The Feather Thief

Johnson focuses on Victorian era naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace lived during the Victorian era’s “back-to-nature movement” (15). Like many other people of his era, Wallace was obsessed with collecting natural specimens. After reading Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Wallace decided to lead his own expeditions. He was especially interested in understanding the origin of species, hoping to write a book like Darwin.

Johnson recounts Wallace’s first major campaign to the Amazon, which ended in failure. Wallace initially traveled to the Amazon with another naturalist. The two men intended to collect specimens throughout the Amazon and ship specimens back to London during the expedition. The men hoped to use these specimens for research and to profit from their sales. After two years, the men parted due to competition with one another because they were collecting similar natural specimens.

Wallace focused his expedition around Rio Negro, which is the largest left tributary of the Amazon River. As originally planned, Wallace sent boxes of specimens downriver, thinking his intermediaries would then ship them to London. Instead, custom officials detained many of his boxes thinking they contained illegal items. Wallace paid the officials a large sum of money to liberate his specimens at the end of his four-year journey. He loaded nearly 10,000 specimens onto a single ship. Unfortunately, the ship caught fire while on the journey back to England, destroying all of Wallace’s collections. He was even unable to save his notebooks, which contained “years’ worth of research on the wildlife along the ink-black Rio Negro” (14).

Wallace did not spend long wallowing about his failed expedition. Aided by his memory and a few surviving drawings and notes, Wallace began giving presentations on his Amazon expedition findings to London’s scientific societies. By doing so, Wallace hoped to grow his reputation among these societies so that one of them would fund his next expedition. This plan proved successful. Wallace secured some funding for his next expedition to the Malay Archipelago.

In preparation for his journey, Wallace visited the British Museum of Natural History in London. He noticed that the museum had an incomplete collection of the Birds of Paradise, which represent “the strangest and most beautiful birds on the planet” (23). In fact, no naturalist had seen these birds in the wild. Wallace was determined to both broaden the museum’s collection as well as see them with his own eyes.

Wallace’s second expedition was far more successful than his first. While collecting specimens was taxing, Wallace also needed to protect them from insects and stray dogs. The sheer volume of specimens he collected over an eight-year period highlights his success in doing so. Wallace sent tens of thousands of natural specimens back to London, including “310 mammals, 100 reptiles, 7,500 shells, 13,100 moths and butterflies, 83,200 beetles, and 13,400 other insects” (33). He was most proud, however, of the 8,050 bird skins. The British Museum of Natural History purchased many of these specimens.

Wallace was also the first naturalist to see Birds of Paradise in the wild. He even witnessed the males elaborate mating ritual. Wallace’s goal turned to bringing some back alive to England. His initial attempts were unsuccessful. The birds died within a few days of being in his care. He bought two Birds of Paradise from a European merchant in Singapore. These birds survived the trip back to London, and Wallace gave them to the Zoological Gardens.

On this expedition, Wallace also came up with the theory of natural selection during a bout of malaria. He wrote Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary biology, a letter explaining his theory. Unbeknownst to Wallace, Darwin had been working on a similar theory for decades. While Wallace was still in the field, Darwin published his infamous book, On the Origin of Species. Although Wallace’s contributions to this theory are forgotten, Johnson underscores that he remains one of the greatest 19th-century naturalists.

In Chapter 2, Johnson describes the life of Lionel Walter Rothschild. Despite being born into a wealthy banking family, Walter had little interest in finance. Instead, he pursued his passion for collecting natural specimens. By 20 years old, Walter collected 46,000 specimens. For his 21st birthday, his father built him a museum, which would later become the British Natural History Museum at Tring. He opened the museum to the public in 1892: “The museum soon attracted thirty thousand visitors each year, a staggering figure for a small-town museum in those days but a sign of the voracious public appetite for the strange and exotic” (39).

While Walter had a keen eye for collecting specimens, he was terrible at accounting. He routinely overspent. His father even removed him from the family will in hopes it would curb his spending.

A British peeress, who Walter had an affair with, blackmailed him. Walter tried to hide the affair from his family by selling his bird specimens collection, which comprised 280,000 bird skins, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Prior to this sale, Walter’s obsession with collecting bird skins resulted in him having the greatest private collection ever collected by an individual person.

Johnson describes how women’s fashion resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of birds in the final three decades of the 19th century. Rare bird feathers became the ultimate status symbol. Johnson credits the French Queen Marie Antoinette with sparking this “feather fever” after she wore a diamond-encrusted Egret plume in her hair. Feather-filled fashion dominated magazines and shop windows. Hats were especially important to Victorian era women’s fashion. Different events and occasions called for different hats, “each demanding different species of bird for decoration” (44). Johnson describes how some hats included entire bird skins and were so large that women rode in carriages with their heads out the window.

The feather market employed tens of thousands of people by the beginning of the 20th century. The value of feathers also substantially increased as the number of birds in the wild decreased. As one example, a kilo of Egret feathers fetched over $12,000 in today’s dollars. Demand for birds outpaced supply. As a result, people set up feather farms. Conditions at these farms were inhumane. Some farmers blinded their birds to keep them more docile, as just one example.

Johnson ends this chapter by noting that most of the world at that time believed nature was an inexhaustible resource. Thus, they thought it was impossible to drive species to extinction or near-extinction. Unfortunately, they were wrong, and the plume trade decimated numerous bird species.