S6E6: Feather Heists and Questions of Value

Rosa returns to feathers in this episode, this time to discuss the infamous 2009 “feather heist”, in which Edwin Rist stole an invaluable collection of bright-coloured feathers from tropical birds. She uses the heist to open a deeper consideration of the value of feather collections for science and the ethics of collecting and maintaining such collections. 

•  Pitt Rivers Museum
• Smithsonian
• Natural history Museum in London
• The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Credits:

• Recorded: 28 May 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Pixabay, Epidemic Sound, and Freesound
• Learn more about the team here. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Hidden Collections

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:01

This is another iROAR podcast.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:13

Welcome back to season six of the Animal Highlight, where we're focused in on animals and museum collections and objects. And in today's episode, I think we're definitely focusing in on a collection. And specifically, we're speaking about how a whole host of objects in this collection were stolen and the types of questions that this raises about the value of museums, of collections, of preservation. What is the point of doing all of this and what harms are done when they're stolen or when they're disrupted? Hello Rosa. Welcome back to the Animal Highlights. It's your second last script, which is very exciting. So who are we talking about today?

Rosa Dyer 0:58

So today we're, you know, we're in our museum space, and this time we're going to kind of go backstage. So instead of focusing on objects that are on display or the little beasties that are in between those objects that we were talking about last week with the wasps and moths, we're instead going to look at objects that are in the kind of back area of the museum. So the collections that as a member of the public you might not see, but I think also have really interesting stories to talk about. And afraid we are talking about birds again, but no surprises there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:24

But that's such an important thing because I think when people go into museums, I don't know how many people think about the massive collections that are unseen, right? Like because museums are, depending on the museum you go into, they sometimes seem so huge in and of themselves. They just seem massive. But then, and this goes for any museum, right? Whether it's an art museum, whether it's a natural history museum, there's so much more that we don't see as visitors, right?

Backstage Bird Skin Archives

Rosa Dyer 1:48

Oh, totally. Yeah. I think it's usually like less than 1% of what's on display generally is what's actually in the collection. It's often centered in these kind of strange discussions about repatriation that, you know, this anxiety we're going to empty the museum if we give anything back or change it. And I think, yeah, some people I think don't realize that there's literally often millions of objects in drawers and storage, kind of in the back area of places. So yeah, I thought we'd give that some time today. So we're going to be slightly, I guess it's gender bending with our, not gender bending, genre bending with our with our episode today. And I hope we're not going to veer too much into the true crime podcast, but I do think it's quite a fun story. But you know, if we get a bit too kind of serial about it, do bring me back to the but do bring me back to the animals, but it is a really fun story. So we're going to enter into the really strange world of firstly museum skin collections. So one of these kind of research collections that aren't necessarily visible but are really important. And then also this really weird, strange crime that happened to do with the theft of some of these collections and this strange man called Edwin Edwin Rist, whose name is also quite difficult to say, but we'll work it out.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 2:53

I'm so happy that you also struggle with saying names. I'm not alone. Oh my gosh.

Rosa Dyer 2:58

So obviously, we want to focus on the animals always in that highlight spot. I'm just going to give a bit of a background context first, because I think to kind of set the crime scene, because I think it's important. So one of the lesser-known areas of natural history museums is this area backstage, which is usually what was called a research collection or a science collection. So these might be hundreds or thousands or even millions of specimens of kind of organism or animals or natural objects which are used for research. So bird collections like those held at the Natural History Museum at Tring in London, or there's a huge one at the Smithsonian, for example, will have thousands and thousands and thousands of drawers of bird specimens, usually called bird skins, that represent the vast majority of the world's known species and might have kind of famous individuals, so things like, for example, Darwin's finches, or specimens that are representative of, you know, particular important events or places in history. But they're also just, you know, hundreds and hundreds of the same species in a single drawer. And the idea is that you get a representative of the population of these species so that they can be studied in a way that doesn't require the live animal to be there. So the story where the birds are kept is sort of intimidating when you go into it. I certainly kind of took a step back and was slightly kind of out of place when I first went into it. So it's a huge temperature-controlled kind of warehouse-like room that requires often special security clearance to get into. The corridors are often dark, and as you walk along, the kind of lights trigger as you go down these sort of rooms of, you know, hundreds and hundreds of kind of white cabinets that are full of dead birds. So it does have this weird sort of morgue-like quality to it, which in many ways it is. It's full of hundreds of dead birds. So from floor to ceilings are these white metal cabinets, and each drawer, if you pull them out, will have a kind of entire array of a single species of birds. And they're called bird skins because usually the organic material is removed, so it's not a wet collection. And some of the skeleton might be there, so the feet might be there, but usually it's just the skin of the bird with the feathers still attached.

Why Skins Matter For Science

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:05

Were they put in originally as like a whole plump fleshy bird, and that's just what's happened over time, or are they put into these drawers as skins?

Rosa Dyer 5:13

No, so they usually so they're pre-prepared, so they enter the collection usually as just the skin. So the idea for them is to, as a researcher, allow you to look at the variety of something like plumage variation across kind of a geography or time, or you know, just variation across a population. It also allows you to take specimens from the skin and from um from the feathers if you want to do research on, you know, particular things you can get from those samples. So it's different from uh having a skeleton or having kind of flesh samples, which would be a different type of collection. But what these specimens are really important for are things called type specimens. So oftentimes when you're describing a new species, you'll have a type specimen which would be, you know, this bird is this big, you know, has these this type of plumage, and you might have that as part of a skin collection. So it can be if you have a bird that you can't identify, you can bring it to one of these bird collections and use it to compare, basically. So these collections are used by researchers for a huge range of things. So the kind of work I was doing with them was called, I really enjoyed it, it was called forensic ornithology. I felt very cool doing it, which was trying to identify um when I had, you know, a single feather on a headdress that I didn't know what bird it was, it was trying to kind of match it to the spec to the species by using kind of, it was called whole feather analysis. So being a detective and trying to find out where the feather had come from. Um but people also use it for things like genetic analysis and kind of micro-sampling, things like that. Um so yeah, they're really basically valuable collections. They're massive, they're used for a whole variety of things. Um, but this wasn't a sentiment shared by a man called Edwin Wist Wrist, who um was the culprit of one of probably the most like bizarre museum crimes I've ever heard of. Um, I do want to say as well, like I'm a lot of the details I'm getting about this are from this amazing book called The Feather Thief by this man called Kirk Wallace Johnson, who wrote about this case. Um and you just like, if anyone's interested in it, you just have to read it because it's just it's a beautifully written book and there's so many different threads of interest in it. But in also because we're kind of doing an Animal Highlights episode, I thought I'd take that story but focus in really in detail about who the victims of the crime were. So who were the birds that were stolen? Because they're some of the most beautiful and kind of visually striking birds in the world. And I think thinking about these qualities of beauty and rarity and uniqueness is really interesting, both as targets of the crime, but also in thinking about their own life histories and how they kind of would have lived before they entered the collection. So, what was the Great Feather Heist? So in 2009, one person, Edrin Whist, who was strangely a very talented flautist who was in London studying music, decided that some of the birds at Tring had potential not just as scientific specimens, but also to be lucrative, I guess, objects or I don't really know what the word is, commodities maybe, that he could sell and get a lot of money for. So having cased the collection before, he pretended to be a photographer and came and visited. He then came back at night and broke into the collection with a suitcase and stole just under 300 skins of beautiful coloured birds, many of which were just really rare and, you know, hugely valuable.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:18

Are you allowed to go into these places with a suitcase?

Enter Edwin Rist And The Heist

Rosa Dyer 8:21

No. So he he broke in at night, I think. Uh he broke a window and came in with his suitcase. So he c he kind of cased out the place first. He posed, I think, as a photography student, he wanted to take pictures of the birds and then came back later at night and broke in. And the reason behind the theft, which is like completely bizarre. I mean, I don't know, I might just be ill-informed. But the reason was to sell the feathers to the salmon fly tying community, which, like, I'll raise my hands up, did not know it was a thing, to be honest. I think is quite a niche hobby where enthusiasts use exotic bird feathers to create fishing lures. It's an art from the Victorian times, I think, and the people that practice it today still use Victorian-era recipes for doing it. And the kind of value and allure of it is using often really rare or spectacular bird specimens that are hard to get hold of. So wrist participated in this hobby, and as a result of this theft, sold at least £100,000 worth of feathers to fellow enthusiasts as a result of the heist. And so while the motive behind the crimes like sounds almost like humorously bizarre if you don't know much about tying, I suppose, you know, I didn't really. And I think it's kind of if you're just listening to it in 30 seconds, it's quite a funny story. But I think as I was thinking through it more, the impact of what removing those skins from the collection was was actually really great. So many of the skins he took were really old specimens, they were over a hundred years old, reflecting populations which are now really threatened, and also most whose trade is really, really tightly controlled. So the reason he was able to get so much money for them is because they're just not available on the market. They shouldn't be traded, they're protected species. One thing that was interesting though is that Wrist, you know, he had he had broken in, he had the opportunity to steal anything. He didn't go for what ornithologically or from a kind of natural history perspective might be seen as the most valuable specimens. So he didn't go for things like Darwin's Galapagos finches, for example, which were there. He didn't go for extinct species like the great orc, which was also there. Um, I think largely because he didn't think they were beautiful enough. The point was to get beautiful, beautiful feathers for fly tying. So it was really something very attached to this particular value system that was, you know, prized in the fly tying community.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:31

So which kind of birds did you say he stole?

Rosa Dyer 10:34

So that this is like what kind of got me into this as an animal thing, is that they're beautiful. I'll put them in the blog post because they're really difficult, obviously, to portray over, but I think just the names of them give a really good picture. So some of the species were called something like the spangled cottonger, the crimson fruit crow, the resplendent quetzel, the magnificent rifle bird, the superb bird of paradise were to name perfew.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:58

So I wish I used words like resplendent morning in their life. I don't know. I just want to step outside one day and be like, wow, what a resplendent day. Like what a trivial word. Yeah.

Rosa Dyer 11:09

I'll put photos of them in the blog post because, like, as you can imagine, they are just stunning. Um, and they ranged from all over the world, so from South and Central America to New Guinea. Some of them were famous ones. So from one from I think the Alfred Russell collection was stolen. So one of the ones that may have helped discover natural selection.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 11:26

So he didn't just take like one draw and empty out that draw and quickly rush out.

Fly Tying And Illicit Markets

Rosa Dyer 11:30

He was very particular about which uh he seems to have been, yeah, was I think he knew what he wanted and yeah, really targeted these species that he knew would be highly valued by this particular community. Um so yeah, that from all over the world, from all over places, probably from all over the collection, you know, they're not all from a single genus or something, they would have been next to each other, as you say. But they all are united by being stunningly beautiful. And also really kind of uniquely beautiful, a lot of them. So I think we mentioned this when we were talking about the hummingbirds, but that a lot of these species have, you know, these really unique qualities of things like iridescence or like really rich pigments that these tropical birds have, which aren't present in a lot of other species. So something like the resplendent kettle, for example, is just like beautifully brilliant turquoise and it's kind of amazing when you see it in person, what that's like. And if you were like to put them, you know, put all the birds he stole into, you know, some kind of fantasy aviary, I think it'll probably be the most amazing thing you'd ever see, you know, all of these colours collected. And so, yeah, when I was kind of, I was reading through his book and reading through I got to this point and I kind of wanted to pause at this point, and I felt like, you know, it was time to kind of not to use the phrase, but like hold space for the birds and kind of actually see how these colours can be reconnected back to their life histories. So I thought if you don't mind, we'll we'll pause the pause the feather heist story for a moment and think about actually who the birds were, because obviously I think that's where we want to go with this podcast. So plumage colour is fuelled by a number of things. So it's fuelled by both natural and sexual selection in birds. Um, so for male birds in particular, it seems to be an important component of their life histories. So bright and unusual plumage has been argued to play a crucial role for things like influencing mate choice and also for how successful you are once you've kind of got to the point of reproducing. So the males of a species being so highly coloured may inform both how females select a mate, but it also may help with male-male competition between species as well. So if you've got a particularly bright or beautiful tail feather, for example, you might be able to claim dominance over other males and therefore have greater access to females. Um, and also is about, you know, females then making a selection about who they find most impressive as a partner. Um it's also possible as well that the brightness of plumage can say positive things about what's inside you. So things like your hormones or your immunity might be expressed to having kind of brighter plumage and having dull plumage could be an um indicator you might have something like parasites or some kind of vitamin deficiency, things like that. So being beautiful and being brightly coloured and kind of resplendent is actually something that can be an indicator that you're a good bet as a mate.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 13:59

Isn't it true though? Like, I mean, because we're also thinking about colour here from, I guess, a human eye, but isn't it true that sometimes birds that look a bit dull to us might be resplendent because they uh many species of birds can see in different uh colour wavelengths, right? They can see, um, I forget which bird, I don't know if it's the starling. I'm gonna get this wrong. But I know that there's several birds that we think of as just really drab, but to each other, um, they look absolutely amazing.

Rosa Dyer 14:30

Yeah, yeah, I read that as well, and again, my mind is blanking. I want to say puffin' for some reason, but I could just be absolutely putting that out of thin air. But um, if you look at them under UV light, they're really brilliant and they reflect back at you. And we yeah, we don't like fully understand, I think, how birds' eyes work and compare to us. So, yeah, there is there is a theory that um, yeah, what we're potentially seeing as dull is not the case for for those birds. And definitely um there's been studies that show kind of the nanostructures of particular bird feathers scatter light in really unique ways that can um signal different things for stuff like sexual signaling, for example.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:05

Yeah, it says here um birds of paradise, some species can emit green, yellow, and pale blue light from their bodies, including special patches on their head, feet, and inside their mouths. Um pigeons and turicos are species, they have porphins, porphyrins, uh, which is a type of feather pigment that glows under UV light. So pigeons, I mean that's what I'm thinking of.

Rosa Dyer 15:31

Yeah, pigeons, not puppets.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 15:33

Puffins are one of the things people think of them. I mean, not maybe in terms of colours, but they're definitely charismatic and they are beautiful. But pigeons, uh yeah, so under UV light, they look a lot more impressive than what to the human eye at least. Um anyway, sorry to interrupt today.

Which Birds Were Taken

Rosa Dyer 15:49

Yeah, yeah. Well, so yeah, basically these birds are beautiful. And like weirdly, even though they came from all over the world, a lot of them seem to have been concentrated in tropical regions. And that is something that is scientifically proven that um a lot of birds inhabiting kind of rainforest environments or the tropics do tend to show much more brilliant and beautiful kind of brightness of colour and kind of colour uniqueness compared to maybe more temperate regions. Interestingly, this is something that um Humboldt uh kind of observed in the 18th century when he came to the Amazon. Um he said that the closer you are to the tropics, the more beautiful and bright colour the feather plumage um is in bird species. And obviously, there wasn't any real way for him to prove this, it was just kind of a thing he observed. Um, interestingly, though, really recently, with the development of things like high-resolution colour imagery, this has been confirmed it is true that birds closer to the equator do actually like kind of quantifiably have a greater diversity and intensity of colour, so broader spectrum, greater intensity compared to birds, you know, the further away you go to the equator. So, like interestingly, even though Humboldt was just kind of saying this as an observation, it's now been proven. And the way it's been proven is by using these kind of bird skin collections. So, in a way, you know, Wrist was kind of, I'm not going to say he was right, because I think it was an appalling thing to do, but if you were taking it on like his selection criteria for the most beautiful birds, you know, scientifically, he did choose, you know, some of the most intense and diverse plumage that he could of. And obviously, it has cross-species appeal, you know. We as humans obviously find them beautiful and you know, things like this crime, but also what we were talking about in the hummingbird episode of things like, you know, the Victorian craze for having bird plumage on hats and stuff really shows that this is a cross-species thing that we can appreciate the beauty of it. So, kind of to return for a minute back to what happened with with the feather heist, so kind of very sadly, most of the species uh specimens that he stole just weren't ever recovered. Once he was tracked down, his defense was basically that the collections were obsolete. They're not, well, you know, they're not really worth much. Whatever um, whatever kind of science or research that could be done from them has already been done. So actually, it wasn't really much of a crime because he wasn't really losing anything to science. Um, and basically, why shouldn't he? Which, you know, it's just wrong on so many levels. But weirdly, actually, the judge in the case seemed to slightly agree with this because to the dismay of all the museum, you know, people and everything, he was basically just given a s a suspended sentence when he was when he was um put on trial. And I think, you know, focusing in on the birds again, it's so it's so wrong because, you know, like this example with Humboldt and then, you know, doing these colour studies a hundred years later after he's made that observation, these are really important collections. They do continue to be used for the advancement of science and for the advancement of um bird conservation. So that was a totally wrong statement for him to make. And I think when we think of collections like this, you know, it's about cumulative knowledge and about what the kind of bodies of these birds serve for science, and if we can justify them as collections, because oftentimes, you know, the birds have been killed in order to be part of these collections. I think broadly speaking, we can justify them because over hundreds of years, each advance in technology in technology, so you know, natural and sexual selection, DNA sequencing, um things like mass spectrometers for thinking about plumage colour, it's allowed us to take a specimen and analyse it in new ways each time. So you're accumulating more and more knowledge about that species to hopefully, hopefully aid in understanding them better and understanding how to conserve and protect that species better. Um, I think kind of each way we study the species is, you know, creating a new link in that chain of knowledge that's anchored to the bird body that is in the drawer train or Smithsonian or wherever. So yeah, I think that that was the bit that really got me riled up for these aren't, you know, there's no value to these collections, because of course there is, and of course they continue to be used. And so while he claimed they were obsolete and, you know, his whole theft was not much of a big deal. I think nothing could really be further from the truth.

Colour, Selection, And Signalling

Claudia Hirtenfelder 19:50

Yeah, and I think I mean if I understand you correctly there, you were saying that the the collections are justified, not necessarily the killing of the birds is is justified. Um, because yeah, you know, to treat them so flippantly is also to kind of disavow the fact that a lot of these were acquired through often violent means. Yeah, I mean, we spoke we've spoken about this in this season already, with just how the kind of contradictory moves of naturalists trying to preserve species while at the same time collect them for these collections. And then I think now that they exist in these collections, I think they are owed and due a certain level of respect, um, not just for their scientific prowess or uh potential, but also because they um, you know, that they have specific stories to be told here of how these birds ended up in these drawers. And when they no longer exist there, um, yeah, I think what this episode also highlights is just how quickly their stories can be subsumed by the story of a person who decides they need them. Do you know what I mean? So this becomes about wrist instead of about the the animals who who um who were acquired in various different ways.

Rosa Dyer 21:02

Absolutely. And I think this idea of, you know, we talked about, it's come up a few times in the series about life and afterlife, and kind of the museum is often the space where these afterlives exist. And that can often feel a bit kind of strange in terms of temporality, like, you know, the after kind of makes it seem like something of a, you know, not future thinking or not hopeful in a way. It's always kind of predetermined by death occurring. And I think the thing um there's a really um I'll I'll link this in the blog post as well. There's a really brilliant, um, I think she's an anthropologist called Adrian Van Allen, who works at the Smithsonian, who writes about practices of care and how people um create and present these bird skins. So when a new specimen comes in, how when they're preparing the bird skin, they as practitioners have to think about all the possible ways in which this bird skin might be used in the future for future research. So they have to do it with the sense of care that has to imagine what the future of research might be, what the future. Of that species might be and you know the possibilities of what new technologies might happen. Um, and so I think kind of bird skin collections like the one at Tring or the Smithsenian, they're not kind of obsolete relics of the past that kind of you know twee like a Victorian museum or something, but they're constantly being reignited through new research practices and new people coming in and caring for them and caring about those species, even in the afterlife of the animal when you know the life is no longer there. I think kind of each individual in the collection holds massive potential for discoveries and it's they're shown to be over and over again. And so while it can feel like a morgue, especially when you're walking through it, and you know, it a kind of moment I really had is that um, I think I mentioned him last week. Um, my mum has a rescue um African Grey called Gus. And I remember pulling open a drawer of the African grey section and just seeing, you know, a hundred dead parrots, and like it really hit me of like that is not, you know, how I recognize this bird and how this bird kind of exists in my life. But I think when you frame it how Van Allen does as a process of care and kind of hopeful future thinking, I think that is maybe a kind of better way to think about these collections as something that continue to contribute to these chains of knowledge and chains of science that hopefully can help us to protect those species more in the future.

Tropical Brilliance And Humboldt

Claudia Hirtenfelder 23:15

Yeah, it's definitely there's definitely a tension there. And I think acknowledging that tension is important, but it doesn't mean throwing away everything, right? And saying that, you know, I think it would also be a mistake to somehow disregard these collections um because they do exist now and there is potential to understand both human and animal histories here and and stories and like you say, also futures. And I know that this is a general archival practice, not only with animal remains, but also just any sort of artifact that comes into archives, um, even like sound artifacts, right? You you don't know something, sometimes something might enter a collection today and seem unimportant in the context of today. But like you say, you don't know what the things are going to look like 50 years from now or 100 years from now, and how the focus on something that seems trivial today might come into uh focus or be heightened in in future. And I think there is something to be said for trying to preserve uh that moment and that that biology and that knowledge. Um, but we also have to just be mindful of how we collect these collections, right? I think indiscriminately killing animals so that we can have collections to understand 50 years from now is there's something ethically dubious there as well, right? Um and I'm hoping that today it's not something that people would condone, but it was certainly something, you know, 50, 100 years ago that was very much practiced. So this is there's a difference not only in terms of how we read these collections, but also in terms of how these collections are collected that's important to recognise, right?

Rosa Dyer 24:49

Completely. And I think, you know, this maybe gives a teaser for the next episode that there's this strange interaction that we have between the individual and the species or the individual and the population, that, you know, at what point does the kind of balance of morality means killing an individual for your skin collection, which might help research for the whole species in some ways, but that individual life still has a value and still matters in some way. And, you know, I don't think we're, you know, on our 20-minute podcast, we're not going to reach the bottom of that. But I think, yeah, there's all these entanglements of morality and care and thinking about these processes that is really complex and yeah, it has no one answer to it. But I think none of the answers are what Rist said. I think we can maybe agree on that.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 25:33

Yes, I think fair enough. Rist disregarding and saying it's unimportant and what he did was not wrong is completely not right. So well, thank you so much. Uh, I look forward to what's your your last script for the season. So um, so we'll see you again next time. Thank you to Rosa Dyer for co-hosting this Animal Highlight with me, and to Rebecca Shen for designing the episode artwork as well as the Animal Highlight logo. The bed music was done by Gordon Clark, and other episode sound effects come from Pixabay, Epidemic Sound, and Free Sound. This episode was produced by myself.

Siobhan O'Sullivan 26:12

This is The Animal Highlight with me, Toria Huttenfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.