Police and museum curators were initially perplexed because they did not understand why someone would steal bird skins. This whole story is stranger than fiction, which would make it a great selection for readers who don’t often pick up nonfiction, perhaps expecting it to be dry or taxing.

The invention of the automobile put the huge hat industry to an end, since women were unable to hold their heads up with these atrocities. Tring – located about 50 km to the north-west of London – is a relatively small town with green surrounds, its main claim to fame being its association with Walter Rothschild and his zoological collection. Knyga - apie žmonių godumą, hobių-aistrų- tyrinėjimų savanaudiškumą, visišką nepagarbą/nemeilę gamtai. Overtired, he walked out a window which he refers to as a “PTSD-triggered fugue state” in which he nearly died.If you're curious about the stolen goods, all of which were antique zoological specimens that were labeled to show precisely where each specimen came from, the date, and more? The book is in three parts: the first gives historical context about specimen collection and the early feather trade; the second is a blow-by-blow of Rist’s crime and the aftermath, including the trial; and the third goes into Wallace’s own investigation process. A real page-turner, while at the same time meditative, thoughtful and stylish, The Feather Thief takes us on a fascinating journey inside a bizarre and secretive underworld unlike any other. All the same, I've got mad respect for Darwin, Wallace, and their culture-rupturing scientific discovery made possible by tropical birds, so I thought this book would be up my alley. One summer evening in 2009, twenty-year-old musical prodigy Edwin Rist broke into the British Natural History Museum, home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world.

Rist, from upstate New York, was a 20-year-old flautist studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London.These feathers come from some of the rarest birds in the world, such as the Resplendent Quetzal, the King Bird of Paradise, the Flame Bowerbird, and the Blue Chatterer. It's just astonishing to read the numbers of birds that were collected over the years, many for frivolous reasons. In a very accessible way, Johnson recounts the obsession of Victorians to collect things (including rare bird feathers) that pushed specific bird populations to extinction or the brink of extinction. With a wire cutter, glass cutter, rock, and suitcase, Edwin successfully stole 299 bird skins, including some collected by Wallace, from the museum.

Author Kirk Wallace Johnson found his subject matter quite circuitously, as he was recovering from burnout; his efforts to resettle homeless Iraqis had resulted in a case of PTSD, and led to a fishing trip, and a quasi interest in fly fishing. Jenna Bush Hager and Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group, have teamed with Johnson to develop a series adaptation of the true-crime non-fiction book.In recounting the 2011 court case, Johnson describes how the judge decided – seemingly on the basis of his own incredulity about Rist’s actions – that Rist must surely suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, this being the catalyst which inspired the ‘Asperger’s defence’. The new home of the world-famous Tetrapod Zoology blog - Tet Zoo for short - now in its fourth iteration.

As much as I hate sounding like some kind of snobbishly arrogant, well-read bastard, this reflects the fact (extremely common if you read a lot of material relevant to your specialist area) that specialist books so often go over the same ground before getting to the new stuff.

Feather fever resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of birds, resulting in a women-led conservationist movement at the end of the 19th century and early-20th century to end the use of birds in women’s fashion. And that’s just the very beginning of this very banana pants true story because why would a university student steal HUNDREDS of rare bird specimens?