Feathering their nests
An obsession with fly-tying led to a bizarre theft from the Natural History Museum and huge sums changing hands. Fact can be stranger than fiction…
Walter Rothschild, the eccentric eldest son of the first Baron Rothschild, once remarked: “Birds have the power of sucking the honesty out of people, like the vampire sucks blood.” The man who drove a carriage harnessed to four zebras to Buckingham Palace, just to prove that zebras could be tamed, was speaking from experience. His zoological collection, the largest ever amassed by a private individual, at one time included 300,000 bird skins and 200,000 eggs.
Rothschild, who was given a museum by his father as a 21st birthday present, is a character in one of the strangest robbery stories you will ever read. It took place in 2009 and encompasses most of the seven deadly sins. Dozens of those involved have never been identified. It is the greatest wildlife crime of the past century, perhaps of all time. And you’ve probably never heard anything about it.
This story is full of villains and obsessives. The prime one is Edwin Rist, a talented young flautist from a small town in America. But just as culpable are a shadowy bunch of people obsessed with tying classic salmon flies with original feathers from birds that are heavily protected, critically endangered or even extinct. They are familiar faces at international fly-tying symposiums and some may even be reading this article.
Most do not even fish but will pay seemingly obscene amounts just to get their hands on a few feathers from a resplendent quetzal, blue chatterer, cock-of-the-rock or king bird-of-paradise. They operate within closed and difficult-to-access Facebook pages or even on the notorious ‘dark web’ and are paranoid about letting outsiders into their secret groups. Keep them in mind.
To set the scene, we need to go back more than 160 years, even beyond Rothschild
(although he plays a part, too), to the naturalist-explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, who conceived the idea of evolution by natural selection in the late 1850s, independently of Charles Darwin. (It could have resulted in a nasty spat but Wallace expressed no open resentment that Darwin gained all the credit.)
Wallace’s theories had evolved over eight years combing the Malay Archipelago (now Malaysia and Indonesia), during which time he collected 125,660 specimens, with more than 5,000 being species new to science. He persuaded the UK government to stockpile as many as possible in the British Museum, “where they may be available for study and interpretation”. He believed the bird skins in particular held answers to questions that scientists did not know to ask yet, and that they needed to be protected.
Presciently, he wrote: “If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations.
They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve.”
Enter, stage left, the second Baron Rothschild of Tring, Lionel Walter Rothschild. Aged seven, he had told his parents: “I am going to make a museum,” and with his father’s vast wealth behind him it became a reality. At 14, he had a large staff just to satisfy his collecting mania.
Rothschild arrived at Cambridge university with a flock of kiwis. He had amassed 46,000 specimens by the age of 20. In 1892, the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire, was opened to the public and attracted 30,000 visitors a year. They saw mounted elephants, sharks, polar bears, even a zebra-horse cross, and occasionally Rothschild himself astride a 150-year-old Galapagos giant tortoise that he had freed from a lunatic asylum in Australia. Despite his father bankrolling his obsession, Rothschild had no concept of money, costs or budgeting. He paid an army of collectors to search the world for specimens but, in the end, he was forced to sell 280,000 skins to the American Museum of Natural History as huge debts piled up. When he died in 1937, his museum and what remained of his collection was bequeathed to the natural history arm of the British Museum.
And there it might all have remained, living in drawers and jars forever. The Natural History Museum’s website states that its ornithological collection in Tring includes 700,000 skins, 17,000 specimens in spirit and 400,000 sets of eggs. They represent about 95% of the world’s species, with a few gathered even before the British Museum was founded in 1753.
HEART OF THE TALE
And now to the heart of our tale. In 2007, a highly talented 17-year-old American musician, about to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, was sent pictures of the
Rothschild paid an army of collectors to search the world for specimens
bird-filled drawers at Tring. That email was to change Edwin Rist’s life.
At 11, he had watched a video entitled The Orvis Fly Fishing School and was captivated by the fly-tying session. Though he didn’t even own a fly rod, Rist became consumed by tying Victorian salmon flies. The trouble was, the flies advocated by George Kelson, William Blacker and others required specialist feathers beyond a teenager’s pocket.
Blacker’s 1842 book The Art of Fly Making recommends owning the plumes of 37 birds, including the blue chatterer, resplendent quetzal and various birds-of-paradise. Major John Popkin Traherne’s Chatterer fly demands 150 to 200 chatterer feathers that (assuming you could find such a quantity) would cost thousands of pounds.
As Kirk Wallace Johnson writes in his excellent book The Feather Thief: “Through brute repetition, Rist developed the technical skills needed to tie Victorian flies but he was constantly frustrated. His flies looked exactly like Kelson’s but to him they were adulterated, compromised by the use of substitute feathers.” He needed the correct ones.
When Rist went online, he discovered he was not alone. Across the world, there are hundreds who only want to tie salmon flies using feathers recommended nearly 200 years ago, when words such as ‘endangered’ and ‘extinction’ appeared only in dictionaries. Rist not only joined this secretive sect but he became a leading light, despite his youth. He proved an exceptional tyer and befriended a retired ornithology professor willing to sell him feathers on the cheap. A zookeeper sent him feathers from the autumn moult of his birds. Rist chopped logs to fund his addiction.
He even assembled a fly called the Blacker Celebration, made up of rare feathers that he had bought or been given. The fly, which he posted on one website, included plumage from several very rare birds. One tyer commented: “Good grief, Edwin! The only materials on that fly that aren’t on the CITES list are flosses, tinsels and golden pheasant crests! Do you live in an aviary, perchance?”
It looked as if his tying obsession would have to be put on hold when he moved to London to study. But that email about the Natural History Museum’s collection nagged like a sore tooth. He made up a fake Oxford student whose dissertation was on birdsof-paradise, and was granted access to the
Tring museum to take photos. Johnson writes of that fateful visit: “Inside a cabinet were rows of drawers. He slowly pulled one out to reveal a dozen male magnificent riflebirds. He’d never seen a full skin before, much less a dozen of them. Biodata labels hung from their legs, recording the altitude, latitude, longitude, date of capture and name of the collector. Several bore the faded handwriting of Alfred Russel Wallace.”
A single riflebird skin, with more than 500 breast feathers, would easily be worth more than £3,000. There were dozens here, never mind all the other incredibly rare birds in the hundreds of cabinets. Rist formulated a plan to break in and plunder those cabinets.
He created a Word document entitled ‘Plan for Museum Invasion’ and listed what he would need. Seven months later, on 23 June 2009, he took a train to Tring, armed with a suitcase, gloves, wire cutters and a laser glass-cutter. He scaled a wall, snipped the barbed-wire fence and cut his way into the museum. The security guard, allegedly glued to a football match, failed to notice the alarm indicator blinking.
Rist had originally planned to take only a handful of each species but, confronted
with such an abundance of riches, he took every Indian crow pelt. He piled flame bowerbirds, blue chatterers, magnificent riflebirds, superb birds-of-paradise and more into his suitcase, escaping before the museum’s guard made his rounds. His case held 299 of the world’s rarest and loveliest birds as he headed back on the early-morning train to his London flat.
A security guard noticed the broken window next morning but a cursory check failed to spot anything missing. It was over a month later before the theft was discovered. The news was made public but few outlets reported it, though it created a huge buzz on online fly-tying forums. Rist, meanwhile, had bought 1,100 Ziploc bags and started selling feathers, even whole skins, online.
It was 507 days after the robbery that the police, following online trails, knocked on Rist’s door. He confessed at once. But of the 299 skins, only 174 were recovered from his apartment and 72 were missing their vitally important labels. He pleaded guilty at Hemel Hempstead magistrates’ court on 26 November 2010, to burglary and money laundering. His case was transferred to crown court, where it was expected that he would receive a hefty custodial sentence of several years, given the value of the bird skins (which could have amounted to north of £1m). Richard Lane, the museum’s director of science, testified that it was a “catastrophic event, not only a loss to the UK but to the knowledge and heritage of the planet”.
But the judge, swayed by a dubious assessment that Rist was a victim of Asperger syndrome, gave him a 12-month suspended sentence. (Even Rist himself admitted later that he was not suffering from the disease.) He escaped, pretty well scot-free – and he still had thousands of the ultra-rare feathers.
Kirk Johnson (who himself became an obsessive, determined to discover what had happened to the remaining skins), chased the story for six years. A total of 106 skins still remained unaccounted for. What had happened to them? A number had been returned, mostly anonymously, when a few of those who had bought them realised that they were handling stolen goods. But without the labels written by Wallace and others, which had been cut off and thrown away, they were scientifically useless.
Johnson even persuaded Rist to talk about the robbery, though it took him several years to gain an interview. In the meantime, he was increasingly convinced that Rist had not operated alone. How had he managed the heavy suitcase? He tracked down a young Norwegian who had been selling the stolen feathers for Rist online. But was Long Nguyen, maquerading under the online name of Goku, the mastermind behind the robbery, or was there a shadowy third party?
The recipients of the skins and feathers were unabashed. As Johnson wrote: “They knew they were safe. Those who kept the skins Edwin stole had only to snip the tags off to remove the evidence to keep the law at bay. Those who bought patches or plucked feathers knew that nothing could tie their quarry back to the crime. Before long, stealing birds from museums was once again a laughing matter on the forum.”
His efforts to delve further ran into online brick walls, and other problems arose. When he attended a fly-tying show, trying to trace the skins and feathers, he was told: “I don’t think you want to write that story.”
“Why not?” he replied.
“Because we’re a tight-knit group and you do not want to piss us off.”
Johnson told me: “Spencer Seim has received threats [to the extent that he felt compelled to go to the police] for the crime of first introducing me to the story and for believing that it’s wrong to tie with feathers from protected species. I can point a finger all day, but if there’s to be change it can only come from within this community.” And they don’t seem to care.
The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson is published by Hutchinson.
All the feathers pictured in this article were legally sourced.
Those who kept the skins had only to snip the tags off to remove the evidence