The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

Today post is on The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk W. Johnson. It is 320 pages long including notes and photographs and is published by Viking Press. The cover is a close of some beautiful bird feathers. The intended reader is someone who likes true crime and natural history. There is some mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the blurb online- 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. 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. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier 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.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

Review- An interesting story about a crime that most people have not heard of, including myself. Johnson was burned out on his job as refugee assistor and was fly fishing for relaxation when he first heard about the crime. It was at first a way to unwind after long days at work investigated the crime and the man who did it Edwin Rist but it became on all consuming passion to get some kind of justice. In doing so we get an interesting book about true crime and natural history. It has good information about both without becoming boring recitation of facts. I really enjoyed this book and the story of the crime, the birds themselves, and Johnson as narrator. I would recommend this book.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library's Cloud Library account.