Close Modal

The Feather Thief

Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

Look inside
Paperback
$18.00 US
5.42"W x 8.36"H x 0.72"D   | 10 oz | 24 per carton
On sale Apr 23, 2019 | 336 Pages | 9781101981634
As heard on NPR's This American Life

“Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor

From the author of The Fishermen and the Dragon, a rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

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. 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. 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.

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. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. 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. 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.
“Fascinating . . . a complex tale of greed, deception, and ornithological sabotage.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating from the first page to the last—you won’t be able to put it down.”
Southern Living

“A fascinating book . . . the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered.”
The Wall Street Journal

“Thrilling . . . This book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set.”
Paris Review, “Staff Picks”

“Johnson, like Susan Orlean before him, is a magnifier: he sees grand themes—naïveté, jealousy, depression, the entitlement of man . . . That vision makes a book about things like Victorian salmon fly tiers feel heavy as gold.”
The New Yorker, “What We’re Reading This Summer”

“[A] true-crime caper recounted with relish.” 
O, The Oprah Magazine, “10 Titles to Pick Up Now”

“Vivid and arresting . . . Johnson [is] a wonderfully assured writer.”
The Times (London)

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever. . . . Johnson is an intrepid journalist . . . [with] a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.”
Christian Science Monitor

“An uncommon book . . .  [that] informs and enlightens. . . A heist story that manages to underline the enduring and continuing importance of natural history collections and their incredible value to science. We need more books like this one.”
Science

“The best compliment I can give a nonfiction writer is that they make me care deeply about an obscure topic I would otherwise never have been interested in. That’s the case with Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief.”
Eva Holland, Outside, “The Best Summer Books”

“A fascinating account of a bizarre crime . . . The Feather Thief is one of the more peculiar and gripping crime stories in recent memory.”
LitHub CrimeReads, “The Essential True Crime Books of Spring 2018”

“Johnson succeeds in conveying the gravity of this natural-history 'heist of the century,' and one of The Feather Thief’s greatest strengths is the excitement, horror, and amazement it evokes. It’s nonfiction that reads like fiction, with plenty of surprising moments.”
Outside

“A riveting read.”
Nature 

“A literary police sketch—part natural history yarn, part detective story, part the stuff of tragedy.” 
Smithsonian

“Within pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book . . . Johnson is a master of pacing and suspense . . . It’s a tribute to [his] storytelling gifts that when I turned the last page I felt bereft.” —Maggie Fergusson, The Spectator (London)

“A riveting story about mankind’s undeniable desire to own nature’s beauty and a spellbinding examination of obsession, greed, and justice . . .[told] in engrossing detail. . . . A gripping page-turner.” 
Bustle

“Enthralling.”
HelloGiggles

“Richly informative, with handy illustrations, endlessly fascinating and crackingly entertaining, The Feather Thief is the kind of true-crime narrative that gives Erik Larson's much-lauded The Devil in the White City a run for the money.”
Shelf Awareness

“Highly entertaining . . . journalism at its best . . . If you know nothing about fly-fishing or tying, it doesn’t matter, as long as you like a well-written story.”
—Karen Gallagher, The Baltimore Sun's Roughly Speaking podcast

“Reads like a whodunit . . . I could not put it down.”
—Tom Rosenbauer, The Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast

“This is the type of book I absolutely love – one that takes a seemingly obscure topic and shines a brilliant and bizarre and endlessly fascinating light upon it. The crime itself is riveting, but Kirk Wallace Johnson’s portrayal of the crazy world of feather fanatics makes this an unforgettable read.”
—Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods

“Captivating...Everything the author touches in this thoroughly engaging true-crime tale turns to storytelling gold. . . . Johnson's flair for telling an engrossing story is, like the beautiful birds he describes, exquisite. . . . A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man's ‘unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.’”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“[An] enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime. . . . Johnson goes deep into the exotic bird and feather trade and concludes that though obsession and greed know no bounds, they certainly make for a fascinating tale. The result is a page-turner that will likely appeal to science, history, and true crime readers.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“A remarkably compelling story of obsession and history.”
Booklist, Starred Review

“You'll never look at a feather the same way again after reading this riveting detective story . . . [The Feather Thief] brilliantly weaves together Alfred Russel Wallace, the surprisingly shadowy history of fly fishing, conservation and the plumage of the most beautiful birds on earth.” 
The Bookseller (UK)

“A true-crime tale that weaves seemingly unrelated threads—a museum break-in; the development of evolutionary theory; a case of post-Iraq PTSD; endangered birds; and (above all) the murky underworld of fly-tying obsessives—into a spellbinding narrative tapestry.”
—Mark Adams, author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu
 
A captivating tale of an unlikely thief and his even more unlikely crime, and a meditation on obsession, greed, and the sheer fascination in something as seemingly simple as a feather.”
—Paul Collins, author of The Murder of the Century

“A stirring examination of the devastating effects of human greed on endangered birds, a powerful argument for protecting our environment—and, above all, a captivating crime story.”
—Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees

“This gem of a book, about a heist of archival birds, is marvelous, moving, and transcendent. I can’t stop thinking about it.” 
—Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara and The Feud

“This extraordinary book exposes an international underground that traffics in rare and precious natural resources, yet was previously unknown to all but a few. A page-turning read you won’t soon forget, The Feather Thief tells us as much about our cultural priorities as it does about the crimes themselves. There’s never been anything like it.” 
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs
© Maria Josee Cantin Johnson
Kirk Wallace Johnson is the author of The Feather Thief and To Be a Friend Is Fatal, and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, which he started after serving with USAID in Fallujah. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and This American Life, among others. View titles by Kirk Wallace Johnson
PROLOGUE
 
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 Music’s “London Soundscapes,” a celebration of Hayden, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, he’d 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 suit- case through the mud and gravel skirting the road, under gnarly old trees strangled with  ivy. Turlhanger’s  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 isn’t 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 he’d 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 building’s nearest window, forming a small ravine. If he fell, he could injure himself—or worse, make  a clamor that would  summon security. But he’d known this part wouldn’t 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 think- ing 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 can’t give up now. You’ve 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 guard’s 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 he’d 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 natural- ists 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 Quindío Andes region of western Colombia. He didn’t know exactly how many he’d be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed forty-seven of the museum’s 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 hadn’t 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 Chiriquí 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 Galápagos island finches and mockingbirds gathered by Charles Darwin in 1835 during  the voyage of the HMS  Beagle—which had been instrumental in developing  his theory of evolution through natural selection—were resting in nearby drawers. Among the museum’s 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 Audubon’s The Birds of America. Overall, the museum houses one of the world’s largest collection of ornithological specimens: 750,000 bird skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 birds preserved in spirit, 4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs, gathered over the centuries from the world’s most remote forests, mountainsides, jungles, and swamps.

But Edwin hadn’t broken into the museum for a drab-colored finch. He had lost track of how long he’d been in the vault when he finally wheeled his suitcase to a stop before a large cabinet. A small plaque indicated its contents: paradisaeidae. Thirty-seven  King Birds of Paradise, swiped in seconds. Twenty-four Magnificent Rifle-birds. Twelve Superb Birds of Paradise. Four Blue Birds of Paradise. Seventeen Flame Bowerbirds. These flawless specimens, gathered against almost impossible odds from virgin forests of New Guinea and the  Malay Archipelago 150 years earlier, went into Edwin’s bag, their tags bearing the name of a self-taught naturalist whose breakthrough had given Darwin the scare of his life: a. r. wallace.
 
 
The guard glanced at the CCTV feed, an array of shots of the parking lot and the museum campus. He began his round, pacing the hallways, checking the doors, scanning for anything awry

Edwin had long since lost count of the number of birds that passed through his hands. He had originally planned to choose only the best of each species, but in the excitement of the plunder, he grabbed and stuffed until his suitcase could hold no more.

The guard stepped outside to begin a perimeter check, glancing up at the windows  and beaming his flashlight on the section abutting the brick wall of Bank Alley.

Edwin stood before the broken window, now framed with shards of glass. So far everything had gone according to plan, with the exception of the missing glass cutter. All that remained was to climb back out of the window without slicing himself open, and melt into the anonymity of the street.

About

As heard on NPR's This American Life

“Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor

From the author of The Fishermen and the Dragon, a rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

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. 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. 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.

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. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. 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. 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.

Praise

“Fascinating . . . a complex tale of greed, deception, and ornithological sabotage.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating from the first page to the last—you won’t be able to put it down.”
Southern Living

“A fascinating book . . . the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered.”
The Wall Street Journal

“Thrilling . . . This book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set.”
Paris Review, “Staff Picks”

“Johnson, like Susan Orlean before him, is a magnifier: he sees grand themes—naïveté, jealousy, depression, the entitlement of man . . . That vision makes a book about things like Victorian salmon fly tiers feel heavy as gold.”
The New Yorker, “What We’re Reading This Summer”

“[A] true-crime caper recounted with relish.” 
O, The Oprah Magazine, “10 Titles to Pick Up Now”

“Vivid and arresting . . . Johnson [is] a wonderfully assured writer.”
The Times (London)

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever. . . . Johnson is an intrepid journalist . . . [with] a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.”
Christian Science Monitor

“An uncommon book . . .  [that] informs and enlightens. . . A heist story that manages to underline the enduring and continuing importance of natural history collections and their incredible value to science. We need more books like this one.”
Science

“The best compliment I can give a nonfiction writer is that they make me care deeply about an obscure topic I would otherwise never have been interested in. That’s the case with Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief.”
Eva Holland, Outside, “The Best Summer Books”

“A fascinating account of a bizarre crime . . . The Feather Thief is one of the more peculiar and gripping crime stories in recent memory.”
LitHub CrimeReads, “The Essential True Crime Books of Spring 2018”

“Johnson succeeds in conveying the gravity of this natural-history 'heist of the century,' and one of The Feather Thief’s greatest strengths is the excitement, horror, and amazement it evokes. It’s nonfiction that reads like fiction, with plenty of surprising moments.”
Outside

“A riveting read.”
Nature 

“A literary police sketch—part natural history yarn, part detective story, part the stuff of tragedy.” 
Smithsonian

“Within pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book . . . Johnson is a master of pacing and suspense . . . It’s a tribute to [his] storytelling gifts that when I turned the last page I felt bereft.” —Maggie Fergusson, The Spectator (London)

“A riveting story about mankind’s undeniable desire to own nature’s beauty and a spellbinding examination of obsession, greed, and justice . . .[told] in engrossing detail. . . . A gripping page-turner.” 
Bustle

“Enthralling.”
HelloGiggles

“Richly informative, with handy illustrations, endlessly fascinating and crackingly entertaining, The Feather Thief is the kind of true-crime narrative that gives Erik Larson's much-lauded The Devil in the White City a run for the money.”
Shelf Awareness

“Highly entertaining . . . journalism at its best . . . If you know nothing about fly-fishing or tying, it doesn’t matter, as long as you like a well-written story.”
—Karen Gallagher, The Baltimore Sun's Roughly Speaking podcast

“Reads like a whodunit . . . I could not put it down.”
—Tom Rosenbauer, The Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast

“This is the type of book I absolutely love – one that takes a seemingly obscure topic and shines a brilliant and bizarre and endlessly fascinating light upon it. The crime itself is riveting, but Kirk Wallace Johnson’s portrayal of the crazy world of feather fanatics makes this an unforgettable read.”
—Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods

“Captivating...Everything the author touches in this thoroughly engaging true-crime tale turns to storytelling gold. . . . Johnson's flair for telling an engrossing story is, like the beautiful birds he describes, exquisite. . . . A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man's ‘unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.’”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“[An] enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime. . . . Johnson goes deep into the exotic bird and feather trade and concludes that though obsession and greed know no bounds, they certainly make for a fascinating tale. The result is a page-turner that will likely appeal to science, history, and true crime readers.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“A remarkably compelling story of obsession and history.”
Booklist, Starred Review

“You'll never look at a feather the same way again after reading this riveting detective story . . . [The Feather Thief] brilliantly weaves together Alfred Russel Wallace, the surprisingly shadowy history of fly fishing, conservation and the plumage of the most beautiful birds on earth.” 
The Bookseller (UK)

“A true-crime tale that weaves seemingly unrelated threads—a museum break-in; the development of evolutionary theory; a case of post-Iraq PTSD; endangered birds; and (above all) the murky underworld of fly-tying obsessives—into a spellbinding narrative tapestry.”
—Mark Adams, author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu
 
A captivating tale of an unlikely thief and his even more unlikely crime, and a meditation on obsession, greed, and the sheer fascination in something as seemingly simple as a feather.”
—Paul Collins, author of The Murder of the Century

“A stirring examination of the devastating effects of human greed on endangered birds, a powerful argument for protecting our environment—and, above all, a captivating crime story.”
—Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees

“This gem of a book, about a heist of archival birds, is marvelous, moving, and transcendent. I can’t stop thinking about it.” 
—Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara and The Feud

“This extraordinary book exposes an international underground that traffics in rare and precious natural resources, yet was previously unknown to all but a few. A page-turning read you won’t soon forget, The Feather Thief tells us as much about our cultural priorities as it does about the crimes themselves. There’s never been anything like it.” 
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

Author

© Maria Josee Cantin Johnson
Kirk Wallace Johnson is the author of The Feather Thief and To Be a Friend Is Fatal, and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, which he started after serving with USAID in Fallujah. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and This American Life, among others. View titles by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Excerpt

PROLOGUE
 
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 Music’s “London Soundscapes,” a celebration of Hayden, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, he’d 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 suit- case through the mud and gravel skirting the road, under gnarly old trees strangled with  ivy. Turlhanger’s  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 isn’t 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 he’d 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 building’s nearest window, forming a small ravine. If he fell, he could injure himself—or worse, make  a clamor that would  summon security. But he’d known this part wouldn’t 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 think- ing 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 can’t give up now. You’ve 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 guard’s 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 he’d 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 natural- ists 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 Quindío Andes region of western Colombia. He didn’t know exactly how many he’d be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed forty-seven of the museum’s 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 hadn’t 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 Chiriquí 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 Galápagos island finches and mockingbirds gathered by Charles Darwin in 1835 during  the voyage of the HMS  Beagle—which had been instrumental in developing  his theory of evolution through natural selection—were resting in nearby drawers. Among the museum’s 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 Audubon’s The Birds of America. Overall, the museum houses one of the world’s largest collection of ornithological specimens: 750,000 bird skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 birds preserved in spirit, 4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs, gathered over the centuries from the world’s most remote forests, mountainsides, jungles, and swamps.

But Edwin hadn’t broken into the museum for a drab-colored finch. He had lost track of how long he’d been in the vault when he finally wheeled his suitcase to a stop before a large cabinet. A small plaque indicated its contents: paradisaeidae. Thirty-seven  King Birds of Paradise, swiped in seconds. Twenty-four Magnificent Rifle-birds. Twelve Superb Birds of Paradise. Four Blue Birds of Paradise. Seventeen Flame Bowerbirds. These flawless specimens, gathered against almost impossible odds from virgin forests of New Guinea and the  Malay Archipelago 150 years earlier, went into Edwin’s bag, their tags bearing the name of a self-taught naturalist whose breakthrough had given Darwin the scare of his life: a. r. wallace.
 
 
The guard glanced at the CCTV feed, an array of shots of the parking lot and the museum campus. He began his round, pacing the hallways, checking the doors, scanning for anything awry

Edwin had long since lost count of the number of birds that passed through his hands. He had originally planned to choose only the best of each species, but in the excitement of the plunder, he grabbed and stuffed until his suitcase could hold no more.

The guard stepped outside to begin a perimeter check, glancing up at the windows  and beaming his flashlight on the section abutting the brick wall of Bank Alley.

Edwin stood before the broken window, now framed with shards of glass. So far everything had gone according to plan, with the exception of the missing glass cutter. All that remained was to climb back out of the window without slicing himself open, and melt into the anonymity of the street.