Neil Armstrong
Adventures in the Plumage Trade
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
By Kirk Wallace Johnson
Hutchinson 297pp £20 order from our bookshop
Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in New Mexico’s Red River fishing for trout when he first heard the bizarre story at the heart of this unusual and engrossing page-turner. He was using off-the-shelf flies: hooks wrapped in various materials to mimic the often-drab aquatic insects that trout feed on. His guide, Spencer Seim, showed him a home-made salmon fly, ‘one of the most strangely beautiful things I’d ever seen … It bore the feathers of a dozen different birds, flashing crimson and canary yellow, turquoise and setting-sun orange.’
Salmon flies, which resemble nothing in nature, are designed to provoke. The trout bites because it is trying to feed, the salmon because it is repelling a perceived threat. Seim explained that traditional Victorian salmon flies are ‘tied’ according to detailed ‘recipes’ created more than a century ago, often
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