The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  I messaged Couturier in the forums, but his account hadn’t been active for years. I pried an e-mail address from another tier but never heard back. I befriended other Couturiers on Facebook in search of him, but he seemed to have vanished.

  The only other person I could think to ask was John McLain. When I reached him, he was holed up in his basement, dyeing feathers and sorting orders from across the globe. The last time he’d seen Couturier was the 2009 Somerset show, where he’d arranged for him to share a room with Bud Guidry, the administrator of ClassicFlyTying.com, who was hoping to keep travel costs down. Couturier had a reputation for being erratic, so when Guidry reported that Couturier had stolen his credit card and run up a thousand dollars in charges that weekend, McLain cut ties with the French-Canadian.

  To find him, McLain suggested I reach out to a friend of Couturier’s named Robert Delisle. Before long, I was clicking through a massive Facebook album of exotic bird skin photos. In one, there were five Cotingas, all in perfect condition, arrayed like a fan on Delisle’s tying bench. In another, a full Indian Crow skin with cotton eyes. In another were dozens of museum-quality skins.

  I sent him a message, asking if he could connect me to Couturier, but Delisle told me he was no longer reachable. Couturier, he shared, lost his job in 2010. Over the past few years, Delisle had spent $40,000 buying up every last scrap of material from his hard-pressed friend. After selling off his rare skins and feathers, Couturier was no longer tying flies.

  “Was there a lot of Indian Crow and Cotinga?” I asked eagerly, while Marie-Josée, who was born in Montreal, corrected my French.

  The details appeared on the screen one line at a time: Couturier had “ten Indian Crows, five Western Tragopan, three Resplendent Quetzals, two Gymnogene Bustards, and all of the chatterers,” referring to the seven species of Blue Chatterer, one of which is endangered.

  “What about the Birds of Paradise?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he wrote, “I can’t enumerate it all, but he had everything.”

  Heart thumping, I asked him if the skins still had tags on their feet. After a long pause, Delisle replied: “Oui.”

  When I asked if I could see them, he told me he’d get back to me.

  * * *

  –

  Instinctively, I returned to Delisle’s Facebook page and pored over hundreds of photos of flies, hooks, and bird skins, in search of more evidence. I texted McLain an image of three full Indian Crow skins surrounded by eight severed and plucked breastplates: all that remained where the fiery orange feathers once shined was a leathery expanse of dried skin.

  “That’s a lot of empty shell casings,” the detective texted back. “Must have been quite a gun fight.”

  Delisle didn’t appear worried about raising suspicions when displaying his collection. There was a Superb Bird of Paradise patch in one photo. Another showed skins of all seven species of Blue Chatterer, next to feathers from Cock of the Rock, Western Tragopan, and two different subspecies of Indian Crow. All the plumes were neatly fanned out on a large patch of polar bear skin. If I could prove that the birds he’d purchased from Couturier were from the Tring, I could potentially cross twenty birds off the list of missing skins.

  But I soon made the discouraging realization that Delisle had an eBay account. If these were Tring birds, they were already gone. Under the handle Bobfly2007, he sold Flame Bowerbird plumes for $19.99, Resplendent Quetzal for $43 a pop, Indian Crow feathers for $139, and a full skin of the endangered Cotinga maculata for $417.50.

  Combing through over two thousand of his completed auctions, I logged $11,911.40 in feather sales, giving eBay a commission of over $1,300. As I read through his customer reviews—“Excellent to deal with and very personable service” and “THANK YOU FOR THE FAST SHIPPING”—I wondered how eBay could permit such flagrant violations of CITES and other wildlife trafficking laws.

  But the Delisle sales were small potatoes compared to other feather vendors I started unearthing on the auction site. A simple search for Flame Bowerbird, the species hit the hardest by the Tring theft, brought me to Doug Millsap’s auction page, which he ran under the handle lifeisgood.503: a pair of feathers were priced at $24. When I noticed a full skin in the background of one of the auction photos, I messaged him, feigning an interest in buying the whole skin. He said it was mine for $1,800. While the Flame Bowerbird is not a protected species, it was not a commonly available bird in the fly-tying world prior to the Tring heist. “Most of these are part of a collection from the 1920’s Victorian era,” Millsap wrote, encouraging bidders to “check out my other auctions for rare and hard to find materials.”

  Based in Ocean Park, Washington, Millsap manages a pizza parlor with his wife, but he advertised a surprising amount of rare bird skins and feathers. Between two separate eBay accounts, he had so many seller feedback ratings that I had to hire a research assistant to import the data into my spreadsheet. A “gorgeous vintage” Scarlet Macaw sold for $490, a Blue and Gold Macaw for $650, and a full Blue Chatterer skin for $1,675. As the species began to appear in row after row—Blue Chatterer, twelve-wire Bird of Paradise, Penguin, Banksian Cockatoos—the tally of revenue quickly cleared $80,000.

  Though eBay’s Wildlife and Animal Products policy advises its users to follow international treaties like CITES and domestic laws like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the company appeared to be doing little to preempt or monitor for illegal sales.

  It wasn’t as if Delisle and Millsap were using code words to describe the birds. Many listings used the bird’s Latin names, which would make it easy for eBay’s screeners to surface the posts, if such screeners existed. You won’t find any rhino horn on the site, but type in the endangered Cotinga maculata or Resplendent Quetzal, the sale of which is prohibited by Appendix I of CITES, and you can check out with PayPal and have it rushed to your front door by the U.S. Postal Service with an eBay money-back guarantee.

  I sent several inquiries to eBay, but the company never replied. It wasn’t until I sent it a list of hyperlinks to current auctions of endangered bird species, and asked how I was meant to interpret the commission that eBay earned in facilitating those illegal sales, that they wrote back.

  Ryan Moore, senior manager for Global Corporate Affairs at eBay, responded within a few hours, sending over a heap of corporate jargon that made me shudder with the memory of the kinds of watered-down statements I had to write as a junior public affairs officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Baghdad.

  “eBay is committed to doing what it can to protect endangered species,” Moore wrote. The extra words did a lot of lifting: it wasn’t that eBay was doing what it could but that it was “committed” to doing what it could.

  “eBay has demonstrated a commitment to prohibiting the sale of illegal wildlife products on its site,” Moore continued. It wasn’t that eBay had prohibited the sale of illegal wildlife products, but that it had “demonstrated a commitment” to doing so.

  Moore stressed that eBay had over eight hundred million listings and provided “examples and links to resources with more details about state, federal and international wildlife laws.” He added that the company “actively enforces this policy through a rules-based filtering system and reporting mechanisms available to eBay members and government agencies; and through removal of products and/or sellers as appropriate.” When I asked how the filtering system worked, and whether he could provide statistics on the number of auctions that had been halted by eBay, he was unwilling to share.

  I drew his attention to a listing of feathers from Cotinga maculata, an endangered and protected species. By listing it under its Latin name, the seller had made no effort to keep a low profile, making it clear that whatever filtering system eBay had in place wasn’t populated with terms from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the central database of threatened species. Moore promised to look into it. When
I refreshed the Cotinga auction page, it was gone.

  But this was obviously damage control. Instead of flagging something with a press officer, I was curious to see what happened when I used eBay’s online form. I reported an illegal auction of a pair of Resplendent Quetzal feathers, but a week later, with no action by the company, they sold for thirty-nine dollars.

  * * *

  –

  Delisle had gone silent.

  After years of picking off names one by one, I decided to make one public post in the forum, challenging the entire community to help me find the remaining skins. If Edwin was truly just a bad apple in the cart, I argued, why not collectively work to undo the damage to their reputation?

  “The black eye of greed has surfaced again,” replied Aaron Ostoj, an Oregon-based feather dealer whose family motto is “God, Family, Feathers.” I’d first seen his name when he joked about some Indian Crow patches being “stolen from a natural history museum and sold at 3000% profit” a full four months before Edwin’s arrest.

  Ostoj and others weren’t thrilled to see the Tring heist rehashed. Several complained that I was just “stirring the pot.” One member angrily suggested that if I cared so much, I should donate money from my book advance to the museum. Val Kropiwnicki called me an ambulance chaser, before asking: “Maybe I’m just sick of witch hunts? Maybe we are all poisoned by this?”

  Bud Guidry, the administrator, was pissed. He said that despite his best efforts, the subject of the Tring heist could only “be buried as deep as the shovel handle.” He announced that he would leave my post up until it “went south . . . then I’ll sweep it under the rug again till it comes up again later.”

  Shortly thereafter he wrote that he was being bombarded with private messages from people asking him to remove it.

  Why were they so troubled? I wondered. I had only asked for help in recovering stolen items to the museum. I had even arranged it so that birds could be returned to the Tring anonymously.

  Only hours after it went up, Guidry declared that my post would be deleted: “The members of this community have spoken. I give you all my word: when another mention of this subject or those involved are posted here, it will immediately be deleted.”

  Guidry told me that forty-one members had privately begged him to delete my inquiry.

  25

  FEATHERS IN THE BLOODSTREAM

  Weeks later, when Robert Delisle finally replied, his story had changed. He now said there were no tags. When I asked a question about Couturier, he said he didn’t know him. Sensing I was losing him, I wrote, “I just wanted to know when you bought the skins from him.” After fifteen minutes, he wrote “Good luck” and never replied to me again.

  Were the birds Delisle bought off Couturier from the Tring?

  I was desperate to find out but didn’t even know if Couturier was still alive: Marie-Josée had found an obituary in French for someone with his name. Unless I was prepared to start searching through the homeless shelters, morgues, and cemeteries of Montreal, Couturier was lost to the story.

  Marie-Josée, only a month away from our baby’s due date, sensed my disappointment but asked a clarifying question: “What if he’s still alive, and he admits that they were from Edwin? Then what? Aren’t they all gone anyway?”

  “I would know, I guess,” I grumbled, suddenly aware of the diminishing returns of my obsession.

  * * *

  –

  In the beginning, the mystery of the Tring heist had been little more than a puzzle to distract me from the pressures of my work with the List Project. I’d spent years trying to get people to care about tens of thousands of refugees fleeing a war they no longer cared about. My campaign for a dramatic, speedy solution—an airlift of our interpreters—had failed spectacularly, and I knew that I was staring at a lifetime of incremental gains, if I was lucky.

  Now as I trawled the Web for some sign of Couturier, I realized I was stuck in another endless struggle. I had anointed myself the rescuer of the Tring’s birds, even though the museum had long ago written them off as lost to science and wasn’t searching for them. With a guilty plea and a closed case, the police were no longer investigating. The community of fly-tiers clearly wanted nothing to do with my quest.

  The Tring’s spreadsheet had been the fragment of a map that launched my expedition, but all I ever discovered were ruins. Of the sixty-four skins I set out to find, I knew that the remains of two were in South Africa with Ruhan Neethling. If Long helped Edwin sell twenty skins, that brought it down to forty-two. If Couturier’s skins were from the Tring, and Delisle’s count was right, then I was down to twenty-two.

  But I was always too late. Long had already sold off whatever skins he had. Even if I could tie Couturier’s birds to the Tring, Delisle had already auctioned them off. Ruhan was preparing for the Rapture and couldn’t care less about my mission. If Edwin had played me and still had them locked away in some long-term storage unit in Düsseldorf, I’d never know—he never spoke to me again after our interview.

  The only ones I ever laid eyes on were Long’s feathers, and I was beginning to worry that they wouldn’t be returned to the Tring.

  Even worse, I had uncovered additional museum thefts by other fly-tiers. A few years prior to the Tring burglary, at least two German natural history museums—in Stuttgart and Frankfurt—had been robbed of dozens of Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer skins. The thief was believed to have been an older American fly-tier who moonlighted as a pest control expert: while spraying for bugs, he had allegedly taped the skins inside his white coveralls. Marie-Josée worriedly asked if I was now on the hunt for more missing skins.

  As more and more museum curators shared stories of specimen thefts, I thought of the two currents of humanity running through the story of the Tring’s birds. In one coursed Alfred Russel Wallace, Rick Prum, Spencer, Irish the undercover detective, the league of curators who had shielded the birds from Zeppelins and the Luftwaffe, and the scientists who probed each skin for insights, adding to our collective understanding of the world in tiny increments.

  Here were humans bound across centuries by the faith-based belief that these birds were worth preserving. That they might help future generations, trusting that the march of scientific progress would forever present new ways of looking at the same ancient skins.

  In the other current ran Edwin and the feather underground, and the centuries of men and women who looted the skies and forests for wealth and status, driven by greed and the desire to possess what others didn’t.

  In the war between knowledge and greed, it sure seemed as though greed were winning.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the last trip I took before our baby was born, I paid a visit to the battleground of a similar war that had been waged a hundred years earlier: the feather district of New York.

  The pigeons puttering around on the sidewalk on the section of Broadway that cuts through Greenwich Village barely made way for the humans pounding by in sneakers and heels. The city has evolved around them, mostly upward, but the buildings of the old feather merchants still cast the same cold shadows they did 120 years ago, when a hundred thousand New Yorkers fashioned the jewels of the sky into hats.

  I wandered about, imagining great big vats of dye on the upper floors, bulk dealers ruffling through thousands of skins, haggling over the cost per kilo. Feather men wheeling new deliveries of birds bagged from the Malay Archipelago down side streets, shooing away stray dogs hoping for something feathery to chew on. French immigrants getting by on the tricks of the Parisian plumassier trade, dyeing and shaping feathers in the tenement house attics of the nearby Quartier français. Mothers and daughters fluttering down from the Upper West Side to peruse the latest plumed fashions.

  I stopped in front of the ornate cast-iron pilasters of 625 Broadway, where Ph. Adelson & Bro once showcased the latest “lines of Aigre
ttes, Paradise and Ostrich feathers.” Inside, a line of high schoolers waited to order burritos from Chipotle.

  I’d unearthed the address in an 1899 issue of The Millinery Trade Review, whose editors railed against the mounting success of the Audubon Society and the conservationists fighting to topple their business, condemning them in the name of the free market for attempting “to dictate to American women what they shall wear and to American merchants what they shall buy or sell or what they shall import.”

  When the Lacey Act and other early conservation laws were passed at the turn of the century, the men who filled these storefronts with bird skins were beside themselves. “The foolish laws that now exist are obeyed to the letter by the millinery trade,” snarled the editors: “any more of the kind, however, will be strenuously opposed.”

  Behrman & Colton. Max Herman & Company. Velleman & Co. A. Hochheimer’s. Eventually all were claimed by the compounding pressures of changing fashions, new laws, and most powerfully, a societal recognition that people had taken their need to possess beautiful birds too far.

  I crossed Bleecker and stopped in front of a twelve-story building that had once housed the New York Millinery and Supply Co., Aronson’s Fine Headwear, and the Colonial Hat Company. I’d read about a seizure of a number of Bird of Paradise plumes here just after the First World War.

  It is now a PetSmart. A large poster of a Parrot near the front entrance proclaims: EXOTIC PETS IN BACK.