What are Salmon fliers? Apparently, they are a brightly colored lure, made with bird feathers that mimics small fish, which Salmon will snap at.

The author of this book first learned of Edwin Rist while fly fishing in Mexico, and quickly became as obsessed with this crime as Edwin Rist was with rare bird skins and Salmon fliers. It seems there is nothing out there in this world that doesn’t have a dark underbelly… I still don’t have any interest in the sport, and I never will- but one thing is for sure- I was never bored while reading this book!

I admit I still don’t fully understand fly fishing, or the obsession with Salmon fliers. I decided I should at least give it a try, because all those positive reviews had to mean something, right? It just didn’t sound like a topic that would interest me in the least. However, every time I thought about reading it, I changed my mind, because I wasn’t sure if I would fully understand the premise, for one thing, and for another, I was afraid it would bore me silly. I added it because it was labeled as true crime and because the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. This is another book that has sat on my TBR list for an entire year. The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson is a 2019 Penguin publication. The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson 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. 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. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. 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. 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. 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. 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. A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

Book review the feather thief