the thing with feathers by noah strycker

Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator. 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. 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. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief.

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. 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. 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. And I’ve enjoyed all of them.Ī rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. I didn’t start reading books about birds intentionally like, “I’m going to go read a bunch of bird books now.” It just… happened. The way nearly everyone, at one point or another, has wished to be one or at least wished for self-powered flight. The way they’re symbols for freedom and rising early to take advantage of the morning hours. I’ve always thought birds were a little stupid––the way they fly into closed windows and the way they get lost inside airports and Walmarts. If an especially pretty one flies close to the window, I’ll go over to look at it, but I’m not one to head out with binoculars and a field guide trying to spot different species of bird.Īnd yet, I LOVE reading books about birds. I don’t have any particular affinity for birds.

The thing with feathers by noah strycker