Kirk Wallace Johnson - The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

By the time Edwin Rist stepped off the train onto the platform at Tring, forty miles north of London, it was already quite late. The residents of the sleepy town had finished their suppers; the little ones were in bed. As he began the long walk into town, the Midland line glided off into darkness.

A few hours earlier Edwin had performed in the Royal Academy of Musics London Soundscapes, a celebration of Haydn, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, hed packed a pair of latex gloves, a miniature LED flashlight, a wire cutter, and a diamond-blade glass cutter in a large rolling suitcase, and stowed it in his concert hall locker. He bore a passing resemblance to a lanky Pete Townshend: intense eyes, prominent nose, and a mop of hair, although instead of shredding a Fender, Edwin played the flute.

There was a new moon that evening, making the already-gloomy stretch of road even darker. For nearly an hour, he dragged his suitcase through the mud and gravel skirting the road, under gnarly old trees strangled with ivy. Turlhangers Wood slept to the north, Chestnut Wood to the south, fallow fields and the occasional copse in between.

A car blasted by, its headlights blinding. Adrenaline coursing, he knew he was getting close.

The entrance to the market town of Tring is guarded by a sixteenth-century pub called the Robin Hood. A few roads beyond, nestled between the old Tring Brewery and an HSBC branch, lies the entrance to Public Footpath 37. Known to locals as Bank Alley, the footpath isnt more than eight feet wide and is framed by seven-foot-high brick walls.

Edwin slipped into the alley, into total darkness. He groped his way along until he was standing directly behind the building hed spent months casing.

All that separated him from it was the wall. Capped with three rusted strands of barbed wire, it might have thwarted his plans were it not for the wire cutter. After clearing an opening, he lifted the suitcase to the ledge, hoisted himself up, and glanced anxiously about. No sign of the guard. There was a space of several feet between his perch on the wall and the buildings nearest window, forming a small ravine. If he fell, he could injure himselfor worse, make a clamor that would summon security. But hed known this part wouldnt be easy.

Crouched on top of the wall, he reached toward the window with the glass cutter and began to grind it along the pane. Cutting glass was harder than he had anticipated, though, and as he struggled to carve an opening, the glass cutter slipped from his hand and fell into the ravine. His mind raced. Was this a sign? He was thinking about bailing on the whole crazy scheme when that voice, the one that had urged him onward these past months, shouted Wait a minute! You cant give up now. Youve come all this way!

He crawled back down and picked up a rock. Steadying himself atop the wall, he peered around in search of guards before bashing the window out, wedging his suitcase through the shard-strewn opening, and climbing into the British Natural History Museum.

Unaware that he had just tripped an alarm in the security guards office, Edwin pulled out the LED light, which cast a faint glow in front of him as he made his way down the hallways toward the vault, just as hed rehearsed in his mind.

He wheeled his suitcase quietly through corridor after corridor, drawing ever closer to the most beautiful things he had ever seen. If he pulled this off, they would bring him fame, wealth, and prestige. They would solve his problems. He deserved them.

He entered the vault, its hundreds of large white steel cabinets standing in rows like sentries, and got to work. He pulled out the first drawer, catching a waft of mothballs. Quivering beneath his fingertips were a dozen Red-ruffed Fruitcrows, gathered by naturalists and biologists over hundreds of years from the forests and jungles of South America and fastidiously preserved by generations of curators for the benefit of future research. Their coppery-orange feathers glimmered despite the faint light. Each bird, maybe a foot and a half from beak to tail, lay on its back in funerary repose, eye sockets filled with cotton, feet folded close against the body. Tied around their legs were biodata labels: faded, handwritten records of the date, altitude, latitude, and longitude of their capture, along with other vital details.

He unzipped the suitcase and began filling it with the birds, emptying one drawer after another. The occidentalis subspecies that he snatched by the handful had been gathered a century earlier from the Quindo Andes region of western Colombia. He didnt know exactly how many hed be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed forty-seven of the museums forty-eight male specimens before wheeling his bag on to the next cabinet.

Down in the security office, the guard was fixated on a small television screen. Engrossed in a soccer match, he hadnt yet noticed the alarm indicator blinking on a nearby panel.

Edwin opened the next cabinet to reveal dozens of Resplendent Quetzal skins gathered in the 1880s from the Chiriqu cloud forests of western Panama, a species now threatened by widespread deforestation and protected by international treaties. At nearly four feet in length, the birds were particularly difficult to stuff into his suitcase, but he maneuvered thirty-nine of them inside by gently curling their sweeping tails into tight coils.

Moving down the corridor, he swung open the doors of another cabinet, this one housing species of the Cotinga birds of South and Central America. He swiped fourteen one-hundred-year-old skins of the Lovely Cotinga, a small turquoise bird with a reddish-purple breast endemic to Central America, before relieving the museum of thirty-seven specimens of the Purple-breasted Cotinga, twenty-one skins of the Spangled Cotinga, and another ten skins of the endangered Banded Cotinga, of which as few as 250 mature individuals are estimated to be alive today.

The Galpagos island finches and mockingbirds gathered by Charles Darwin in 1835 during the voyage of the HMS Beaglewhich had been instrumental in developing his theory of evolution through natural selectionwere resting in nearby drawers. Among the museums most valuable holdings were skeletons and skins of extinct birds, including the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon, along with an elephant-folio edition of John James Audubons The Birds of America