And it was in the name of women's fashion. And he told Kirk that Long was not involved. So this is like-- these are Tring, and this is--. So Kirk's on the river with this guide, a guy named Spencer Seim. That would be a natural thing to assume. Presently, he gets down on all fours and, with great stealth, crawls to a small rise on which a birder is prone, binoculars trained. Around the year 1900, certain snowy egret feathers were more expensive than gold.
And someone else responded, I've met this something. Also, this unsettling thing happened during the interview. In his early 20s, he went to Iraq and ran rebuilding projects in Fallujah for USAID after the invasion. In any case, Kirk finally felt like he was closing in on what he'd been after. And B, Edwin is not the only fly tyer in the world who felt OK about knowingly owning stolen property. And he heard about this one kid in America who was exactly his age. You should have gone to jail. Kirk and Long took the train back to Long's apartment where Long dipped in and fetched his binder of feathers, sort of like a stamp book with little pockets. Sneaking up behind him, Mental stretches out a hand, peels back the flap of the man’s knapsack and rummages within.
I found them.
He opened a drawer that contained an imperial woodpecker, a treasure of the Sierra Madre of northwest Mexico. You, sir, are a thief. Nothing else matters. And an alarm is triggered in the museum. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12, Escape Artist Harry Houdini Was an Ingenious Inventor, He Just Didn't Want Anybody to Know, DNA Analysis Suggests Mother and Son Were Buried in Famous Viking Grave, The Little-Known Story of Queen Victoria's Black Goddaughter, Ancient Roman Villa Discovered Beneath Italian Apartment Complex, The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones’, Scientists Find a Possible Link Between Gut Bacteria and Depression, Nearly Half of South America’s Mammals Came from North America, New Research May Explain Why, Five Ideas for Celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2020, The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine, Edison vs. Westinghouse: A Shocking Rivalry, The True Story Behind Tom Hanks' 'Greyhound' Movie, This 700-Year-Old Purse From Iraq Is Remarkably Intact, The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board, Nero, History's Most Despised Emperor, Gets a Makeover. It took him a few months, but he finally stuffed them all into an envelope with no return address. Long kept those packages he was supposed to sell for himself, after Edwin was arrested. We asked Edwin if we could air … Like, how do I make them fit? Our program is produced today by Miki Meek. Did he like roll around in the dead birds? They needn't have bothered. Not long after, there was an industrialized slaughter all over the world. That guy's threat had the exact opposite effect on Kirk than he intended. While most of the feathers can be obtained legally, there’s an extensive black market for the tufts of species now protected or endangered. Who knows where the hell it came from? Now Muzzy's stuff was legal. Some of them were collected in the mid 1800s by one of the greatest scientific explorers of his time, a man named Alfred Russel Wallace.
But it is true that Edwin sent him a bunch of presorted packets of feathers and three or four whole bird skins to sell. And soon, he was rummaging through the garage and the basement looking for a hook and thread, anything he could find to try it himself. He didn't work for the museum. He emailed the museum and told them he needed to photograph the birds for a friend's PhD thesis. A quick warning that this episode contains a few swear words that we've un-beeped for the podcast version. Yeah. Pleaded guilty to burglary and money laundering; received a suspended sentence), (Edwin Rist, flute. They're referred to as bird skins. On the outside, it looks more like a private mansion or a boy's school than a museum.
Darwin had figured it out, too, at that point, but he had been too scared to put it out there. I'm Sean Cole. From the red-ruffed fruitcrow and from cotinga, I think. Anyway, he was finally admitted to the Royal Academy of Music in London, but he didn't bring any of his fly tying gear or feathers with him. And it was an uncomfortable interview where I'm learning all of these things about his life, but also confronting him with stuff. I don't know how you look at the chain of events and see this as anything other than Edwin using him as a fence to potentially take the fall for him if things got hairy. They weren't on display. Like a box of dead birds would come tumbling out of a closet. Our website is thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 600 episodes, totally free. Edwin opens the envelope. Edwin's parents were both journalists.
In court, a Tring constable informed me, Rist admitted that he had harvested feathers off many of the stolen birds and snipped the identifying tags off others, rendering them scientifically useless. And the flies themselves had all these names. Are we at the anger level at this point? Boogie Woogie Blues - Hollywood Fats Band with Roy... Casey Jones - Billy Murray & American Quartet, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. And he got really hostile when I approached them. Oh yes, it's so perfect. But had the police or the museum looked in the visitors log, they would have found Edwin's full name, which, if someone had Googled it, they would have found edwinrist.com, on which he was selling some of their specimens, using their Latin names. If any of the buyers asked, Edwin made up stories as to where the birds came from.
His field notebooks and thousands of preserved skins are still part of a continuous voyage of discovery.
When Edwin was caught, he pleaded his guilt, which meant that the investigation stopped, and there was no search for anything else.
I don't normally pull this card out, but I feel like my time in Fallujah has calibrated my threat perception a little bit differently. And he wondered where the missing birds were. Neither of our parents have every been on a fishing trip. And anyone who was anyone wore hats with a lot of feathers on them, from parrots, egrets, ospreys. And it was a gesture to this young acolyte, almost like, work your way up to these things. It's just a bird. Like, probably approaching there. You can tell a research specimen of a bird from a mile away. It was surprisingly unexciting and technical. And they told me, that particular security guard doesn't even like soccer. And Kirk had other evidence implicating Long, some Facebook exchanges, Edwin saying, did your box arrive, pictures of the two of them on a trip to Japan after which all kinds of new birds were posted for sale by Goku. Was someone else selling them?
These other guys would say, yeah, well, it's a good fly, but talk to me when you get some real cotinga. Kirk left Long's apartment feeling bad for him, but also frustrated. But there wasn't much, just a few articles in the British press that covered the basics, which were-- Edwin Rist was from New York originally. Like Kirk, he had taken copious notes, kept track of the sales online. Or is it parceled out over time? Johnson’s chronicle of an unlikely crime by an unlikely crook is a literary police sketch—part natural history yarn, part detective story, part the stuff of tragedy of a specifically English kind. But research, of course, was the last thing on Edwin's mind, looking at the birds. "The great feather heist," article in Smithsonian magazine, via WWW, posted April 2018, viewed 10 August 2018: (Heist of birds from the Natural History Museum in Tring in 2009 masterminded by 22-year-old Edwin Rist, an American studying flute at London's Royal Academy of Music. And now, under the watch of collections manager Robert Prys-Jones, this happened.
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