response?” Prys-Jones snapped. A silence hung before he conceded, “It’s a sense of complete desperation, because we are here to look after these research collections in perpetuity and to make them available. To find that a portion of them has been vandalized is depressing in the extreme.

  “We will be doing work on this for decades to come,” he continued, “trying to work out what information we might be able to restore to some of the specimens. Not necessarily succeeding. There are decades of wasted time in this.”

  He shook his head. “It’s completely senseless. A crime committed by people who are delusional and obsessed.”

  As our meeting ended, Prys-Jones handed me a small stack of printouts, on the top of which were the museum’s press releases. Having already read them many times over, I folded them up and tucked them into my back pocket.

  * * *

  –

  Later that night I dropped into the Akeman pub for a pint of Tring red ale. It tasted like a slurry of flat Diet Coke and even flatter beer. Across the street, just next to the police station, the town’s tourist office was filled with pamphlets touting local attractions and history,
among them a card boasting that George Washington’s great-grandfather John had hailed from Tring: he’d left in 1656 on a trading voyage to Virginia but remained there after a shipwreck on the Potomac.

  As I forced down the ale, I tried to reconcile the many claims I’d heard from the fly-tying community with what Dr. Prys-Jones and Adams had shown me. Fly-tiers had an obvious incentive to claim the Tring was just guessing at the number of birds Edwin stole: if there were no missing skins, there was no ongoing criminality, and the fallout from the Tring heist could be limited to one person—Edwin Rist.

  The curators claimed that Edwin had been shown the list of birds during his interrogation and had admitted to its accuracy. The spreadsheet not only gave me confidence in the Tring’s numbers but also put the lie to the idea that Edwin was the one bad apple in the fly-tying community. Only nineteen birds had been mailed back to the museum by Edwin’s customers following news of the arrest, representing some 6 percent of the total number. How many were still floating around the community, their owners aware that they were in possession of stolen goods?

  Before I went to the Tring, the only number I’d seen, in press accounts of the arrest, was that 191 skins had been recovered. According to the spreadsheet, two more skins had been returned by mail since then, bringing the number to 193. Since the total number of specimens stolen was 299, this left 106 skins for me to track down.

  But what about the Ziploc bags full of loose feathers and fragments that had been recovered from Edwin’s apartment? In one article, I’d seen a police evidence photo displaying five Indian Crow breastplates alongside a Flame Bowerbird cape, sliced from the back of the bird. Edwin had severed the patches containing the most desirable feathers from the original skins, which had presumably been thrown away and were now in some landfill outside London. Surely that would bring down the number of missing skins?