![]() On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. ![]() Note: anyone interested in booking Spencer Seim, the remarkable fly-fishing guide in Taos who first told me about the Tring Heist, should visit his site at (where you can also order one of his beautifully-tied ‘sustainable’ salmon flies, which use feathers from dyed game birds instead of exotic species).The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the CenturyĪ rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. Instead of using costly feathers from exotic species, Seim uses substitute feathers, made from dyeing plumes from ordinary game birds like Turkeys and Pheasants. The Jock Scott fly, tied by Spencer Seim, the fly-fishing guide in northern New Mexico that first told the author about the Tring Heist. What followed was a sprawling, six-year investigation, taking me around the globe in search of Edwin, the missing skins, and some measure of justice. I began fly-fishing, obsessively, as a way of escaping to a quiet place, where my cell phone would stop working and I could think about something else. I fought to get visas for thousands of these Iraqis, but increasingly felt trapped by a never-ending war that the country had already forgotten). Agency for International Development, I launched a non-profit devoted to helping Iraqis that were being hunted as ‘collaborators’ for their work alongside American aid workers, diplomats, soldiers, and Marines. ![]() (After coordinating the reconstruction of Fallujah for the U.S. I was at an impasse in my own life, after having spent the better part of a decade confronting the humanitarian consequences of the Iraq War. I had never written a book when I first heard about the Tring Heist, but thought it sounded like a whale of a story, and started poking around, not realizing how quickly I’d be dragged into the feather underground. The whole story was so strange as to be almost unbelievable. Not too long after that, I was waist-high in a frigid river in northern New Mexico, fly-fishing for trout, when the guide I’d hired for the day mentioned a recent museum heist, carried out to feed the insatiable demand for rare feathers in the salmon fly-tying community. He grabbed hundreds of bird skins-some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them-and escaped into the darkness. He was granted access to the collection, and used his time to case the place, taking photographs of the layout of the museum, and making a mental map of the location of each species.Īfter scaling a wall behind the museum and breaking out a window, the champion fly-tier climbed inside and set out to work. Rist had been there before, months earlier, posing as a student photographer. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. ![]() On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. ![]()
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