The Feather Thief:  Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

In June 2009, a young American scaled the walls of the British Museum of Natural History, broke out a window, climbed inside, and stole a million dollars’ worth of dead birds - scientific specimens preserved over the centuries by a chain of curators who recognized that these birds held answers to questions that scientists hadn’t even considered.  He stripped them of their tags (bearing information crucial to research), and then hacked them to bits with a scalpel, filling Ziploc bags with thousands of iridescent, glimmering feathers, which he sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the community of Victorian salmon fly-tiers.  In 'The Feather Thief,' Kirk Wallace Johnson descends into this ‘feather underground,’ tracking down the missing birds across the world in a madcap quest for some kind of justice.