Book Review: The Feather Thief

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk W. Johnson


In the 1990 movie “The Freshman” a young NYU student becomes involved in a crime ring that charges rich people a million dollars to eat an endangered animal. I remember thinking that was a pretty far-fetched plot. After all, why spend a million bucks to criminally eat a komodo dragon when chickens are plentiful and delicious. Boy was I naive. Buckle up because this book will open your eyes to a bizarre corner of the world.

Apparently there are people who are so enamored of the idea of recreating Victorian-era salmon flys that they will pay top dollar for the same feathers nineteenth century explorers brought back from the far corners of the world. The only thing is, most of these birds were hunted to near extinction (or extinction) because of an insatiable demand for their plumage and it’s illegal pretty much everywhere to kill, hunt, or trade them.

Which is why an obsessive salmon fly tyer who wanted to get his hands on these rare feathers decided to break into a museum and steal centuries’ old bird skins, cut them up, and sell the parts to other people who are just as mentally twisted as the celebrities in the Matthew Broderick/Marlon Brando movie who would pay through the nose to eat the last animal of its species just because they get off on being evil.

I like to think that I’m pretty open minded about hobbies. Weird hobbies are just fine. But after reading this book, I think that traditional salmon fly tying is a really dumb hobby. I mean, they don’t even catch fish with them. And the salmon don’t even care what the flys look like. So why partake in illegally trafficking animals (because they know full well these animals are being illegally trafficked and hunted) just to make something small and useless which you can barely even see? It’s like the difference between people who drink apple cider vinegar will cure what ails them and the people who eat ground rhino horn because they think it will cure what ails them. One is a harmless weirdo. The second is a criminal.

This book doesn’t have a happy ending. The weaselly dirtbag who robbed the museum got no justice and showed no remorse. The excuse his lawyer used to get him a puny sentence sounded too far-fetched to be true. The irreplaceable specimens were lost and/or destroyed, and the weirdos with a hardon for endangered bird feathers keep on shelling out dollars to further endanger these rare animals. But man, what a wild ride.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.




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