The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
by Kirk Wallace Johnson
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When I work on feathers,” he added, “knowledge is a consequence. When I pluck a feather and destroy it, we discover things about the world that nobody knew before.” By contrast, Edwin and the feather underground were a bunch of historical fetishists, practicing a “candy-ass, ridiculous, parasitic activity” that Prum would be glad to see go extinct.
It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions . . . while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands . . . we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. “This consideration,” he concluded, “must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.
Little did I know, my pursuit of justice would mean journeying deep into the feather underground, a world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, cokeheads and big game hunters, ex-detectives and shady dentists. From the lies and threats, rumors and half-truths, revelations and frustrations, I came to understand something about the devilish relationship between man and nature and his unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.
In one of the stranger intersections of animal and man, the feathers of brightly colored male birds, which had evolved to attract the attention of drab females, were poached so that women could attract men and demonstrate their perch in society. After millions of years, the birds had grown too beautiful to exist solely for their own species.
This consideration,” he concluded, “must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.
In an era when women were expected to remain at home and had yet to be granted the right to vote or own property, the abolition of the feather trade was ultimately their work.
In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, hundreds of millions of birds were killed, not for museums but for another purpose altogether: women’s fashion.
As the twentieth century arrived, America’s manifest destiny had been fulfilled. The 1890 census found so many settlements as to declare the extinction of the frontier. Having reached the Pacific, our forebears looked back and saw a denuded landscape: mountains demolished and rivers fouled by the Gold Rush, and species vanishing as cities grew larger and their smokestacks taller. Between 1883 and 1898, bird populations in twenty-six states dropped by nearly half. In 1914, Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon on earth, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Four years later her cage hosted the death of Incas, the last of the Carolina Parakeets.
there was an allure in what people knew to be taboo.
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.
To protect them from Hitler’s bombers, the curators secreted Wallace’s and Darwin’s bird skins in unmarked lorries to manors and mansions throughout the English countryside. Among the safe houses was a private museum in the tiny town of Tring, built by one of the richest men in history as a twenty-first-birthday present for his son. Lionel Walter Rothschild would grow up to earn many distinctions: the Right Honorable Lord, Baron de Rothschild, member of Parliament, adulterer, blackmail victim, and one of the most tragically obsessive bird collectors ever to roam the earth.
indeed, when the Titanic went down in 1912, the most valuable and highly insured merchandise in its hold was forty crates of feathers, second only to diamonds in the commodities market.
But Edwin never saw mastery as having an end. As an artist, believing he had perfected any technique was anathema to him: fly-tying was an endless search for perfection. Some days he tied better than others. Some days he made mistakes he thought he’d long since moved past. He approached the art form with a humble, monkish devotion. As Muzzy put it, in a profile on Edwin and Anton that ran on McLain’s website: “All they need to remember is they are entering a school you never graduate from.
One hundred forty million years ago, a supercontinent in the southern hemisphere known as Gondwana began to break apart. After forty-six million years, the Australian Plate separated and began drifting north. For eighty million years, as the Australian Plate slowly drifted into tropical waters, a wide range of birds winged throughout the continent, among them the common ancestor of both Birds of Paradise and crows and jays of the family Corvidae.
Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration,” wrote Izaak Walton in 1653
In 1973 the London Convention was replaced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES, which has 181 signatories. Comprised of three appendices that gauge the severity of threat to various species, CITES protects 35,000 species of plants and animals. Among them are nearly fifteen hundred birds, including Alfred Russel Wallace’s beloved King Bird of Paradise.
In 1903, when it became clear that the Snowy Egrets of the Everglades had been hunted to the brink of extinction, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order to create the first federal bird refuge at Pelican Island in Florida—one of fifty-five reserves set aside during his presidency.
There was status in owning something rare, and parlor room vitrines laden with natural curios became “regarded as one of the essential furnishings of every member of the leisured classes with claims to be considered cultivated,” according to the historian D. E. Allen.
But while Edwin skated, Darren Bennett was sentenced to ten months in prison for stealing two pounds of horn-shaped plaster.
(For all the 007 references, though, the British press neglected to mention that Ian Fleming had found his spy’s name after stumbling across a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by the American ornithologist James Bond.)
Embracing the biblical proverb that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” the Victorians promoted natural history collecting as the ideal form of recreation, and stalls at train stations were packed with popular magazines and books on building a private collection.
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".
Where something is scarce, people are creative.
Who would steal a bunch of dead birds?
When Couturier replied, Edwin felt as though he had a message from Michelangelo or da Vinci in his inbox.
1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act outlawed
…remember that beauty works from within, it cannot be put on and off like a garment.
Your life work is not simply to attract man or please anybody, but to mold yourselves into a grand and glorious womanhood.
The earliest recorded use of feathers for fishing occurs in the third-century-A.D. writings of a Roman named Claudius Aelianus, who described Macedonian trout fishermen who tied “crimson red wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles.” And while the practice assuredly continued over the coming millennia, no texts on fly-fishing survive from the Dark Ages. Fly-tying didn’t reappear until 1496, when Wynken de Worde, a Dutch émigré running a newfangled printing press in Fleet Street in London, published A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, which included crude “recipes” for a dozen trout flies, one for each month, known by fly-fishing fanatics as the “Jury of Twelve.
In 1921 a passenger debarking from a cruise ship in New York was found to have five Bird of Paradise feathers and eight bunches of Egret plumes hidden in the false walls of his suitcase, along with sixty-eight bottles of morphine, cocaine, and a pouch of heroin hidden within a bag of nuts.
