In a dark and gloomy back corner, beyond the labyrinth of organic cat food and life preservers for dogs, were four knee-high cages. I squatted down to find twenty Parakeets, blue and green. CHOOSE A COLORFUL COMPANION, encouraged a nearby sign. On the floor of one cage, an orange-beaked Society Finch—$23.99 (or $21.99 with a PetPerks membership)—was standing a bit unsteadily on a pile of wood chips, staring blankly at an aisle of scratching posts.
My phone vibrated with a text from Long.
He’d recently told me he felt like Tony Stark from Iron Man. In the movie, Stark, an international arms dealer, is injured by one of his own missiles, leading him to change his ways and confront evildoers. Long was excitedly planning to launch a movement called Sustainable Fly-tying, throwing his master-tier status behind the use of common feathers, fighting against his community’s destructive addiction to exotic and protected birds.
I was proud of him, but when he screwed up his courage and finally made the announcement on his Facebook page, his fellow fly-tiers scoffed. Jorge Maderal, a Spaniard in charge of a private Facebook group devoted to buying and selling rare feathers, was unmoved—he said he needed to “feel the real essence of the feathers” and “the history.” On ClassicFlyTying.com, sales of feathers and skins continued. On eBay, it was as easy as ever to buy and sell feathers from protected species.
“It’s really hard to convince people to quit using exotics!” Long texted. He was discouraged. “People just laugh at me and don’t really take me seriously.” I thought back to something Edwin had told me about his understanding of human nature: that there was an allure in what people knew to be taboo. When I’d asked Edwin why he didn’t just use substitute feathers that had been dyed to resemble the real thing, he winced: “The knowledge of its falsity eats at you . . . and all these people have been eaten by it. Including me.”
The allure was indeed powerful. I remembered the tale of Eddie Wolfer, a fly-tier known for owning a live Blue Chatterer. A couple of years earlier he had been rushed to the hospital to undergo surgery for a brain tumor. While he was getting a plate installed in his skull, two fly-tiers knocked on his front door and convinced his girlfriend to sell the bird, which they killed and sold at the next fly-tying show. “That bird was my pet,” he lamented in a post to the forum. “Those 2 SOBs have more money than God. How greedy people can be. You know who you are. I thought you were my friends.”
I texted Long to see if he’d returned the feathers to the Tring.
“Soon!” he replied.
* * *
• • •
Years after it all began, I found myself back in the Rio Grande river valley with Spencer, searching for trout. The Blue-Winged Olive mayflies were hatching, floating to the surface to dry their wings, hoping to take flight before being gobbled up. My cast was out of form—I spent half my time unsnagging flies from the piñon and ricegrass on the riverbanks. Spencer, on the other hand, could cast through bramble like a slingshot: pinching the fly, he pointed the rod tip forward and shot the line through the tiniest of openings.
In the half-decade since he first said the name Edwin Rist, the war in Iraq had ended and another had taken its place. I had fallen in love with Marie-Josée, dismantled the List Project, and moved to Los Angeles. We had a baby boy, happy and healthy, whose eyes light up at the hummingbirds flitting about the feeder by his nursery window. The middle name we share belonged to my grandfather but also to someone who has become special to our family: Wallace.
Spencer and I went for long stretches without needing to speak, hitting a pocket of water, drifting flies into deep pools, looking for a flash below the surface, studying the size of the emerging mayflies.
I told Spencer about the e-mail I’d just received from Wallace’s great-grandson, Bill. He told me that his ninety-three-year-old father, Richard, had been invited to Tring a few years ago to see Wallace’s Birds of Paradise. When one of the trays was pulled out, it was empty.
* * *
–
Spencer clucked. After seeing how the fly-tying community had reacted to my appeal for the missing skins, he told me he felt compelled to become a reformer. He was working on a book in the spirit of Kelson but that stripped each Victorian fly recipe of the exotic species that had cast such a dark spell over the community. He was certain that salmon flies could be just as beautiful using feathers that were common and cheap.
On the best of days on the river, the life of vibrating devices and glowing screens disappears, and all that matters is the temperature of the water, the speed of its flow, the skittishness of the fish, the accuracy of the fly, and the neatness of the cast. It all felt so pure, so untouched and hopeful.
Dr. Prum had assailed Victorian fly-tiers for desperately clinging to a world that no longer existed, calling them “historical fetishists” searching for meaning in the modern world, but as soon as he said it, I knew it also applied in some measure to me. The rivers I fished were dammed right and left. Many were choked with effluent and agricultural waste from industrial mines and farms. Even the brown trout we stalked weren’t “natural”; they had been shipped from the Black Forest region of Baden-Württemberg in 1883 and introduced into our streams. For the right to cast my fake flies to them, I bought permits from state departments of fish and game, which manage hatcheries that raise and release trout into the water.
Spencer and I sloshed upstream, while a hawk circled high overhead. Smaller birds mobbed it, thrashing at its wing and tail, but it orbited patiently, biding its time.
“Got a call from Roger Plourde the other day,” he said, knowing of Plourde’s less-than-subtle threat years earlier at the fly-tying symposium.
“Yeah?”
“He had tons of Flame Bowerbird he was selling.”
“Really?”
“But when I told him that I was about to go fishing with you, he hung up.”
The bloodhound in me wanted to scurry up the riverbanks and hop on a flight to Plourde’s front door, but I knew I was finished. Even if I sent the Tring a definitive list with five hundred names of those who’d bought the severed remains of their birds, nothing would happen. The museum had no reason to pursue scientifically useless feathers.
On we waded, scrambling over fallen trees, silently gesturing at unsuspecting trout. The chill of the water made our legs drowsy and our boots heavy, but we waded upstream beneath the piñon and ravens as though the river would never end, searching for darting golden flashes beneath the surface.
* * *
• • •
That fall the men of the Victorian salmon-fly-tying world boarded flights from across the globe for the 26th International Fly Tying Symposium, which would be held once again at the DoubleTree in Somerset, New Jersey.
Chuck Furimsky, the director and promoter-in-chief, described it as “the ultimate candy store for fly-tiers . . . more of everything—more fly shops, more displays . . . more fly-tying secrets.” John McLain, Roger Plourde, and a hundred celebrity tiers would be there.
The theme of the show: “Never Enough.”
There would be no Fish and Wildlife agents descending on Somerset. Instead, they were focused on headline-grabbing busts of rhino horn and elephant ivory. A Canadian college student who had recently been caught at the border with fifty-one turtles taped to his legs, intended for sale to Chinese turtle soup fanatics, was sentenced to prison for five years. In a statement to the court, he thanked the U.S. justice system for “stopping the darkness of my greed and ignorance.”
But the men at the Never Enough symposium knew they were safe. Those who kept the skins Edwin stole had only to snip the tags off to remove the evidence and keep the law at bay. Those who bought patches or plucked feathers knew that nothing could tie their quarry back to the crime.
From the skins, they harvested wings and breastplates and capes.
From the fragments, they harvested individual
feathers.
Miserly tiers stowed them away in mothballed drawers to treasure in private moments. Others, aware that the Tring and law enforcement weren’t even looking for them anymore, openly traded and sold them back and forth until the bulk of the birds had dissolved into the bloodstream of the feather underground.
Before long, stealing birds from museums was once again a laughing matter on the forum. When a member posted a photo of himself in front of a stuffed Florican Bustard at the Natural History Museum in London, one user replied: “Thank goodness it was protected by a case of glass. I can see the look of fear in that bustard’s eyes.”
Another forum member uploaded photos of mounted birds that he had recently taken during a visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—Blue Chatterers, Great Green Macaws, and the Birds of Paradise.
The subject line: “Paging: Secret Agent Edwin Rist.”
* * *
• • •
In January 2016 snow crunched under boots as the postman cut across the parking lot with a delivery for Dr. Robert Prys-Jones. Nearby, kids tugged sleds up the shallow hills of Tring Park for another run, the exhalations of their parents’ cheers visible in the January chill. Inside Walter Rothschild’s museum, wide-eyed children pressed palms to glass, eyeballing the stuffed polar bear before sprinting off to see the rhinoceros.
The address on the envelope was written in neat block lettering. No return address. A Norwegian postage stamp.
When the staffer opened it, there was no letter. Just a Ziploc bag full of feathers, black and orange and crimson. After some discussion, a curator carried it down the long silent hallway to the vault, passing Victorian-era birds in spirit, tens of thousands of eggs and skeletons, the collection of endangered and extinct specimens, Darwin’s finches, and the cabinets that once housed Wallace’s birds, coming at last to a stop before the door marked PYRODERUS SCUTATUS.
A tray was pulled out, revealing a pile of crime-scene evidence bags. The Norwegian delivery was placed inside, and the cabinet doors closed with a quiet thump.
The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1862, shortly after his return from an eight-year expedition throughout the Malay Archipelago, where he gathered over 125,000 specimens. Wallace independently arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection now attributed to Charles Darwin.
Sketches of beaks of various birds, including the Chestnut-breasted Malkoha and the Black-and-yellow Broadbill, from one of Wallace’s specimen notebooks, dated 1854.
A Yellow-crowned Barbet bearing one of Wallace’s specimen labels, noting the date and location of its collection. His inclusion of such data and argument for its importance led to him being hailed as the father of Biogeography.
The Red-ruffed Fruitcrow, known to contemporary practitioners of the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying as Indian Crow. Its black and orange breastplate feathers are among the most coveted plumes in the community. A single museum-grade skin can sell for $6,000.
The Spangled Cotinga, one of the seven species known to fly-tiers as the Blue Chatterer. Its turquoise feathers are called for in many salmon fly “recipes.”
The Resplendent Quetzal, another bird whose colorful feathers are prized by fly-tiers. Though the species is protected by CITES, an international treaty, making it illegal to buy or sell, packets of its feathers are routinely sold on eBay.
An adult male Greater Bird of Paradise, perched on the treetops of the Aru Islands, where Alfred Russel Wallace became the first Western naturalist to observe the bird’s courtship display. Wallace worried that mankind’s need to possess such beauty would eventually lead to their extinction. Little did he realize that a burgeoning fashion trend would soon send plume-hunters into those very forests.
A woman with an entire Greater Bird of Paradise mounted on her hat, ca. 1900. In the late 19th century, a “feather fever” in fashion swept through Europe and the United States. As a result, between 1883 and 1898, bird populations in twenty-six states had dropped by nearly half. Historians have described the craze as the greatest direct slaughter of wildlife by humans in the history of the planet.
The January 1907 cover of The Delineator, a popular women’s fashion magazine.
Sixteen hundred hummingbird skins sold for two cents apiece at a London millinery auction in 1912. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, one hundred and forty million pounds of plumage were imported into England and France alone. By 1900, millinery was a booming industry, employing nearly one hundred thousand New Yorkers.
Around the turn of the century, some began speaking out against this widespread slaughter. This cartoon from an 1899 edition of Punch depicts a woman with a bird mounted on her hat above the caption: “The ‘extinction’ of species; or, the fashion-plate lady without mercy and the egrets.” The magazine played a key role in stigmatizing feather fashion throughout the U.K.
Sandwich-board men protesting the widespread slaughter of egrets in the streets of London in July 1911 as part of a campaign by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, founded by Emily Williamson and Eliza Phillips.
Here U.S. federal agents pose with confiscated egret skins in the 1930s. After the passage of a series of conservation laws, the protection of birds became a high-stakes battle between wildlife agents and poachers. By 1900, a kilo of Snowy Egret feathers was worth nearly twice its weight in gold.
An illustration from the frontispiece of The Salmon Fly (1895) depicting George M. Kelson, the English lord whose pseudo-scientific book of fly “recipes” popularized the art form. “We have here a well-bred hobby noteworthy of the attention of the greatest amongst us . . . Divines or Statesmen, Doctors or Lawyers,” Kelson wrote.
Six salmon flies depicted in The Salmon Fly. As the art form progressed, flies took on increasingly lofty names like the Infallible, Thunder and Lightning, and Traherne’s Wonder, named for its creator.
An “analytical diagram” from The Salmon Fly illustrating the various parts of a Jock Scott salmon fly. Although salmon cannot tell the difference between a tuft of dog fur and an exotic bird feather, Kelson’s book argued that rare and expensive plumes were more effective in attracting the “King of Fish.”
The Jock Scott fly, tied according to Kelson’s 110-year-old recipe by Spencer Seim, the fly-fishing guide who first told me about Edwin Rist and the Tring heist. Instead of using costly and illegal feathers from exotic species, as many tiers do, Seim uses dyed feathers from ordinary game birds like turkeys and pheasants.
Edward “Muzzy” Muzeroll, with the Victorian salmon flies that first caught the attention of thirteen- year-old Edwin Rist at the Northeast Fly-tying Championship. Before long, Edwin’s father had arranged for his son to take private fly-tying lessons with Muzzy.
Edwin Rist in the summer of 2004, learning to tie his first salmon fly under Muzzy’s supervision.
The Durham Ranger, the first salmon fly Edwin tied, following George Kelson’s 1840 recipe. Edwin used cheaper substitute feathers, but at the end of the session, Muzzy handed him a small envelope filled with $250 worth of rare feathers and whispered, “This is what it’s all about.”
Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild was born into a family of legendary bankers but was drawn to the natural world. By the age of twenty, he had obsessively collected over 46,000 specimens. For his twenty-first birthday, his father built him a private museum in the corner of the Rothschild estate at Tring Park outside London. Upon his death in 1937, Rothschild’s museum was bequeathed to the British Natural History Museum.
The Tring Museum today, now home to one of the greatest ornithological collections in the world. Late one evening in June 2009, twenty-year-old Am
erican virtuoso flautist and Royal Academy of Music student Edwin Rist broke through a rear window and pulled off one of the largest specimen thefts in history.
Inside one of Tring’s corridors of specimen cabinets, like the one Edwin walked down the night of the heist.
A tray of Scarlet Minivets in one of the Tring’s cabinets. Over the course of several hours, Edwin filled a suitcase with birds from sixteen different species and subspecies, selecting only the brightly plumaged adult male specimens.
The Tring Museum’s press release calling on the public to come forward with any information regarding the theft included this photo of the species the thief had targeted: Red-ruffed Fruitcrow, Resplendent Quetzal, Cotingas, and Birds of Paradise, several of which had been collected by Alfred Russel Wallace.
Over sixteen months, Edwin sold feathers and skins obtained during the heist on eBay, through his personal website, and on an online forum popular with fly-tiers, ClassicFlyTying.com. This “mix pack” of feathers plucked from the stolen birds, including several species and subspecies of Indian Crow and Blue Chatterer, was posted to the ClassicFlyTying.com trading floor the night before his arrest.
The Feather Thief Page 24