Feathering their nests

An obsession with fly-tying led to a bizarre theft from the Natural History Museum and huge sums changing hands. Fact can be stranger than fiction…

- KEITH ELLIOTT

Walter Rothschild, the eccentric eldest son of the first Baron Rothschild, once remarked: “Birds have the power of sucking the honesty out of people, like the vampire sucks blood.” The man who drove a carriage harnessed to four zebras to Buckingham Palace, just to prove that zebras could be tamed, was speaking from experience. His zoological collection, the largest ever amassed by a private individual, at one time included 300,000 bird skins and 200,000 eggs.

Rothschild, who was given a museum by his father as a 21st birthday present, is a character in one of the strangest robbery stories you will ever read. It took place in 2009 and encompasses most of the seven deadly sins. Dozens of those involved have never been identified. It is the greatest wildlife crime of the past century, perhaps of all time. And you’ve probably never heard anything about it.

This story is full of villains and obsessives. The prime one is Edwin Rist, a talented young flautist from a small town in America. But just as culpable are a shadowy bunch of people obsessed with tying classic salmon flies with original feathers from birds that are heavily protected, critically endangered or even extinct. They are familiar faces at international fly-tying symposiums and some may even be reading this article.

Most do not even fish but will pay seemingly obscene amounts just to get their hands on a few feathers from a resplendent quetzal, blue chatterer, cock-of-the-rock or king bird-of-paradise. They operate within closed and difficult-to-access Facebook pages or even on the notorious ‘dark web’ and are paranoid about letting outsiders into their secret groups. Keep them in mind.