The Feather Thief - bookrastinating.com

Paperback, 336 pages

Published April 23, 2019 by Penguin Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-101-98163-4

(1 review)

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.

7 editions

KnitAFett reviewed The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Interesting, but meh at the same time.

3 stars

I appreciated the history of why birds were hunted to the point of extinction for their feathers and how the laws that are in place to protect them now were put into action. I also now know a lot more than I thought I would ever need to know about fly-tying. The overall drive to have the genuine feathers as a status symbol in the community was insane. I wanted to shake a whole bunch of people in this book.

I felt like the "true crime" aspect of this book really dragged it down a bit, though. There was never some major "aha!" moments or anything and was just a weird obsession for the author (who was into fly fishing) wanting to understand why a major fly-tier stole a bunch of birds from the museum and then taking it upon himself to try to find the missing birds after the …

I appreciated the history of why birds were hunted to the point of extinction for their feathers and how the laws that are in place to protect them now were put into action. I also now know a lot more than I thought I would ever need to know about fly-tying. The overall drive to have the genuine feathers as a status symbol in the community was insane. I wanted to shake a whole bunch of people in this book.

I felt like the "true crime" aspect of this book really dragged it down a bit, though. There was never some major "aha!" moments or anything and was just a weird obsession for the author (who was into fly fishing) wanting to understand why a major fly-tier stole a bunch of birds from the museum and then taking it upon himself to try to find the missing birds after the museum had already made it clear that from a scientific point, the birds would no longer hold value since the tags would have been removed by that point.

I'm not mad that I put time into it, but it isn't something I would ever have interest in reading again, and definitely not one that I would feel a need to recommend to others. I do, however, want to learn more about the history of bird feathers in fashion.