The saddest book

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, feathers, fly tying, salmon flies, natural history museums, crime, theft

First, some background. Points to remember:

• Salmon very seldom eat during their spawning run upriver. Those that do eat a little have been found to contain only salmon eggs in their stomachs, eggs from salmon that spawned already. This is for reasons to be mentioned below.
• Salmon are protective of their spawning areas. They will snap at something that they think is a threat, particularly if it looks like a large, swimming insect.
  
• They may also bite out of sheer annoyance.
• Salmon can see colors, but mainly in the red-orange-yellow part of the spectrum. Salmon eggs are orange, which is why they might eat a few; they can see them well. A gray "lure" would work no better nor wore than a brightly colored one.
• The so-called "salmon fly" isn't something they eat; it just happens to emerge around the time salmon are running the rivers. See the image:

The upper image is a salmon fly, of the variety found in Idaho and Montana. You can see it's rather big, about two inches; they get up to three inches. It is also drab in color, though the abdomen is kind of orange. These big insects are eaten by large trout, not by salmon.

The lower image is also called a salmon fly, one of the classic designs developed by Victorian fly-tiers. For someone who knows the natural history of salmon, one wonders, "What were they thinking?" These are for people, not for fish!

Trout are finicky eaters. The kind of insect a trout will "hit" varies almost by the week, as various species of May fly, stone fly, caddis fly, and so forth emerge, one after another. A wise fly fisherman will have tied (or purchased) dry flies that mimic the look of each insect that trout are looking for, and use the lure that fits the season. Color is no big deal to a trout; shape is.

Although a big trout looks a lot like a salmon, salmon are not trout. They don't live in the river year-round. They live at sea and eat at sea. Atlantic salmon go upriver to spawn, and they typically survive the experience. On the way back to sea they may eat, but they didn't eat on their way upriver. Pacific salmon die after spawning, and by the time of spawning their bodies have already begun to decay. As mentioned, if they eat at all on their way upriver, they eat the eggs of salmon who stopped earlier to spawn, eggs that didn't stay buried in the riverbed sediment. So they aren't looking for prey at all.

Victorian salmon flies were just artwork. Some self-promoters claimed to have caught salmon with their flies, but it is only because they succeeded in getting a salmon annoyed enough to defend itself. The truly unique attribute of the craft of tying classic salmon flies is the use of colorful feathers. The most colorful feathers come from tropical birds. Beautiful birds such as bird-of-paradise and trogon and blue chatterer.

The Victorian fly above, a replica of a classic, century-old design, was produced either from bits chicken and turkey feathers that were dyed appropriately, or from feathers of rare, endangered, or perhaps extinct birds. Most of the feathers needed for a classic "recipe" are illegal to possess in most Western countries. But guess what? That doesn't stop dedicated artists (some of whom actually fish, but not with their artworks!) from spending tons of money on feathers or even entire bird skins obtained by various means; sometimes legally for a few species, but more often with varying degrees of shadiness in a "don't-ask-don't-tell" industry.

Naturally, with big money changing hands, thievery isn't just likely, it is guaranteed from time to time. Where can feathers from rare or extinct species be found? All the attics that might have contained articles of clothing from the "feather boom" in the Victorian Era have been scoured. The usual target is a natural history museum. People have occasionally been caught leaving the research area of a natural history museum with a few bird skins in pockets or stuffed into their trousers. But there is one big heist, the one that (temporarily) rocked the fly-tying community. The Tring Museum Heist.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, an activist for refugees until about 2016, is an avid fisherman, finding solace in faraway places where he can stand hip-deep in a river fly fishing, for trout. When a guide showed him a couple of salmon flies (tied mainly to learn how), and then told of the Tring Heist, Johnson was intrigued. Intrigue soon became an obsession, which resulted in several years of travel, interviews, and tracking down a few secretive characters, culminating in the book The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

The central character is Edwin Rist, who apparently carried off the theft of 299 skins of 17 species of very sought-for birds, filling a large suitcase that he took into the Tring Museum in England through a window he broke. Had it not been for a thrilling soccer match going on at the time, the night guard might have seen the alarm light (no sound alarm was used), and caught Rist in the act. As it was, it took a month for the museum to realize it had been robbed, when a researcher wanted to study some specimens of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Natural Selection. He found only an empty drawer.

I found the book very painful to read. By the end, it was clear that most "feather hobbyists" are contemptuous of the scientific mission of natural history museums. Many of them wonder why the museums don't support their hobby by "plucking off a feather here and there" and selling them. It doesn't matter to them that in the case of one species (read the book to find out which), the skins Rist stole represented more than half of all specimens ever collected, of a species now extinct.

Two-thirds of the skins that Rist stole were recovered, some when his apartment was raided, and others that were returned by his "customers" (he sold some on eBay, and others through a friend in Norway, whose reputation suffered greatly as a result). But for nearly all of them, the collecting tag or label had been removed and discarded. Without the information about where and when a specimen was collected, it is scientifically useless.

I'll give you an example. I work at a natural history museum part time, as a data manager (I have a minor in biology, which helps a great deal). One day, gathering information about certain freshwater mussels, I came across the drawers of Zebra Mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), the critter that invaded the Great Lakes in the late 1980's, carried in the ballast water of cargo ships. Its home range is Croatia, Ukraine, and southern Russia. The specimens collected before 1988 are all from Croatia and Ukraine. Later ones are all from Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, except for one from Russia. Besides the definite "invasion started on X date" that flags the invasion, studies of comparative morphology and perhaps DNA can be done to see how the animal may have changed in American waters, and perhaps whether their ancestors mostly came from the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. If all the specimen labels were discarded, it would just be a bunch of boxes of small, striped shellfish, with little more one could glean from them.

Author Johnson ended his research, knowing that perhaps as many as 65 bird skins were still not accounted for, but stonewalled at every turn. He wrote what he could, and that is a fascinating, if saddening, story.

Johnson wonders if he was played by Rist and others. Edwin Rist didn't serve any prison time. His defense lawyer used an "Asperger's defense" to convince the judge that he wasn't "judicially responsible", whatever that may mean. Having confessed to his crime, he didn't have to go through a discovery trial, just a sentencing hearing. He is certainly bright enough to fool the psychologist who pronounced him a case of Asperger's Syndrome. Hmph! If he is, so am I. If the psychoanalyst who counseled me when I was 12 had known about Asperger's, she might have pigeonholed me there; as it was, I was pronounced "socially withdrawn" and encouraged to learn to understand people better. From what I read about Rist, he was, if anything, either never "on the spectrum", or got off it more rapidly than I did (and I did!).

Various figures, in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (or pounds) are found throughout the book. One cannot properly appraise such losses. One cannot go back to 1860 and re-collect a certain bowerbird or trogon. To collect in the same location today, if the species still exists, is to collect specimens of populations that have continued to evolve for 160 years, which is more significant than most folks would imagine.

If you love natural history, plus detective stories, this is a great read for both. Maybe you won't find it as saddening as I do, and that's OK; most people aren't in a day-to-day environment where the rubber hits the road for researchers.

They are what make a bird a bird

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, birds, feathers, natural history

I suppose there are good reasons that it is a crime to possess a feather from any wild bird in the United States, but it is a shame. Birds shed feathers all the time, whether sparrow, swallow, robin, crow, hawk, owl or eagle. Whatever passes through or over your yard, leaves an occasional calling card, particularly during molting. Children (and many adults) delight in collecting fallen feathers.

I used to put a few feathers in the brim of my hat. Every year there would be new ones, and the colorful ones—blue jay or cardinal or swallow—make a great accent. I learned early on to first freeze a feather to kill mites and fleas. But in recent years, I don't wear wild bird feathers any more; it could land me in jail.

In a closing chapter of Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, author Thor Hanson took an unusual feather he had found to the Smithsonian Feather Identification Laboratory. It was from a leg of a golden eagle. The lab curator did not return it to him; she is authorized to keep feathers of endangered birds, and he is not.

There is much to learn from the book. Feathers first evolved nearly 200 million years ago. Remnant molecules in Chinese dinosaur fossils showed that they were as brilliantly colored as modern birds. Yet feathers evolved only once, so they are a "hard feature", compared to eyes, which evolved independently at least four times, and flight itself, which evolved independently at least five times.

I was surprised to learn that feathers did not evolve from scales. Their development is so different that they cannot be related. I didn't fully understand the explanation of the way a feather grows, but the intricate on-and-off dance of keratin-producing cells is a spectacular, choreographed sequence. It is amazing that the process works at all, yet it produces thousands of feathers, on every bird's body, year after year. A natural miracle indeed!

A coat of feathers is no simple matter. When we look at a bird, we see the contour feathers that cover most of the body, the pinions or flight feathers on the trailing edges of the wings, a few tail feathers, and perhaps some downy bits poking out on the legs. Under the contour feathers a layer or more of down feathers provides the best thermal insulation known, by far. My 2.5-pound down sleeping bag has kept me warm in subzero campouts. If I wanted the same insulating value from a "fiberfill" type synthetic, I'd need at least eight pounds, and the bag would take up four times the space, even scrunched into a stuff bag.

How then does a bird keep from boiling over on a warm day? I can shed the sleeping bag easily, but the robin in my yard, who is equipped to sleep through a freezing night, must wear the same integument six months later when the temperature exceeds 90° F (32° C). Birds don't sweat! If needed, they pant, they hide in the shade, they splash in water, and they start out by being several degrees hotter than the average small mammal, so they are more likely to be radiating heat out to the environment, rather than receiving it.

When I finished reading the book, I thought, "Is this all?" The fifteen chapters cover numerous aspects of feathers, from their history and evolution to the sexual selection that has led to so many spectacular varieties, from their uses both industrial and fashionable to the many theories of how flight evolved, and most of all to the simple wonder of such surprisingly complex and beautiful objects. The author's passion shines through the writing, making the reading all the more enjoyable. From some writers, 300 pages is a lot. From Thor Hanson, it is just an appetizer!