The Feather Thief
Subtitle: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
By: Kirk Wallace Jackson
Contributors: Penguin Random House. 
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780525559092; 9781101981610
Subjects: NATURE / Animals / Birds; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Museum Administration & Museology; Theft from museums; Natural history museums; Natural History Museum (London, England); Zoological specimens; TRUE CRIME / General; Fly tying
Other titles: Beauty, obsession, and the natural history heist of the century
Description: On a cool June evening in 2009, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist grabbed hundreds of bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier - and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? This is the gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice.
Notes: Includes notes (pages [255]-280), bibliography (pages [283]-289) and index (pages [291]-308).
Table of contents: title: Prologue; title: Dead birds and rich men. The trials of Alfred Russel Wallace ; Lord Rothschild's museum ; The feather fever ; Birth of a movement ; The Victorian Brotherhood of Fly-tiers ; The future of fly-tying; title: The Tring heist. Featherless in London ; Plan for Museum Invasion.Doc ; The case of the broken window ; "A very unusual crime" ; Hot birds on a cold trail ; Fluteplayer 1988 ; Behind bars ; Rot in hell ; The diagnosis ; The Asperger's defense ; The missing skins; title: Truth and consequences. The 21st International Fly Tying Symposium ; The lost memory of the ocean ; Chasing leads in a time machine ; Dr. Prum's thumb drive ; "I'm not a thief" ; Three days in Norway ; Michelangelo vanishes ; Flowers in the bloodstream.