Feather Thief

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 exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

Intr-o seara racoroasa de iunie din 2009, dupa ce a sustinut un concert la Royal Academy of Music din Londra, flautistul american Edwin Rist, in varsta de douazeci de ani, s-a urcat intr-un tren pentru un avanpost suburban al Muzeului Britanic de Istorie Naturala. Acasa la una dintre cele mai mari colectii ornitologice din lume, muzeul Tring era plin de exemplare rare de pasari ale caror pene superbe meritau sume uimitoare de bani pentru barbatii care impartaseau obsesia lui Edwin: arta victoriana a legaturii cu somonul.