Spectacular plumage and feather heists

Welcome back to the Animal Highlights! Today we are continuing our tour of the world of animals and museums. This episode moves us a bit away from animal-objects displayed in the public areas of museums, and instead we are moving “back-stage” to the world of natural history museum research collections. 

I’ve chosen this topic because I think when we talk about museums some people have an image that the objects on display to the public represent most of what the museum has as a collection. This is often centred in discussions of repatriation for example, where there seems to be an existential anxiety about our museums being “emptied” by the possibility of objects being returned to communities. This image of the empty museum is one based on a misinformed idea that the objects we as the public see on display make up the majority of what a museum’s collection is. However, almost all the time this just isn’t the case, and what is displayed publicly in museums is usually only a tiny percentage of the thousands and sometimes millions of specimens or artefacts over which museums are custodians. This is certainly the case for most natural history museums, who will often have absolutely enormous collections of animal specimens stored securely behind doors, whose intended purpose is the aiding of scientific research, and not necessarily public display. So I thought it only fitting we spend an episode thinking about these lesser viewed collections. 

We are going to be a bit genre- bending today with this episode I fear, and perhaps stray into the world of the true crime podcast. Today the animals we are going to focus on come to us as victims of one of the most fascinating and bizarre criminal heists I’ve ever come across. Let’s enter the strange world of museum skin collections, beautiful bird feathers, Victorian fly-tying and the crimes of Edwin Rist! 

The crime scene

First, before meeting our victims and understanding the mad crime that took place, I think it’s worth setting the scene– to keep with the true-crime pod theme, what was our “crime scene”? Well, let me introduce you to one of the perhaps lesser known areas of natural history museums: the bird skin collection. It’s likely that most people will not have had the very particular experience of walking into a room filled with literally hundreds of drawers filled with dead animal skins. I’ve had the slightly creepy privilege of doing so a few times in the course of researching feathered objects.

Bird collections like those held at the Natural History museum collection at Tring in London hold hundreds of thousands of bird specimens, representing examples from the vast majority of the world’s known species, and including famous and irreplaceable collections from history, like those of Charles Darwin for example.

Scarlet macaw skin specimens at the Smithsonian. Image: Rosa Dyer

The store room where the bird specimens are kept is sort of intimidating when you first go in.  It’s a huge, temperature controlled warehouse-type room, requiring special security clearance to access. The quiet atmosphere, slightly odd smell and dark corridors give it a pretty morgue-like atmosphere, which in many ways it is. From floor to ceiling are rows and rows of white metal cabinets, containing layers of drawers filled with dead, preserved bird bodies. Organised by family, then species and subspecies, as you pull out any drawer, you are met with an arrangement of “skins”, prepared bird bodies where most of the skeleton and soft tissues have been removed, leaving usually only the feathered skin, beak and feet. Sometimes hundreds of individuals of a single species might be contained within a single drawer, the aim being to showcase the diversity of things like geographic range or plumage variation which exists. Some of the bodies might also be “type specimens”, individuals against which the particular phenotypic attributes of a species are determined and defined. 

These collections are used by researchers in the scientific community to undertake a huge range of studies, from examinations of plumage to genetic analysis. The collections can span significant time periods of collection, revealing fascinating details about changes and movements in populations over time, as well as details of significant events in natural history, like specimens collected on famous voyages or significant historical locations. Large collections like the one at Tring are therefore considered an invaluable and irreplaceable resource for science. 

When I was working with bird skins for my own research, I was undertaking something called “forensic ornithology”, where I was using the collections to help identify small feather samples used in ethnographic objects like headdresses. I felt like a pretty cool bird detective while I was doing it, which feels sort of fitting given that a bird collection was also the site of one of the most significant and bizarre natural history museum crimes I’ve ever heard of. A lot of the details of the story I’m going to talk about come from the brilliant work of Kirk Wallace Johnson who wrote a book about the case, called The Feather Thief, which I can’t recommend enough if anyone wants a much more detailed account of what took place. Of course, being an animal highlight episode, we are going to centre the birds who were the victims of this crime. They are some of the most beautiful, visually striking birds in the world, and as we will learn, it seems their beauty, rarity and uniqueness made them ideal targets. 

The crime 

So what was the Great Feather Heist? In 2009, one person, a talented US flautist studying in London named Edwin Rist, decided that some of the birds housed at Tring had the potential to offer a lucrative alternative beyond serving the research interests of the scientific community. Having cased the collection beforehand by posing as a photographer, he broke into the collection at night with a suitcase and stole just under 300 skins of brightly coloured birds, many of which were extremely rare. 

The reason behind this theft was pretty bizarre: to sell the feathers to the Salmon fly-tying community, a niche hobby where enthusiasts use exotic bird feathers to create fishing lures. The art of Victorian Salmon fishing ties uses recipes from the 1800s, often with the feathers of rare birds which are hard and sometimes illegal to acquire. The lures are rarely actually used for fishing, but rather seen as an art form in itself. Edwin Rist participated in this hobby and sold at least £100,00 worth of feathers to fellow enthusiasts as a result of the heist he undertook at Tring. 

While the motive behind the crime sounds almost humorously bizarre, the impact of removing the skins from the collection was great. Many of the skins he took were old specimens, over a 100 years old, reflecting many populations which are now threatened and whose trade is extremely tightly controlled. Interestingly, Rist didn’t go for  specimens which might have been the most obvious candidates for theft, birds like Darwin’s Galapagos finches or prized specimens of extinct species like the Great Auk,  because he didn’t think them beautiful enough for what he had in mind. 

The Victims

The birds which Rist stole were adult males with some of the most beautiful examples of avian plumage in the world. The names of some of the birds paint a pretty impressive picture of their visual prowess: some include the spangled cotinga, the crimson fruitcrow, the resplendent quetzal, the magnificent rifle-bird, the superb bird-of-paradise. These birds ranged from South and Central America to New Guinea, some of which were from Alfred Russel Wallace’s collection and may have helped inspire his discovery of natural selection. They are united however by their stunningly beautiful plumage. It is really quite difficult to describe the absolute beauty and uniqueness of some of these birds: the brilliant bright turquoise and purple combinations of the cotingas, the iridescent emerald greens of the Resplendent quetzal or rich red and black combinations of the fruitcrow. If you were to see this collection of birds together, in perhaps some kind of crazy fantasy forest where they all exist alongside one another, I could probably bet it would be one of the most visually impressive things you would  ever  see. 

Like the hummingbirds discussed in the previous episode as “feathered jewels,” the beauty of the birds made them highly desirable but also objectifiable for the sake of art. While Rist and the fly-tying community saw their feathers as valuable raw materials for their hobby, I think reconnecting these bodies with the living birds is also really important and can also help us to understand the persistent value of these collections for science. 

The Spangled Cotinga (Cotinga cayana). Image: Rachel Samanyi

From the bird’s perspective, why have such beautiful plumage? I think we can be pretty certain it isn’t there to serve the tastes of Victorian hat-wearers or hobbyists. There is evidence that the evolution of  plumage colour may be fuelled by both the forces of natural and sexual selection in birds. For male birds in particular, bright and unusual plumage has been argued to play a crucial role in influencing mate choice and reproductive success. The males of a species being so brightly coloured may inform both how females select a mate, and also male-male competition between birds. If you have particularly bright and beautiful tail feathers for example, you may be able to claim dominance over other less impressively attired males. It is also possible that the brightness of your plumage might say positive things about your fitness, hormones or immunity which can impress your possible mates.Studies of  cotingas show that the colours expressed by these birds (the brilliant turquoise blues of the lovely or spangled cotinga for example) are the result of unique feather nanostructures which scatter light to produce stunning visual effects used for sexual signalling. 

The brilliant colourations of many birds coming from tropical regions has long been observed. Alexander von Humbolt, the famous 18^th century explorer and naturalist, had noted that the closer you are to the tropics, the greater variety of colours one is likely to see in nature. While this has been observed for over 100 years, it has been pretty difficult to quantify. Recent studies using high resolution imagery, have, however,  confirmed that birds really do come in a much broader range of colours in the tropics. Birds in these regions show both a broader spectrum of colours and a greater intensity of those colours than birds in more temperate latitudes. So, it seems, the Victorians were, in some ways, right to comment on the visual uniqueness and splendour of the tropical birds they wanted to use for their hobbies and accessories, they are genuinely uniquely visual effects in nature.

The attractiveness of the plumage of these birds obviously has a cross-species appeal beyond its advantage for natural or selection within the bird’s own species. Human eyes and tastes are far from immune from the beauty of these birds, and in the case of the Great Feather Heist, it was their visual splendour above their rarity or infamy  which led to them being selected as victims in Rist’s crime. 

Many of the specimens Rist stole were never recovered and those that were found were rendered scientifically useless because Rist had removed their labels. Once he was tracked down, his defence was that Tring and its collections were largely obsolete because all meaningful study possible on the collections had already taken place, and therefore it didn’t matter that the specimens were taken and repurposed by the fly tying community (for his own large financial gain of course not forgetting).  To the dismay of museum administrators and the Hertfordshire Constabulary, the feather thief received a suspended sentence. 

The Resplendent Quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) Image: James Maley

But, as the recent studies on tropical bird colouration show, there is an enduring and cumulative value to these collections. While Humboldt may have made an observation about the greater colour diversity of birds in tropical regions in the 1800s, it is only now with our developments in digital photographic technologies and forms of analysis that science has been able to quantify and confirm his theory. Over hundreds of years, each advance - the theories of natural and sexual selection, DNA sequencing, technologies like mass spectrometers to measure plumage colour - has allowed new ways of examining and analysing the same bird skin or the same feather. Each new study was a link in a chain of knowledge anchored by the bird bodies over which Tring and its staff are custodians. Therefore, while Rist claimed that the collections he took were obsolete to science and therefore his theft was “not really much of a big deal”, this of course was not the case. 

Natural History Collections and Hopeful Futures?

Those museum workers who prepare skin today must do so with a sense of care for the future in mind, they must try and imagine what the future of research might be, and what new technologies the skins might encounter in a future that does not yet exist. Bird skin collections like Tring are not obsolete relics of previous practices in the discipline of natural history, they are constantly being reignited through new research practices. To prepare a skin today is, I think, to make a positive claim about the possibility of future knowledge generation. Each individual bird in the collection holds massive potential for discoveries both about the future and past, so while I think collections like Tring can sometimes feel like morgues, I also think they represent how animal-afterlives in museums can also manifest hopeful futures. 

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Rosa Dyer is a Collaborative Doctoral Project PhD candidate at Birkbeck College University of London and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her practice-based project at the Pitt Rivers Museum focuses on featherwork collections made by South American Indigenous peoples. Her work aims to reveal the dynamic relations that exist between birds, people and environments by working with Indigenous collaborators to reimagine how the feathered objects are represented in the museum. You can connect with Rosa via Twitter (@rosajdyer).